The Good Temp

2. The Social Construction of New Markets and Products

Chapter Two The Social Construction of New Markets and Products We may find business more willing to buy people’s services for near-term duration. The application of temporary help on a project basis has yet to be accepted by business, but there are signs that such acceptance might be realized by the end of the decade. Guy Millner, President, Norrell Services and National Association for Temporary Services, 1972 In the mid-twentieth century the temporary help service industry succeeded in recasting temporary employment from a marginal to a normative practice. But, as argued in chapter 1 institutional and legal market-making activities can’t fully explain this success. Rather, industry writers disseminated novel views of temporary and permanent employment as part of an effort to promote the new market paradigm. In articles published in personnel and business magazines , these writers attempted to shape the terms of a new labor market and persuade readers of the value of their new product by reiterating five key issues: (1) how new THS industry practices differed from traditional practices, (2) the “true” and “hidden” costs of permanent labor, (3) templates for using temps and agencies efficiently , (4) finding out who has the capacity to be good temporary workers, and (5) identifying new occupations, industries, and task niches where temporary workers could be used. Taken together, 33 The Social Construction of New Markets and Products these articles portrayed temporary workers as legitimate, reasonably qualified, even desirable employees. We have analyzed archival data to document changing personnel doctrine about temporary and permanent employment systems. By conducting a content analysis of several hundred articles in personnel and other industry magazines published between 1960 and 1990, we document the rise of the “staffing” paradigm. This new outlook called attention to the benefits of jobs organized on a temporary basis and of good temporary workers, while criticizing the “traditional” model of employment based on full-time, permanent jobs and workers . Tilly and Tilly (1994) argue that capitalists purposely create new labor markets by emphasizing new norms and values. In this spirit we show how the normative construction of the new paradigm on the part of personnel and THS professionals was an integral part of shaping a new labor market for temporary jobs and temporary workers . This discourse sets the stage for chapters 3–5, where we look at agency practices on the ground and examine how agency staff actually sustain this unique employment relationship. Many who study historical transformations at work, whether of management theories and ideologies (Barley and Kunda 1992; Bendix 1956), internal labor markets (Dobbin et al. 1993), legal edicts (Edelman, Fuller, and Mara-Drita 2001), or “fashions” such as quality circles (Abrahamson 1996), argue that the diffusion of new ideas throughout the business world provides important indicators of employment change. Rhetorics—discourses that reflect beliefs and theories about how things can or should be done, how they can or should look, or what values should prevail—invite analysis because they “provide both the locale (or venue) and the rationale for trends in organizational management (and) usually precede or develop along with the implementation of ideas by firms” (Edelman, Fuller, and Mara-Drita 2001, 1592). Professional personnel journals in particular have contributed to the diffusion of new ideas, but they also “provide documentation of their evolution” (Edelman 1990, 1410), with personnel professionals being the “engine” driving the diffusion of new ideas about management and employee governance throughout the twentieth century. We cannot claim that the rise of a new doctrine in personnel publications actually caused employers to start using temps on a widespread 34 The Good Temp basis. Rather, we suggest that the new doctrine slowly contributed to a hospitable business environment for the new practice. Authors of these articles showed how using temps could be safe and provided formulas for using them, thus demystifying the practice. Tempting though it may be to try, new managerial rhetorics cannot be singled out as either causing or resulting from workplace practices; rather, they are both the harbingers and the footprints of social change. Managerial rhetorics are promulgated through a variety of sources. The “media” (Edelman, Fuller, and Mara-Drita 2001, 1601) of management rhetoric consist of professional and industry periodicals, meetings, workshops, and, in contemporary times, Internet Listservs. Bendix’s classic Work and Authority in Industry (1956), for example, drew on one arm of the management media—personnel magazines and mass-market books that popularized management practices—to analyze ideologies about the use of authority in business enterprises...