Landscapes of flexibility: negotiating the everyday; an introduction

The last quarter of the 20th century was marked by the rapid rise of regimes of ???flexible specialisation??? and ???flexible accumulation??? (Piore \& Sabel 1984). These processes involve economic actors from multiple countries, while being linked to dynamics of capitalist globalization and technological advances in information and communications (Borja \& Castells 1997; Sennett 1998). At the same time, developed world economies have experienced the flexibilisation of work and employment (Silver \& Goldschneider 1994; Wallace 2003; Salaff 2001), citizenship (Ong 1999), governance (Hooghe \& Marks 2003), as well as household, living and family arrangements (Watters 2003; Crompton 2002; Carnoy 1999). The growing perception of the body as a ???porous??? space that is easily adaptable to changes in external circumstances (Martin 1994; Mitchell 2003) has been accompanied by an emphasis on mobility and flexibility in designs of the built environment, as well as the blurring of structural boundaries in th ...