As employees cannot always readily stretch their competencies and professional identity on the job through regular job crafting, we ask the question: are there alternative ways of crafting inside organizations through which people can stretch themselves? Using grounded theory methods, we step into the shoes of federal employees active in Open Opportunities, a digital market for temporary assignments in the U.S. federal government. We find that employees use such temporary assignments to craft a liminal space in which they can explore new skills, establish new professional ties, and claim new professional identities unavailable in their full-time jobs. However, due to its visibility, this way of crafting can also generate substantial supervisory pressures resisting it. These pressures may induce an image cost, and trigger increased frustration, stress, and strain in people's jobs. As we describe this new job crafting pattern, we pay attention to both its benefits and burdens, and the impact thereof on people's efforts to stretch themselves at work. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study and its consequences for future research on job crafting, professional identity development, and the future of work.

Through an international Delphi study, this article explores the new electronic human resource management regimes that are expected to transform internal staffing. Our focus is on three types of information systems: human resource management systems, job portals, and talent marketplaces. We explore the future potential of these new systems and identify the key challenges for their implementation in governments, such as inadequate regulations and funding priorities, a lack of leadership and strategic vision, together with rigid work policies and practices and a change-resistant culture. Tied to this vision, we identify several areas of future inquiry that bridge the divide between theory and practice.

Across two datasets-a corpus of 485 print media articles and a multiactor survey of Tech/Innovation experts, Authors/Journalists, Economy/Labor Market experts, Policy Makers/Public Administrators, and Engaged Citizens (N=570)-we build the case that the future of work is a fiction, not a fact; or better yet, a series of competing fictions prescribing what the future will or should look like. Using an abductive and curiositydriven mixed-method analysis process we demonstrate that different narratives about the future of work stand in direct relation to specific actors in the public debate, both through framing tactics used by narrators in the media, and through political and dispositional processes of narrative subscription. From these findings, we infer that research on the future of work is in need of a paradigm shift: from 'predictions' to 'imaginaries'. This, we argue, will help counter deterministic and depoliticized understandings of the future of work. We propose an integration of theory around framing contests, field frames, narrative subscription, and corresponsive mechanisms to offer a plausible account of our empirical discoveries and develop an agenda for further research. As the practical implications of our research show, the future of work does not need to be something that happens 'to us'-instead, the future can be what we 'make it'.

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