Flexibility revisited: Post-socialist flexibility stigma and its paradoxes for Romanian women corporate leaders

This study improves the understanding of the relationship between flexible work and gender regimes by exploring the flexibility stigma in a non-Western country – Romania, a former socialist Central and Eastern European nation, characterised by a particular gender order. The research delves into the experiences of 22 women managers across nine financial organisations through narrative interviews. The article contributes the concept of a hybridised, post-socialist flexibility stigma, defined by a high familistic penalty that emerges from the distinctiveness of the Romanian post-socialist gender regime – demanding workplace expectations of work devotion paradoxically adopted by the respondents despite high personal needs of flexibility – and cultural socialist legacies. Additionally, the research sheds light on organisational mechanisms of persuasion, control and consent manufacturing that organisations use for discouraging flexible work and that contribute to managers’ contradictory roles in stigma formation.