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Sorbonne). Different versions of this paper were presented at various seminars and workshops in Europe and abroad. We are grateful to participants and discussants for their comments and critiques. We are particularly indebted to Richard Green, Carine Staropoli, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. 2 AbstractThis paper is about the alignment of technology and modes of organization in infrastructures in the context of their reform. Since infrastructures are characterized by strong technical complementarities, we explore the resulting 'critical technical functions' that need to be performed in order to guarantee the expected technical performance of the system. We characterize 'critical transactions' as essential to provide adequate support to these functions. We distinguish various modes of organization that can effectively coordinate these critical transactions. We argue that the features of these transactions determine the alignment between organization and technology and should be taken explicitly into account when reforming infrastructures.

This article elaborates on the possible interrelations between the technical and institutional coordination of infrastructures. There is indeed a need for coherence between both in order to safeguard a satisfactory functioning in terms of economic performance, guarantee of public values and technical system integrity. It is argued that the ongoing discussion on the liberalization of various infrastructures focuses very much on institutional changes, including market restructuring towards competition and privatization. The technical repercussions of these institutional changes are often neglected. On the other hand, technological change might also have very fundamental consequences for organizations and institutions. Building on the idea of a co-evolution between institutions and technologies, we define very simplified technical and institutional coordination mechanisms. By comparing both, we are able to determine their coherence and relate this to infrastructure performance. In this way, we provide a novel attempt to relate institutional arrangements to the technical network-specificities of infrastructures. This offers a different perspective on the organization of these sectors and a new explanation of their performance. We illustrate our arguments by way of cases from the electricity and air transport sectors. Implications for theory and policy conclude this article.

This article develops an explanatory framework for understanding the growth and development of temporary agency work (TAW) and the related industry. The analysis shows that explanations based on economic logic are helpful in understanding the choice of TAW in general. These explanations, however, fall short when trying to explain the growth of agency work over time or the variation in its use among European countries. To cope with these shortcomings, we extend our explanatory base to include a variety of sociocultural dynamics. Our analysis shows how deep‐seated national work‐related values (‘deep embeddedness’) affect the way TAW is regulated nationally. It also demonstrates how differences in more changeable norms, attitudes and practices (‘dynamic embeddedness’) affect the process of embedding agency work as a societally acceptable phenomenon, providing a basis for its subsequent proliferation.