“Chewed-up”

I feature Paul to show that markets often produce conflict in interactions between professionals in the new onsite social organization with in-house outsourcing (inO). In markets, customers and vendors have different proprietary goals, called goal incongruence. Because of this historic problem, new procedures that include governance and ticket systems are instituted. However, workers at customers and vendors must work out the new market arrangement with few other social and supporting resources. Managers fill this void with adversarial meanings. Old colleagues take an offensive, authoritative approach and try to control the work of vendors, often escalating problems. Vendors adopt a defensive posture and utilize procedural stances to get customers to use ticket systems. In the working-out of new arrangements in inO, professionals contend with political work I call market labor. It includes: managing customers’ expectations of ownership and control over the work, getting customers to use tickets to help upsell services, and limiting the resources customers could expect in markets. Because of demanding and undignified interactions, subjects usually reported estrangement from former colleagues at customers. I argue outsourced professionals manage the invisible political work in markets with no training, recognition, or compensation for it by employers. It degrades job quality and cheapens the value of social relations in the workplace.