Shaping the future of work: how labour market intermediaries (LMIs) use institutional work to transition to triadic, project-based employment relationships
| Date | 01 July 2024 |
| Pages | 141-160 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-03-2023-0131 |
| Published date | 01 July 2024 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
| Author | Anna Schneider |
Shaping the future of work:
how labour market intermediaries
(LMIs) use institutional work to
transition to triadic, project-based
employment relationships
Anna Schneider
Universit€
at Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
Abstract
Purpose –This paper identifies how the operations of labour market intermediaries (LMIs) transform dyadic
employment relationships into triadic ones. It reveals the change dynamics that LMIs engage in to bring about
this transformation and that contribute to the projectification of work.
Design/methodology/approach –Drawing on an institutional-work lens and using interview data from
both TempX, a German-based staffing service provider, and its client organizations, the analytical framework
details the dynamics by which LMIs appropriate various HR tasks and different labour-market-organizing
roles and thus create these triadic employment relationships.
Findings –TempX assumes a powerful position between its client organizations and workers by increasingly
taking over HR tasks from its client organizations, alternating between profiting from market transactions and
engaging as a buyer and seller of labour. This powerful position, gradually created through four distinct,
sequential, institutional work dynamics, allows it to transform dyadic employment relationships into triadic
ones and to promote project-based work.
Originality/value –By showing how LMIs capitalize on the multiple services they offer, and how they use
these services to establish a powerful position in both the labour market and in their relations with client
organizations, this paper contributes to research on how LMIs change their institutional environment. Second,
by showing that LMIs switch between different labour-market organizing roles and HR tasks, this paper
reveals how essential this switching is for LMIs to establish triadic employment relationships and to drive the
projectification of work, and thus it also contributes to research on LMIs’role in the projectification of work.
Keywords Labour market intermediaries, Triadic employment relationships, Projectification of work,
Skilled contingent workers (SCWs), Institutional work
Paper type Research paper
Employee
Relations: The
International
Journal
141
© Anna Schneider. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and
create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full
attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://
creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
I am especially grateful to Jannika Remmers for her diligent assistance with data collection and to
Marc Abernathy for his expertise in language and valuable help revising this article. I also extend my
thanks to Bernadette Bullinger, Julia Brandl, Martina Kohlberger and Petra Eggenhofer-Rehart for their
insightful feedback.
My appreciation and gratitude extends as well to the participants of various research colloquia at
University of Innsbruck, as well as to the participants of the 34th EGOS Colloquium 2018 in Tallinn,
Estonia; the Kommission Personal Herbstworkshop 2019 in Munich, Germany; the 17th Workshop on
New Institutionalism in Organization Theory 2022 in Madrid, Spain; and the 38th EGOS Colloquium
2022 in Vienna, Austria, all of whom provided valuable comments on earlier drafts of this work.
Finally, I wish to express my deep gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers and to the journal
editor, Dennis Nickson, whose guidance was instrumental in the revision process of this article.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0142-5455.htm
Received 15 March 2023
Revised 15 August 2023
28 February 2024
1 May 2024
Accepted 1 May 2024
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 46 No. 9, 2024
pp. 141-160
Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-03-2023-0131
1. Introduction
Researchers generally agree that employment relationships are fragmenting into “various
worlds of work”(Delbridge and Sallaz, 2015), in which employment is more short-term,
project based, and contingent (Cappelli and Keller, 2013;Polivka and Nardone, 1989), leaving
workers with little job security and diminishing their prospects for long-term employment.
Labour market intermediaries (LMIs) such as personnel consulting firms, staffing agencies
and temporary work agencies facilitate such work arrangements because they broker
workers or employ them in triadic employment relationships (Ruiner et al., 2020;Tholen,
2023;Bonet et al., 2013;Kunda et al., 2002). These changes to standard employment
relationships are illustrations of what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005a,b) have termed “The
New Spirit of Capitalism”, in which companies use project-based work to organize themselves
flexibly so they can respond to changing environmental and market conditions. Companies
increasingly use triadic work arrangements for core company tasks (Nesheim, 2003;Nesheim
et al., 2007), particularly highly qualified workers (e.g. technicians, engineers and IT
professionals), who are the fastest-growing segment of temporary workers (Semenza and
Pichault, 2019). The proliferation of project work, also termed “projectification”(Schoper et al.,
2018;Lundin et al., 2015), in organizations and societies encourages and legitimizes
contingent work arrangements and vice versa. Because this kind of work is increasingly
common and has severe consequences for workers and societies, understanding more about
how labour market intermediaries operate and how they contribute to these work
arrangements is of critical interest to researchers.
Researchers have recognized that understanding more about the role of LMIs in the
projectification of work is important, and their findings in this emerging field of researchhave
provided valuable insight into how LMIs impact skilled contingent workers’(SCWs’) careers,
such as by providing these workers with training and support, negotiating their working
conditions and facilitating different work arrangements (Sulbout and Pichault, 2023;Ruiner
et al., 2020;Koene and Pichault, 2021;Lorquet et al., 2018). While the focus on SCWs in this
research has helped us understand the effects LMIs have for them, an important question
remains largely unanswered; namely, how LMIs operate and how, exactly, they bring about
these shifts in employment relationships (Kunda et al., 2002). What we do know is that in
addition to performing an informational role of matching employers and workers and
facilitating such employment transactions (Autor, 2009), LMIs are also actively engaged as
“entrepreneurial actors”(Ofstead, 1999) that establish and shape triadic employment
relationships. In this role, they are thus promoters of contingent work arrangements and
project-based work. An essential question for researchers is how they effect and promote
such relationships. The research question this paper seeks to answer is therefore, “How does
the institutional work that LMIs do contribute to transforming dyadic employment
relationships into triadic ones?”
To answer this question this paper investigates the case of an Austrian subsidiary of a
German-based employment service agency (henceforth called TempX) that specializes in
providing employment services of and for highly skilled technical workers. Temp X is the
market leader in central Europe for such services. It represents a critical case (Flyvbjerg,
2006), because the TempX subsidiary in this study succeeded during a period of pronounced
skilled-labour shortage (Dornmayr and Winkler, 2018), and hence it will most likely also
succeed during economic downturns when companies’demand for flexibility through
outsourcing is much higher. Be cause success for LMIs entail s establishing triadic
employment relationships, learning more about this case allows us to infer how a broader
set of LMIs operate in various economic settings. This study provides a near-complete
account of how this subsidiary operates because it draws on semi-structured interviews with
five TempX managers who were directly involved in opening and establishing the subsidiary
in a new region, along with six representatives of TempX’s client organizations, and thus this
ER
46,9
142
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