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The purpose of this study is to determine the actual occurrences of flexible working conditions and to demonstrate an instrument for their assessment. Flexibility is discussed as a concept and defined in terms of deregulation of work, and a corresponding increase in self-

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The restructuring of human service organisations into more lean organisations has brought increased work demands for many human service professions. Social work stands out as a particularly exposed occupational group, in which high work demands are paired with a large individual responsibility to carry out the job. The objectives of the study were to identify what kind of coping strategies social workers employ to handle the imbalance between demands and resources in work and to investigate how different strategies affect outcomes regarding health, service quality and professional development. Sixteen individual interviews and four group interviews with another 16 social workers were conducted. The analysis identified five different main types of strategies: Compensatory, Demand-reducing, Disengagement, Voice and Exit. An extensive use of compensatory strategies was connected with negative outcomes in health. Often, these compensatory strategies were replaced or combined with different means of reducing the work demands, which in turn influence performance and service quality in a negative way. The results highlight dilemmas the social workers are facing when the responsibility to deal with this imbalance is 'decentralised' to the individual social worker. When resources do not match the organisational goals or quality standards, the social workers are forced into strategies that either endanger their own health or threaten the quality of service.

"Work environment," as a conceptual framework for reforming working life, may not be readily transferable from the tangible conditions of the industrial context in which it was conceived to the more flexible conditions of modern labor. Since the flexible conditions of work generally presuppose an increased responsibility and some sort of personal commitment on the part of the worker, isolating the environmental conditions from the personal abilities of the worker is becoming more difficult. As a consequence, only to a limited extent can the problems of modern labor be interpreted as work environment issues and subjected to work environment measures. With the propagation of flexible working conditions, work environment institutions and their reform ambitions will be passed by. And work environment reforms, rather than being a practical task of coordinating different protective measures at workplaces, will be reduced to an argument within the ideologically motivated rejection of an increasingly polarized labor market.