**2. Flexibility in management sciences**

Industrial economics and management sciences understand the concept of flexibility [14, 15] as the capacity of a business or organization to re‐adapt its structure and projects in response to environmental challenges (strategic flexibility) and to re‐adapt its skillsbase, reorganize its workflows (workflow flexibility) and/or adjust its production methods as a response to unforeseen variations in *inputs* from outside (operational flexibility). The concept therefore appears relevant when analysing farmers' response strategies in the current climate governing agricultural production (characterized by regulatory developments, volatile agricultural prices, climatic variability, etc.). Tarondeau [15] (*ibid*.) stratified different sources of flexibility: product flexibility (product range), process flexibility and inputs flexibility. The basic idea is that the capacity to cope with unknowns and carry the business forward is dependent on several factors, both material and non‐material: the configurations of their technical production systems, their structures, their projects and their objectives [16]. Reix et al. [17] suggest that the drive for flexibility can be seen as the drive to maintain consistency in how the business is managed in response to a changing environment. Flexibility, as a system property, is not "given": it is built, shaped and "nurtured," and it has a cost [18]. Flexibility can be considered a competitive advantage insofar as it enables performance levels to be sustained in situations of uncertainty [19].

**1. Introduction**

2 Livestock Science

social and environmental factors [7, 8].

**2. Flexibility in management sciences**

ance.

systems.

Farm businesses, just like any other business enterprise, develop response strategies in order to cope with the many demands imposed on them and the uncertainties they face. The challenge for farmers lies in securing sustainability for their business, in a context where farming is subject to wide‐reaching change and where farms are increasingly exposed to agronomic trends and climatic risks that the agricultural productivity model generally seeks to overcome by controlling processes and disengaging the effects of environmental disturb‐

Incorporating the precepts of sustainable development in order to build and assess new technical agricultural systems hinges on breaking away from the rationales underpinning these systems and moving towards more holistic objectives encompassing far more than the simple production output function [1]. There are two key drivers to this breakaway: (i) reinventing how researchers interact with the other actors involved in the process of developing new systems and their multiple outcomes [2, 3], and (ii) producing tools capable of quickly rendering a priori system assessments [4, 5] as a first step towards subsequently deploying the systems in compliance with complex multicriteria specifications [6]. This means that agrono‐ mists face the challenge of translating the impacts of integrating these dimensions into terms that farmers can understand and use to reshape their farm systems, taking into account new

This reshaping redefines the farm business as a complex system that needs to be analysed not just in terms of its type but also the rationales driving how it operates [9, 10]. A few years ago, farming system researchers started using the notion of flexibility to define the capacity of a business to weather and adapt to economic uncertainty. The concept of resilience, as pioneered by Holling [11], has also been analysed in this setting, particularly when applied in more recent social‐ecological systems [12]. "Flexibility" has been researched extensively in management science and industrial economics, whereas "resilience" has mainly been used in ecology (but also in social psychology; [13]). Our study will draw on illustrative examples to highlight how the notion of flexibility can prove useful for designing and assessing innovative technical

Industrial economics and management sciences understand the concept of flexibility [14, 15] as the capacity of a business or organization to re‐adapt its structure and projects in response to environmental challenges (strategic flexibility) and to re‐adapt its skillsbase, reorganize its workflows (workflow flexibility) and/or adjust its production methods as a response to unforeseen variations in *inputs* from outside (operational flexibility). The concept therefore appears relevant when analysing farmers' response strategies in the current climate governing agricultural production (characterized by regulatory developments, volatile agricultural prices, climatic variability, etc.). Tarondeau [15] (*ibid*.) stratified different sources of flexibility: Different commentators use different terms as synonymous with or acceptances of the concept of flexibility, but there is a body of ideas that remain recurrent. Flexibility refers to organiza‐ tional capacity [14, 15, 20–23, 28]. This means that the systems described are always manage‐ ment‐led and that the organizational procedures governing their management constitute a source of flexibility for the system. In each case, flexibility is defined as an attribute that is inherent to humans, dependent on how they perceive situations to be addressed, their objectives, their level of risk aversion and the perception they hold of their business. Flexibility is a property that has to associate both change and stability, forming a paradox between permanence (continuity, mainstay) and change [16]. The authors see management flexibility as the result of constructive tension between what needs to be held onto and what needs changing. This same idea has been explored through analyses of how livestock farming systems work, with the notion of invariants [24]. The invariant acts as a backbone, a basis, a bottom line and the frame of reference for handling change (not everything has to change at the same time, otherwise the system risks getting disorganized or even collapsing into chaos). Flexibility is intrinsically dynamic. It can only be meaningfully studied in the long term, at multiperiod scale. Integrating flexibility into the analysis of a system or an organization presupposes that the decision‐maker is looking to achieve short‐term objectives while also securing a range of opportunities for the longer term [25]. In other words, a given decision may appear non‐rational (or non‐optimal) when analysed at timepoint t, but become entirely rational once events liable to arise at some point in the future are factored in (uncertainty preparedness). Indeed, the speed of response to these events is one of the key components of flexibility [15].

Furthermore, in every scenario, the concept of flexibility is also linked to the notion of interaction between the system/organization and its environment. It can therefore be measured and thus assessed, by quantifying the degree of control (according to the dual flexibility concept proposed by De Leeuw and Volberda [20]: controlled systems vs. independent systems) over environmental inputs (**Figure 1**).

The two paradigms coexist within a single system (controlling‐controlled) and must therefore be analysed in tandem. However, the extent to which one paradigm dominates the other reveals specific system behaviours.

The organization as an environment‐controlled system: in this configuration, the organization "copes with" environmental factors [16]. Flexibility hinges on accommodative processes [26], which hallmarks defensive behaviour in response to external perturbation [27]. The target objective for the system will be adaptation, stability, resilience to environmental forces and robustness. Systems unable to achieve this objective would be defined as vulnerable.

**Figure 1.** Organization of an environment‐controlled system (left) and an environment‐independent system (right) (concepts taken from Ref. [20]). TS = target system; CO = controlling organ. The arrows illustrate the direction of control exerted by the CO over the TS.

The organization as an environment‐independent system: in this configuration, the organiza‐ tion seeks to subordinate all changes in its environment to the task of maintaining its objectives and its identity. Interactions with the environment are specified internally, and on a certain level, the environment is integrated into the organization. The processes deployed in the search for flexibility are assimilative processes, which hallmarks a pro‐active pattern of behaviour that will respond to each perturbation by generating new behaviours, thereby expanding the range of adaptation options possible. These configurations define self‐learning organizations with self‐directed learning capacities.

**Figure 2.** Different types of flexibility according to the number of planned procedures (vertical axis) and the speed at which they can be implemented (horizontal axis); adapted from Ref. [28].

De Leeuw and Volberda [20] encapsulated these two configurations by defining flexibility in terms of diversity of procedures and the speed at which they can be mobilized: (i) to increase the organization's environmental control capacities and (ii) to decrease the organization's environmental vulnerability. The authors define different types of flexibility according to the number of planned procedures and the speed at which they can be implemented (**Figure 2**).
