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Despite its geographic and industry expansion as part of the ongoing globalisation of service activity, temporary agency work (TAW) is relatively understudied. TAW is characterised by a distinct triangular structure where workers are typically hired by staffing or employment agencies while being'dispatched'to firms that use them as a type of temporary or non-regular labour. This agency-mediated labour dispatching, as a newly institutionalised industry, has registered rapid growth rates over recent decades across vast swathes of the globe. To a great degree, TAW is part of a wider structural transformation of work and employment under neoliberalism. Arguably, controversy over the expanding non-regular workforce is at its most acute when it comes to unsavoury labour-selling practices. In this connection, TAW is an exemplary field in which to examine today's'flexible'capitalism and its concomitant phenomenon, i.e.'inequality'. Featuring holistic and interdisciplinary perspectives, this edited collection provides a comprehensive overview of TAW, in an international context. It reveals how the TAW industry is intertwined with the changing relationship between the state, corporations and labour unions at the institutional-structural level, and also the perceptions and experiences of ordinary workers in everyday practice. By combining global and local forces, macro and micro levels of analysis, and theoretical and empirical investigations, the book offers fresh insights into recurring issues of labour flexibility and inequality, contributes to practical applications and facilitates fruitful cross-national collaborations.

Over the past two decades the use of flexible employment relations has increased in most developed countries. The growth of temporary agency work constitutes a significant component of this development. Organizations are now facing the challenges of managing a ‘blended workforce', i.e. a workforce consisting of both direct hires and contractors. At a time when Europe, as well as the rest of the world, is facing enhanced global competition and a severe labor market crisis, an understanding of temporary employment practices becomes all the more acute. With the evolution of the use of agency work in the Western world over the past decade, the chapters in this volume show how a focus on the management and organization of temporary agency work can be helpful to see possibilities and pitfalls for the use of temporary employment in the wake of changed employment practices and challenges to labor market stability and welfare structures. Together, the new case studies presented in this volume provide a wide scope of analysis of the organization and management of temporary agency work, offering a much-needed contribution to the discussion of issues and priorities that guide and shape organizational practices today. Its particular uniqueness lies in the empirical richness and variety of local case studies and the way in which these are related to wider policy aims, ideological shifts, and the dynamics of organizational practice, with a particular focus on the organization and management of ‘blended workforces'.

The numbers of workers employed on a temporary basis has grown massively over the last few decades. The benefits to firms of hiring workers on a temporary basis are clear and generally can be reduced to their cheaper short term cost. The status of workers employed in this manner however means that they are less likely to receive the same rights as

This book examines the relationship between competitive strategies and the use of temporary employees.