How Can New Players Establish Themselves in Highly Institutionalized Labour Markets? A Belgian Case Study in the Area of Project‐Based Work
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Author | Virginie Xhauflair,François Pichault,Benjamin Huybrechts |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12281 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12281
56:2 June 2018 0007–1080 pp. 370–394
How Can New Players Establish
Themselves in Highly Institutionalized
Labour Markets? A Belgian Case Study
in the Area of Project-Based Work
Virginie Xhauflair, Benjamin Huybrechts
and Franc¸ois Pichault
Abstract
How can new players seeking to serve nonstandard worker categories (such as
project-based workers) establish themselves into labour markets that are highly
institutionalized? This paper explores the case of SMart, a Belgian community-
based labour market intermediary that successfully developedsolutions to better
represent the interests of project-based workers and secure their discontinuous
careers.Using an organizational legitimacy approach, wefind that labour market
entry and growth involve dierent types of boundary-crossing when addressing
the needs of workers that do not fit into established categories. However, to
justify boundary-crossing, the new player must complement its pragmatic work
on delivering new services and tools with conceptual (cognitive) and structural
(moral) legitimation work.
1. Introduction
In Belgium, as in many European ‘coordinated market economies’ (Hall
and Soskice 2001), the labour market is highly institutionalized with an
extensive regulatory framework defining the legitimate actors and their roles
in the management of the workforce (Visser 2013). Only authorized ‘social
partners’ such as trade unions and employers’ representatives are granted
a voice in the collective bargaining process under the umbrella of the State
(L´
eonard and Pichault 2016). While European countries have seen such a
Virginie Xhauflair is at HEC Li`
ege, University of Li`
ege. Benjamin Huybrechts is at emlyon
business school Casablanca campus and HEC Li`
ege, University of Li`
ege. Franc¸ois Pichault is
at HEC Li `
ege, University of Li`
ege.
C
2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
A Belgian Case Study in the Area of Project-Based Work 371
neo-corporatist system (Streeck and Schmitter 1985) declining, it is not the
case in Belgium (Pulignano et al. 2015; Van den Putte and Orbie 2015).
The Belgian union rate is among the highest in Europe, covering more than
55 per cent of the active workforce (OECD 2015) and still increasing. The
resulting social regulatory framework applies to any worker, unionized or
not. Outside civil servants, two opposite statuses are clearly distinguished
within the Belgian labour law: employee or dependent, and self-employed or
independent worker(De Groof and Vanhegen 2016). Such a binary distinction
does not recognize the high diversity of hybrid statuses between these two
poles (Leighton and Wynn 2011). In neighbouring countries like Germany,
the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, dierent regulatory initiatives
have been taken vis-`
a-vis these ‘new self-employed’ (Buscho and Schmidt
2009), often leading conventional unions to adopt more inclusive strategies
(Gumbrell-McCormick 2011). By contrast, nonstandard workers in Belgium
havereceived little regulatory attention so far,with the exception of temporary
workers for which a specific legislation has been jointly developed by unions,
employers and the government since the 1980s (Pulignano et al. 2015).
Such lack of consideration has led Belgian nonstandard workers, in
particular project-based workers, to seek avenues to voice their concerns
and/or to secure their professional transitions. Several initiatives have been
developed in this perspective by third-party actors, acting as labour market
intermediaries (LMI) between nonstandard workers and user organizations.
For example: employment co-operatives in which individual entrepreneurs
can bring their own business and be hired as regular employees; employers’
alliances in which several user companies pool jobs through a structure that
is legally recognized as a single employer etc. However most initiatives have
so far remained marginal due to legal constraints (wage portage is legally
forbidden in Belgium) or perceived complexity (employers alliances require
user companies with complementary needs and no competition, involving
cooperation costs). By contrast, a much more visible initiative is SMart, a
community-based LMI (Sullivan 2010) oering innovative solutions to better
represent the interests of artists and other project-based workers and secure
their discontinuous careers. SMart’s membership has grown quickly, from a
few hundreds in the early 2000s to nearly 80,000 fifteen years later, becoming
by far the largest actor representing and providing services to project-based
workers in Belgium.
The success of SMart seems surprising when placed in the context of the
highly institutionalized Belgian labour marketsystem, in which the nature and
roles of intervening actors are strictlyregulated. It thus provides a particularly
interesting case to study the conditions under which a newplayer can establish
itself on the labour market.SMart succeeds in doing so by taking into account
the unmet concerns of project-based workers while dealing with opposition
from established actors. In particular, SMart faced opposition from trade
unions who fear further casualization of work (Benassi and Dorigatti 2015;
Kornelakis and Voskeritsian 2016) and consider that nonstandard work is
much better secured when being reconverted into regular employment.
C
2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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