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178 Chris BennerFlexibility in WorkThe term work refers to the actual activities people do while engaged in theprocess of production. It includes the physical skills and cognitive processesinvolved, the tools and technology used, and the relations with other people –customers, co-workers, colleagues from other firms, suppliers, and so on – thatthey engage in during the process of performing those activities. In this framework,flexible work – rapid change in the arena of work with little penalty intime, effort, or performance – refers in part to changes in the demand for laborin the way often described as numerical flexibility (i.e. fluctuating demand inthe quantity of work needed in any particular enterprise). Flexible work,however, also refers to changes workers experience in their activities on thejob, the changing value of their skills and experience in the marketplace, thechanging social relationships and patterns of communication required to beeffective in performing their work, and so on. Thus, in Silicon Valley, we canlook at three components of flexible work that seem most salient: (1) rapidchanges in the quantity of work required; (2) rapid changes in skill requirements;2 and (3) reflexivity in work tasks.Quantitative change in work: Rapid change in the quantity of work requiredis evident through an examination of statistics on total employment. Duringthe height of the 1990s’ boom, total employment in Silicon Valley grew fasterthan 5 percent annually, with employment in the software industry growing 13percent annually, and in computers and communication equipment, more than25 percent annually between 1996 and 1999. By December 2000, unemploymentin Santa Clara County (the core of Silicon Valley) had reached a low of1.3 percent, more than 3 percentage points below the national average.Employment decline during the economic downturn was even more rapid. Inthe space of just 13 months, unemployment jumped to 7.7 percent, and byearly 2003 had reached 8.4 percent, more than 2 percentage points higher thanthe national average. Silicon Valley’s driving industry clusters lost 22 percentof jobs in the space of a single year, between the second quarter of 2001 and2002 (JV: SVN, 2003).Yet even as dramatic as these changes are, they hide the even moredramatic job churning that lies behind these regional totals. These figuresreflect net employment change, but net employment change is the result ofsome businesses expanding and some contracting, some new businesses formingand some dying. National figures suggest that this job churning canaccount for a full 15 percent of all jobs in the economy within a single quarteror 30 percent of all jobs within a single year (Pivetz et al., 2001). This figureis likely to be even higher in Silicon Valley, since there is significant evidenceof rapid job decline amidst overall job growth, and signs of significant levels