How do contract professionals seek to control their working time? Here, the authors identify boundary work strategies through which contractors—both shift workers and project workers—maintain distinctions from employees with standard jobs. Drawing from interviews with contractors in three occupations, the authors identify sources of leverage for control of working time in payment systems, outsider status, and occupational networks. These structures allow contractors to reinforce boundaries between contract and standard employment and resist the overtime and overwork associated with standard jobs. Boundary work between contingent workers and employees may therefore generate inequalities of control, with implications for workers, managers, and organizations.
Much research shows that paid work performed at home supports a gendered division of household labor, leaving women disproportionately responsible for unpaid domestic work. For contract professionals, however, the flexibility to manage working time outside the constraints of a standard job allows both men and women to meld paid employment with household responsibilities. Interspersing paid and unpaid work, home-based contractors—both women and men—accommodate family needs. They arrange daily schedules to be available parents and household managers, and they develop longer-term career trajectories that allow adjustment over time. For women, however, long-standing notions of domesticity make such accommodation invisible, normative, and unremarkable. For men, in contrast, home-based contracting can create the space with which to challenge gender norms. For these home workers, therefore, the same arrangement simultaneously reinforces and resists conventional constructions of gender.
With workforce flexibility and nonstandard, "contingent," work have come new mechanisms for labor market mediation and workforce control. This study examines occupational connection and control in two groups of contract professionals. For these occupational practitioners, networking is a mechanism for labor market regulation as well as for finding work. Networking perpetuates occupational norms that demand commitment to work, accountability to clients, and reciprocity among colleagues. Adhering to occupational norms, contractors develop reputations that can enhance the likelihood of referrals from colleagues for contract assignments. Collegial exchange in an occupational labor market, therefore, exposes contractors to the informal sanctions of normative control.
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