Bringing back the subject: contracting and the discipline of the market : Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy

Citation

Hoedemaekers, C. (2007), "Bringing back the subject: contracting and the discipline of the market : Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 145-150. https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810710715333

In the past two decades, the landscape of employment relations has seen major shifts. New forms of employment contracts, new forms of organizing, changes in the nature of work and changing competitive environments have all led to a shift in the way work is approached by organizations. In academic debates on these matters, this has often been described under the catch‐all‐term of flexibility. Consequently, the term has been surrounded by much ambiguity and confusion. Legge (1995) segments the debate between accounts that describe a macro‐level shift toward more flexible organizations, and accounts that emphasise a more micro‐level flexibilization, taking shape in numerical, financial and functional versions. She points out that the macro‐level accounts have largely overstated the role of flexibilization. On the organizational level, the functional version of flexibility refers mostly to a changing deployment of core employees within an organization, whereas the financial and numerical forms entail anything from changing contracts to structural changes to current employment structures. All in all, the shift towards flexible forms of organization is not as straightforward as some make it out to be.

In recent years, contracting has been discussed as an example of how flexibility can be introduced in organizations, and because of this popular management writers have often held it up as the future of the employment relationship. The work experiences of contractors form the object of research in the latest book from Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda, entitled Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy. These authors have undertaken a truly impressive ethnography of IT contractors in Silicon Valley, in the boom years of the “new” economy. Based on some 70 in‐depth interviews, complemented with accounts from co‐workers and hiring managers, participant‐observation data and a careful study of relevant contracting agencies, the authors present a comprehensive overview of the experiences of what they call “itinerant experts”.

Based on a study in a highly innovative and knowledge intensive labor market at the time that it was at its tightest, the book speaks directly to the proponents of contracting. During that period, many scholars and popular management writers fell over each other to praise contractors and the organizations that used their services, for their example would surely be the way forward for employment relations in general. In their view, the needs of organizations would become dependent on the functioning of markets for contracting labor, where skilled experts offered their services to organizations that could draw on them when needed, and terminate the contract when the job was done. It represented the perfect solution for many, by apparently reducing the employment relationship to a market transaction. Both parties would retain their freedom and supply and demand would be perfectly matched.

Many scholars have since raised objections to this picture of free market optimism. Notably, institutional economists and sociologists have stressed that contracting represents the flowing of secondary labor markets into the core of the economy. This would result in a growing loss of job security and lower wages for a large proportion of the working population.

At the crossroads of these two opposing perspectives is where Barley and Kunda position their account. Their book speaks to both the optimists and the pessimists regarding the rise in contingent employment, but takes a decidedly “sociological approach” to studying the market. Whereas both the optimistic and the institutionalist view of contracting focus on market outcomes, the sociological approach that Barley and Kunda take is descriptive, aimed at creating a thick description of the inner workings of this market.

And this is where the real strength of the book lies. The authors provide great insight into the trials and tribulations of contractors' lives. All market players are carefully introduced: the various contractors, the hiring managers and their organizations, and the contracting agencies that act as go‐betweens in the market. In the three‐way relations between the actors, information becomes paramount in the process of matching supply with demand. The wealth of knowledge on various websites and databases for contracting labor does not take away from the need to find reliable information. From the perspective of the client firms, resumés may be exaggerated, contractors may have become unavailable, contact information may have become outdated, etc. From the perspective of the contractor, the key is to find jobs that are suited to their skills set and reasonable in terms of rewards. From Barley and Kunda's account it becomes apparent that even though the labor market is wide open, this is lot more difficult than one would expect at first glance. The time consuming work of matching supply and demand is often taken over by agencies, who go on to calculate considerable mark up rates over “closed deals”. From the personal stories of IT contractors comes a picture of the market rife with ambiguity and arbitrariness, far from the rationalist behavior portrayed by many economists.

Echoing earlier conceptualizations, Barley and Kunda argue that contractors manage three kinds of capital in order to stay competitive within the market place. These are temporal capital, human capital and social capital, all closely linked to each other. Temporal capital represents the contractor's time, which can variously be directed at work, leisure or building one of the other forms of capital. Human capital represents the contractor's skill set. From the informants' stories, it becomes clear that this requires quite some upkeep in the rapidly changing technological landscape of Silicon Valley, with the added risk that some technologies survive and others do not. And finally, social capital, deemed most important to the success of a contractor by the authors, represents the network of a contractor. The best jobs often result from informal contacts between contractors and IT professionals. A prime medium for these networks are the many internet‐based forums and chat rooms where IT experts come to talk shop. This can be seen according to the authors as an emerging community of specialists who share their knowledge and work together to provide each other with jobs and development opportunities. In order to productively conceptualize this phenomenon, Barley and Kunda call for a rehabilitation of occupational analysis, which may highlight the dynamics of this emerging profession.

