GURUS, HIRED GUNS, AND WARM BODIES S.R. Barley and G. Kunda

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Omschrijving: GURUS, HIRED GUNS, AND WARM BODIES
ITINERANT EXPERTS IN A KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY
Stephen R, Barley and Gideon Kunda
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Boek met zwarte kaft met illustratie met geel/rood/witte letteropdruk in perfecte (onbelezen) conditie;
342 pagina's;

As ethnographers, our agenda is to depict the world of technical contracting from the perspective of those who live it. We are also obligated by the ethics of our craft to shield the people who have so generously opened their worlds to us from unwanted intrusions. For this reason, we have used pseudonyms for the organizations we studied and for the individuals whom we observed and interviewed. This precludes us from publicly thanking the people who took us into their world, gave of their time, and shared their perspectives and knowledge with us. But those whose lives are depicted on the pages of this book know who they are, and to them we are deeply indebted. We hope they find we did justice to the complexity of their world and that we contributed in a small way to making it more manageable.
There are others without whose assistance and forbearance the book would not have been possible. Peter Yessne, chairman of Staffing Industry Analysts, Inc., kindly took the time, early and late in our study, to orient us to the staffing industry. His insights into the industry's structure and practices were invaluable. Our colleagues Galit Ailon, Diane Bailey, Yinon Cohen, Noah Lewin-Epstein, Bob Sutton, and Ely Weitz offered valuable comments on various versions of this book.
Over the course of the two years that we were in the field, a number of graduate students assisted in collecting data. James Evans and Siobhan O'Mahony worked with us over the entire period, doing numerous interviews and field observations and contributing their insights and interprerations. In the process, both became accomplished ethnographers. Fabrizio Ferraro and Ozgecan Kocak did fieldwork at Systems Professionals. Mark Mortenson, Jeff Martin, Joan Ubeda, Greta Hsu, and Filippe Santos interviewed contractors as part of a class on ethnographic field methods taught in Stanford's School of Engineering. Laura Casteneda worked with us for a summer helping interview contractors. We thank them all.
The Stanford University/General Motors Collaborative Work Systems Laboratory and the Department of Labor Studies at Tel Aviv University provided partial support for the preparation of the manuscript. The Network Society Project, under the direction of Rolf Wolff at Gothenburg University and Ingalill Holmberg at the Stockholm School of Economics, funded some of the travel necessary for our collaboration, and its participants offered support and helpful comments along the way.
We dedicate the book to our wives and lifelong partners, Debbi Barley and Lezli Rubin-Kunda, who give a sense of permanence in a world of temporary affiliations and contingent commitments.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1
Unlikely Rebels
Itinerant Experts
The Unraveling of Permanent Employment
The Legal Context of Contingent Work
Estimating the Size of the Contingent Workforce
Making Sense of Contingent Work
The Study
Organization of the Book

Part I: Setting the Stage

Chapter 2
Clients
Why Do Clients Hire Contractors?
How Do Clients Hire Contractors?
Conclusion

Chapter 3
Contractors
Why Do Contractors Become Contractors?
What Kinds of Contractors Are There?
The Roles Contractors Play for Clients
Conclusion

Chapter 4
Agencies
Sales Culture and Technical Culture
What Types of Staffing Agencies Are There?
Conclusion

Part II: Life in the Market

Chapter 5
The Information Game: Finding Deals
What Contractors Do
What Clients Do
What Staffing Agencies Do
Conclusion

Chapter 6
Making the Deal
Hiring Manager Evaluations
Negotiating the Terms of Employment
Closing Deals
Conclusion

Part III: Life on the Job

Chapter 7
Contractors as Commodities
Maintaining a Task Orientation
Delegating Management Responsibilities
Creating Outsiders
Conclusion

Chapter 8
Contractors as Experts
Integration: Creating Team Members
Dependence
Conclusion

Chapter 9
Navigating between Respect and Resentment
Tales of Respect
Tales of Resentment
Forming an Identity

Part IV: Living the Cycle

Chapter 10
Temporal Capital
The Temporal Patterns of Contracting
The Rhetoric and Reality of Flexibility

Chapter 11
Building and Maintaining Human Capital
The Danger of Obsolescence
The Risks of Learning
Strategies for Remaining Current
Conclusion

CHAPTER 12
Building and Maintaining Social Capital
Reach
Reputation and Occupational Circles
Reciprocity and Referral Cliques
Networking: Building and Maintaining Networks

Chapter 13
Itinerant Professionals in a Knowledge Economy
Itinerant Experts: The Contracting Life
The Ambiguities of Self-Reliance
Itinerant Experts and the Social Order
The Occupational Dimension
Supporting Itinerant Professionalism

