The temporary agency as a different organization

In part I we argued that organizations, like temporary agency employment, possess features which will benefit the expert employee. For the temporary agency we proposed in chapter 5, the availability of, and preference for, temporal control were described as a necessary prerequisite for a punctuated break away from the traditional organization. For AT&T the agency concept was internalized and, for various reasons we describe, cannot be considered a radical break but more a gradual adaptation and transformation of the traditional organization. We also suggest that the over-emphasis of demand-sided transformations of organizations, in theory and in empirical research, tends to neglect other important elements of job forms as preferred by the employee (for this case study, temporal control). This implies that conventional analysis of the gradual transformation of firms may result in erroneous conclusions about contemporary organizations such as temporary agency employment. We contend that temporary agency employment is an important sector of the expert employee labour market. This is partly because of the potential temporal flexibility that it can offer these individuals and partly because of its potential for networking and cross-fertilization of expertise. Whereas AT&T took centre stage in the previous chapter it is two London accountancy firms that provide the data for this chapter's analysis.