The sociological analysis of this particular market works so well, because the authors continually juxtapose their approach to research carried in traditions such institutional economics, management studies and anthropology. The various academic readings of the growth of contracting, ranging from jubilant to skeptical, also coexist within the personal accounts of contractors themselves. Moving from organization to organization, they frequently find themselves at the receiving end of both “respect and resentment” (pp. 199). This is partly due to the various different roles they may be assigned in organizations. Contractors may be hired for a variety of reasons: from coaching permanent employees as an expert in a certain area, to maintaining productivity for companies that woo shareholders with their low headcount to profit ratio. As highly paid temporary workers, contractors are frequently met with indifference, jealousy and sometimes even hostility from permanent employees. Their status aparte is often emphasized by physical means of separating them apart from the rest of the workforce, such as elaborate ID tags and separate workspaces.

The contractors' varying roles of expert, expendable hired hand and problem‐solver, as they can be recognized in the extant research on contingent labor and in the anecdotes of popular management books, are embodied within the title of the book. Interestingly enough, we see these contradictory roles mirrored in the tales of “respect” and “resentment” of the informants themselves. The wide variety of academic and popular narratives on flexibility seemingly coexists in the subjectivities of Barley and Kunda's contractors. The tension between them is brought to the fore in the book, and as such, a rich and complex analysis of what it means to work as a contingent worker is presented. Although it is clearly grounded within the particular historical period of the IT‐hype, Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies provides great insight into the functioning of the market for contract labor, the motivations and tactical moves of the market players and the subjectivity of a contractor. As such, it is destined to become a classic.

The book picks up an interesting thread: it addresses the question of whether or not flexible employment has a dislodging effect on workers' identities. Barley and Kunda describe contracting as a liminal experience – a sensation that arises when accepted social roles no longer capture one's experience. They state that “[f]or contractors, however, […] liminality is a continual condition, indeed a way of life. If traditional employment bestows stable membership in a community of work and well‐defined social identity to go with it, contracting places its practitioners in social limbo: each time they accept a contracting assignment, they enter a social world in which the meaning of their involvement is riddled with ambiguity.” (2005, p. 176). Although they see contracting as leading to experiences of liminality, Barley and Kunda do see room for eventual institutionalization of this kind of work. They argue that the job security of former bureaucratic organizations is partly being replaced by an occupational organization of sorts. A loose professional network is forming around IT contractors, that allows them to maintain and improve upon their social capital (their network) and their human capital (their competences). This provides them with a more or less secure position in the labor market, by making sure that they are both noticed by hiring managers and competent enough to do the job well.

The potential dangers of the flexibilization of work have been powerfully highlighted in the influential book The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism by Sennett (1998). Much like Barley and Kunda, Sennett highlights the loss of stability in the employment relationship and its effects on people's lives. He puts forward the thesis that the fragmented nature of flexible work, along with the relative absence of a stable community of colleagues, prevents individuals from establishing a coherent historical narrative for their lives. For Sennett, the main cause of this is the changing nature of work organization, with more of a focus on short term labor and where possible, downskilling by means of new technologies. This causes a lack of transparency of work achievements, job insecurity and the failure to establish communities around occupations. As a result of this, work experience becomes more fragmented.

Individuals struggle to build their identities on the basis of their achievements at work, because the fruits of their labor are no longer transparent to them. Employees fail to build “character” because of the insecurity they experience on account of losing their livelihood, and because they are constantly being uprooted from their direct social environment.

Although Sennett's arguments demonstrate a slight nostalgic longing for the bureaucratic stability of prior decades, he raises an interesting point nonetheless: what do flexible employees build their identities on?

For Barley and Kunda, this would be the occupational community that they are part of, which is slowly replacing the void of liminality in which contractors currently find themselves. For Sennett, work identity is also tied to the work community that one belongs to. But these communities demand a certain degree of stability in order to provide the support and belonging that people need to construct satisfying work experiences. Within flexible capitalism, that stability is rapidly disappearing.