Epilogue
Rerences
Appendix: Cast of Characters
Index

When we left the field in 1999, our informants, along with the rest of the economy, were riding high on the crest of the greatest period of economic growth in modern history. All economic indicators were rosy. The New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ were reaching new highs on an almost daily basis. Unemployment in Santa Clara County, the epicenter of Silicon Valley, stood at 2.9 percent, a historic low.' Venture capital flowed like water and young people with and without technical training were flocking to Start-ups, many of them Internet related dot-coms. Engineers and IT professionals in the Silicon Valley and other major technical centers could leave a job in the morning and, by many accounts, start another by the next day. In fact, technical talent in the United States was so scarce that the federal government had recently lifted the ceiling on HIB visas to satisfy industry's seemingly insatiable demand for technical expertise.
By November 2001, when the National Bureau of Economic Research officially proclaimed the economy to be in a recession, the world of high technology had taken a 180-degree turn. Venture capital was drying up, the stock market was in a free fall, dot-comers were holding 'pink-slip parties," and the technology giants were laying off employees in droves. By July 2002 unemployment in Santa Clara County had risen to 8.6 percent, over two percentage points higher than California's unemployment rate (6.7 percent). The mood of boundless optimism had sunk into tortured pessimism. Those who had flocked to the Bay Area in the late 1990s found their stock options worthless, their jobs disappearing, and the promise of quick wealth nearly as groundless as the hopes of the forty-niners who came to California searching for gold 150 years earlier. The mood was similar everywhere high tech mattered.
As one might expect, contractors and the staffing industry suffered along with everyone else. Between the fourth quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2002, employment in the staffing industry fell by 28 percent.^ During the same period, contractors' wages fell by as much as 20 percent. Nearly half of the firms responding to a survey administered in 2001 by Mercer Human Resource Consulting claimed that they had reduced the number of contractors they employed. Cisco, for instance, laid off more than half of its four thousand contractors.
On the basis of such data, some might argue, as did a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, that contracting was an artifact of an unusually tight labor market and that after the bubble had burst, contracting became less consequential for the economy. If this were true, the story we have told should be read, at best, as a history of a bygone era. But we believe it is not. Although contractors, like permanent employees, have surely experienced the ups and the downs of the economy, available evidence suggests that contracting remains (and is likely to continue to be) an important economic phenomenon.
It is important to note that the boom of the late 1990s did not create the trend toward using technical contractors. Contracting existed in the 1960s, grew throughout the 1980s, and picked up steam in the early 1990s before the Internet became available and dot-coms were conceived. Moreover, according to a recent survey conducted by Kelly Sernces, the proportion of the labor force working contingently was actuilly 6 percent larger in 2002 than it was in 1998. This could only be true if more permanent workers than contractors were dismissed. Evidence also suggests that employment in the staffing industry is recuperating, while permanent employment remains plateaued. Between March 2002 md March 2003, placements by staffing firms increased by 10 percent and the number of agency employees grew by 11.7 percent. Although some estimates indicate that 25 percent of high-tech contractors were till out of work in 2003, this must be balanced against data that indicate that nearly 20 percent of all IT jobs, both permanent and temporary, were lost since the recession began. Perhaps most tellingly, even as the recession bottomed out in 2002, employment of contingent workers remained twice what it was in 1991. In short, contracting seems here to stay.
Our informants' experience concurs. In January 2003 we tracked down as many of our original informants as possible to determine what had happened since we last talked to them. We were able to reach thirteen by phone or e-mail and found sufficient data for ten more on the Web. Of these twenty-three informants, 65 percent were still contracting, 30 percent had taken permanent positions, and one had left employment entirely to raise a family. Three of the seven contractors who went perm told us at the time of our original interviews that they intended to do so. These individuals left contracting before the downturn started. Those informants who continued to contract universally said that contracts had become more scarce, that rates had fallen, and that they had experienced longer periods of downtime than they reported several years earlier. Yet, many also noted that the worst seemed to be over and that business was now improving.
In sum, it seems reasonable to conclude that some of the details of our study belong to a bygone era. In particular, contractors' wages are now lower, jobs are more scarce, and downtime is more common. However, analogous claims could be made for full-time employment. Thus, contracting's structural position relative to permanent employment does not seem to have changed drastically, if at all, and the essence of our analysis Still appears valid. The emergence of itinerant professionalism and its significance for a knowledge economy is as relevant today as it was three years ago. Structural change simply occurs more gradually than the fluctuations of business cycles. It is a mistake to conflate the two.