Flexible Working in the UK: interrogating policy through a gendered Bacchi lens

This article focuses on organisations' flexible working policies and the UK' s Right to Request Flexible Working legislation first introduced in 2002 and progressively extended in 2009 and 2014. It critically explores the existing literature around flexible working to examine the UK' s policy approach through a gendered lens and by adopting Bacchi' s framework What' s the problem represented to be. Three themes from the literature are identified and explored to problematise the deep-seated assumptions and silences underpinning policy: namely, the dominance of the business case rationale; the gendered substructure of organisations; and the disjuncture between policy on paper and policy in practice. Through the lens of Bacchi, the article highlights that the problems underpinning the UK' s Right to Request legislation and organisation' s flexible working policies are neither fixed nor static, discursively shifting across time, and that flexible working policies must be analytically situated within their social and economic contexts.