The value of relationships in a transactional labour market: constructing a market for temporary employment

Introduction
In recent decades, the concept of ‘normal’ employment has been challenged. For example, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2003) argue that the global, social and political landscape was characterised by an ‘epochal’ shift during the last decades of the 20th Century, echoing theorists from a wide range of political and intellectual persuasions (Paradeise 2003; Gorz 1999; Granovetter 1998; Rifkin 1996; Handy 1995; Harvey 1990). All of these scholars have pointed to increasing individualization and changing expectations about contractual specifi cations of rights and obligations in all areas of private and public life (Sennett 1998; Gellner 1997; Lyotard 1984). Kallinikos (2003: 595) described these trends as increasingly eroding work communities where ‘modern humans are involved in organizations qua roles, rather than qua persons’. In employment studies, this has led to a focus upon workforce, labour market and employment flexibility. It has generated extensive debates on, successively, the extent – and costs and benefits to employers and workers – of atypical work and contractual arrangements (for example, Barley and Kunda 2004; Rubery et al. 2004; Auer and Cazes 2003; Purcell et al. 1999; Burchell et al. 1999; Atkinson 1985) and – as part of the human resource management and performance debate – HRM architecture and selective labour contracting strategies with specific attention to temporary employment (Boxall and Purcell 2011; Vidal and Tigges, 2009; Koene and van Riemsdijk; 2005; Kalleberg 2003; Lepak and Snell 1999; Pfeffer 1994). Essentially, it has been argued that competitive pressures in the marketplaces for goods and services, allied to changes in technology which have affected production, provision and transferability of goods and services, have led to increased individualisation and (re)commodifi cation of labour, (Esping-Andersen 1990:37) to an extent that represents a tectonic shift from the traditional perspective of employment as preferably permanent and stable.
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