Flexible work is commonly framed as an employee benefit, a work-design choice, or a productivity arrangement. These framings understate how organizations distribute access to flexibility and how its use may reshape access to information, visibility, managerial support, and career-relevant opportunities. This original conceptual theory article develops a proposed Politics-of-Flexibility Theory to explain how formal arrangements may become an organizational allocation regime. The theory links four proposed mechanisms: a flexibility eligibility gate, an informal information channel, an evaluative visibility filter, and a managerial discretion converter. Together, these mechanisms may influence employees’ access to developmental assignments, consequential voice, influential relationships, sponsorship, recognition, and advancement consideration. The article distinguishes formal permission from effective access, visibility from performance, individual preference from organizational allocation, and career opportunity from realized career outcomes. It further proposes that repeated differences in information, evaluation, and sponsorship may produce cumulative opportunity drift, while transparent eligibility, persistent information practices, output-relevant evaluation, auditable opportunity allocation, and shared managerial accountability may interrupt that process. The theory does not presume that flexible work is inherently harmful or that managerial discretion is necessarily illegitimate. Its relationships are conditional on occupational status, task feasibility, team interdependence, remote-work intensity, career stage, organizational culture, technological affordances, and national context. Testing requires longitudinal, multilevel, experimental, network, and qualitative designs that separate selection effects from organizational conversion processes. The contribution is a bounded theory of how flexibility may become politically consequential for careers without claiming causal validation or universal applicability.