Nonetheless, Barley and Kunda provide an incredibly insightful look into the experiences of contractors in the marketplace. They are sensitive to the contradictions of contractors' positions within the organizations they work in, the diverse subject positions they occupy at various stages in the “contracting cycle”. As seemingly autonomous agents, they nevertheless feel the disciplining force of the market as their flexibility often has them working harder and longer than they ever would have, had they been permanent employees. Their time becomes measured in terms of capital: temporal, social, human. Capital that they strive to maximize in all their work. As contractors, they have simultaneously become entrepreneurs and technical specialists, responsible for their own development and acquisition of work, continuously improving. In this respect, they epitomize the enterprising individual.

In another recent account of contracting work, Storey et al. (2005) present a study of a group of media freelancers, and find that they actively draw on enterprise discourse to construct their identities. Enterprise discourse can be understood as a particular constellation of free market ideology coupled with discourses of individualization and entrepreneurialism. It has been instrumentalized to effect changes throughout the public and the private sector, by means of a critique of bureaucratic forms of organization.

As such, enterprise discourse may provide exactly the vehicle for interpreting the subjective effects of flexibility and the fragmentization of work as Sennett describes it. Here it becomes vital to closely examine the concepts of enterprise discourse that come to replace older ones, thereby radically reframing subjects' experiences and the social conditions that allow for those experiences. The managerialist discourse of flexibility is rife with concepts such as employability, excellence, personal development and others. These concepts have the potential to shift deep‐seated assumptions and expectations of the employment relationship. This has been well documented in the literature on enterprise culture. In the case of contracting, the activities that contractors need to undertake within the market place further drive home the self‐discipline that is associated with enterprise. The short term activities of searching for jobs, inspecting the skill requirements and “selling” one's own skills to a hiring manager are forms of labor that have profound consequences for the self‐understanding of these subjects. These activities are the ones that construct the “self‐identity” concepts that Storey et al. (2005) explored in their study. These self‐identities consequently become further re‐shaped and re‐articulated as contractors immerse themselves in specialist IT books and courses, participate on internet forums, and follow market trends to find the next big thing, in order to “invest” in their skills and become more “employable”. These work activities aimed at succeeding in the market can have far‐reaching effects on the subjectivity of contractors.

However, this conceptualisation of subjectification appears to contradict the “resentment” displayed by Barley and Kunda's contractors with regards to the language and rhetoric of enterprise. Here, it is useful to examine Žižek's (1989) theorization of “doing” versus “thinking” ideology.

Žižek posits that practicing ideology without believing in it may be even more productive to ideological power than truly believing it. In this case, cynicism can function for the subject as an excuse, as a way of absolving itself from the reproduction of that ideological discourse. But the subject is nevertheless “within” the ideological structure, and actively participates in its reproduction. Žižek maintains that the “split” between the subject's own attempts to distance itself from ideology, and the subject's (language‐based) presence within that ideology is itself a characteristic of the nature of subjectivity. This split is between the subject's identity construction, and a more fundamental social dimension of selfhood on the level of language.

Žižek's description of ideological interpellation by doing rather than thinking sheds light on the contradictions in the contractors' accounts. Contractors may be vocally cynical about their freedom within the marketplace, and even skeptical about the advantages of contracting as opposed to permanent employment. But their involvement in market interactions means that they participate in routines and practices that are caught up in the discourse of enterprise. The speech of Barley and Kunda's informants remains laced with defining signifiers of the type of flexibility discourse so prevalent in popular management books. The omnipresence of these signifiers in moments like contract negotiations, work planning meetings, informal talk at work, trade publications, internet forums, and others, means that they come to figure within the wider chain of signifiers that symbolizes the subject to itself and others.

What is crucial here, is that the system still works regardless of the cynical responses of its actors. Žižek likens it to the former socialist states, that he argues actually depended on the disavowal of their subjects in order to function because it prevented collective resistance from taking shape. Enterprise discourse operates through the subjectivities of flexible workers who are actively marketing themselves on labor markets, transforming themselves into enterprising subjects, regardless of the resistance displayed.

If Barley and Kunda are to take the warnings of Sennett and others regarding the ills of flexibility and enterprise seriously, they may do well to focus their efforts on the consequences of such discourse. The vocabulary of enterprise as such must be more strongly rejected. While voices of dissent are easily interpreted as acts of resistance, it is important to acknowledge the way in which they draw attention away from the pervasive growth of the discourse of enterprise.