ABSTRACT
Current accounts of changing forms of work and organization highlight that organizations increasingly integrate market mechanisms and that workers are increasingly required to pursue the ideal of an enterprising self (Storey, Salaman, and Platman 2005). Although the emergence and change of forms of work and organizations as well as individuals’ behavioural, perceptual, and cognitive patterns are obviously intertwined, theoretical explanations of this co-evolutionary process are scarce. This chapter aims at making a contribution to fill this gap by using the concept of reflexive habitus (Sweetman 2003) as a way to shed light on how reflexivity itself has become habitual in flexible forms of work and how, with reflexive habitus, processes of self-refashioning are “second nature” rather than difficult to achieve. The focus is to provide an understanding of what living in transient and flexible worlds of work—of which temporary agency work is a prevailing example—means to workers and how we can make sense of it. Such understanding is, in our view, essential for a critical conceptualization of the role that human resources management (HRM) and employment policies play in shaping individuals’ (work) lives. Whereas HRM can undoubtedly have a positive effect on temporary agency workers’ productivity and well-being, its broader consequences for workers’ identities and life courses should be kept in mind, too. What are the implications of temporary assignments and flexible working conditions for individuals? How do people deal with situations of uncertainty and expectations on creativity? What roles do the agency and the client organizations have in facilitating for the individual employee in managing flexible and changing employment conditions? Previous studies of temporary employment have shown, for example, that individuals develop attitudes and skills to deal with the temporal and spatial discontinuity of temporary agency work, involving a moulding of subjectivity (Garsten 2008); that flexible forms of work are conducive to simulated “designer cultures” involving a shift in employee identification (Casey 1996); and that flexible work conditions often require a metacognitive competence characterized as a self-governing competence (Hanson 2004) by which the individual is able to define, structure, and discipline her own performance and, ultimately, her ability to manage and govern herself in a wider, functional sense.
