ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, the concept of “regular employment” has been challenged and changed rapidly and fundamentally. We have seen a growth of short-term employment. Increasingly, organizations make use of contingent employees (Bergström and Storrie 2003) and contract work (Barley and Kunda 2004). From the beginning of the 1990s onwards, the growth of these “non-standard work arrangements” has attracted scholarly attention (e.g., Casey 1991; Delsen 1995; Purcell and Purcell 1998; Kalleberg 2000). Along with these developments, temporary work and the temporary work agency industry have both grown rapidly. In the United States, temporary agency work (TAW) grew at an annual rate of 11 per cent between 1972 and 1998, against 2 per cent annual growth for regular non-farm employment (Kalleberg 2000). During the 1990s, temporary work agencies were legalized and regulated in many European countries (Bergström and Storrie 2003), reflecting a growing sociocultural readiness for temporary employment and supporting its proliferation (Koene, Paauwe, and Groenewegen 2004). Critics voiced concern about the risks of bringing contingency back in and of undermining work conditions and workplace community (e.g., Benner, Leete, and Pastor 2007; Kalleberg 2009). Still, during the 1990s, temporary contracts in Europe grew by 25 per cent (Kalleberg 2000), and in the first decade of the new millennium, we saw a steep growth of agency work in Europe from 2, 605 million to 3, 924 full-time equivalents between 2002 and 2007 when it peaked, a growth of 51 per cent (Ciett 2011).
