Contested growth: the development of norway's temporary staffing industry

Abstract

In this article we mobilize a variegated capitalism approach to understand the development of the Norwegian temporary staffing industry. From this perspective, national temporary staffing industries are understood as contested multi-actor and multiscalar institutional fields. The analysis explores the key actors and regulatory conditions that have interactively produced this field in the Norwegian context since initial deregulation in 2000, paying particular attention to the active role played by agencies and their collective organizations. In our account, the tight regulatory conditions for temporary staffing in Norway emerge as the main mobilizing issue for the agencies, as well as other political actors such as trade unions. It is argued that the nature of national labour laws, and struggles thereon, are defining characteristics which set the Norwegian market apart from the neighbouring Swedish staffing market. The Norwegian case enables us to contribute to the wider economic geography literature on temporary staffing markets by demonstrating the fundamental importance of national regulatory processes and the contested political processes that underlie regulatory change. It also demonstrates how national distinctiveness is actively produced in relation to extra-national dynamics in terms of both regulatory imperatives (e.g. via the EU's Temporary Workers Directive) and processes of migration. Overall, we demonstrate how national staffing markets are highly dynamic, multi-scalar institutional configurations whose particularities and complexities defy attempts to generalize across groups of seemingly "similar" national economies.

Constrained agencies: The emergence of Singapore's distinctive temporary staffing industry

“…Research on Australia's industry (Coe et al, ), for instance, reveals significant differences from other liberal welfare states like the US and UK (Peck and Theodore, ; Ward, ). Similarly, studies on Nordic states such as Norway and Sweden have revealed multiple types of social democracies, resulting in notably different temporary staffing landscapes (see Coe et al, ; Jordhus‐Lier et al, ). Ultimately, there is a need for greater sensitivity to the variegated nature of capitalism, by appreciating the different political–economic structures of the countries within these broad typologies (Peck and Theodore, ).…”

“…Aligned with the ‘agency of agencies’ approach, this paper draws upon a conceptual framework that helps us understand how national temporary staffing markets are produced through multi‐actor national institutional contexts. Derived inductively from empirical research across diverse temporary staffing markets, including Australia (Coe et al, ), Sweden (Coe et al, ), Japan (Coe et al, ) and Norway (Jordhus‐Lier et al, ), this framework sees the national temporary staffing industry as shaped by a dynamic institutional landscape that is underpinned by interactions between various national and international actors, including businesses, the state, and civil society (Coe and Ward, ).…”

Motivation, Migration and Non-standard Employment: A Survey Among Temporary Agency Workers

“…N onstandard employment (NSE) arrangements 1 such as labor hire have become an integral part of the flexibilization of work (Jordhus-Lier et al 2015;Kalleberg 2000;Ward et al 2001). This has prompted debates on the precarization of vulnerable groups, the growing segmentation of permanent workers and temporary workers (Allen & Henry 1997;Kalleberg 2003;2009), and the motivations for accepting NSE arrangements (de Jong et al 2009; de Jong & Schalk 2010;Lopes & Chambel 2014).…”

The resistible rise of the temporary employment industry in France

“…of Management, Manchester Metropolitan University UK, Corresponding author c.purcell@mmu.ac.uk reporting has provided insight into the negative consequences of low-skilled agency labour in France, documenting daily humiliations and low-pay (Martinez, 2003;Aubenas, 2011). A further body of research has turned attention to how the active role of TEAs in labour 'market-making' activities (Coe et al, 2009) is crucial to the sector's expansion and institutionalisation through altering employer practice and employee expectations within specific national labour markets (Coe and Ward, 2014;Jordhus-Lier et al, 2015).…”

“…These studies focus on the social processes by which agencies 'simultaneously construct and inhabit' (Strauss and Fudge, 2014: 10) their markets and regulatory contexts, often confronted by hostile labour movements and reluctant governments, as was the case to varying degrees in Norway (Jordhus-Lier et al, 2015), France (Purcell et al, 2011), Germany and Belgium (Pulignano et al, 2015).…”