Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy

By Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda

Book Overview

Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence.

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies tells the story of how the market for temporary professionals operates from the perspective of the contractors who do the work, the managers who employ them, the permanent employees who work beside them, and the staffing agencies who broker deals. Based on a year of field work in three staffing agencies, life histories with over seventy contractors and studies of workers in some of America's best known firms, the book dismantles the myths of temporary employment and offers instead a grounded description of how contracting works.

Engagingly written, it goes beyond rhetoric to examine why contractors leave permanent employment, why managers hire them, and how staffing agencies operate. Barley and Kunda paint a richly layered portrait of contract professionals. Readers learn how contractors find jobs, how agents negotiate, and what it is like to shoulder the risks of managing one's own "employability."

The authors illustrate how the reality of flexibility often differs substantially from its promise. Viewing the knowledge economy in terms of organizations and markets is not enough, Barley and Kunda conclude. Rather, occupational communities and networks of skilled experts are what grease the skids of the high-tech, "matrix economy" where firms become way stations in the flow of expertise.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691127956
• ISBN13: 9780691127958
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Patient, thorough and unpretentious analysis with strands to pursue

It's going for this publication, too, the evidence that relevance is not too often linked with the publishing year. One might subject a publication on this topic from the millenium turn rather to the criticism of being outdated than notorious or hidden classics of more distant past (roughly following the proverbial "news of yesterday"). By any means: No, it isn't. On an early stage and in a business where complexity has turned from machinery into extremely mobile abstract code, the authors touched a pivotal point of society which is the written and unwritten expectational concept individuals and corporations operate upon and western governments are amidst in the struggle about (far-easterners apparently are not that concerned, still not or never...), above the professional field addressed. Barley/Kunda deliver broad empirical basis and unlock the findings into considerations open for discussion between many "camps" instead of locking up the results in a ,err, castle of reasoning. A very fertile reading this was (in particular with the furtherly broadening potential together with "le travail en miettes" of georges friedmann, I incidentially ran across by the time, a recommendable experience), certainly a must as well for people involved in politics for that matter. It's an asset. (And, off the record, it's not quite a torture to read!) David Gehle, Freiburg, germany

must have for forward thinkers

As a contractor, owner of a contracting firm, and publisher this book has found one of the best spots in my library: open, and on the desk. I use it, refer to it, and think it is an excellent book. If you're a contractor, you'll find yourself nodding your head and realizing that this is a smart piece of work. I think recruiters should read this book as well.

Highly Recommended !

Some years ago, during the height of the technology stock bubble, a book entitled "Free Agent Nation" made quite a splash by glorifying the phenomenon of independent contracting. Less famously and far less optimistically, a number of economists and anthropologists pointed to this trend as a grave sign of the decay of workers' position in American society. Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, the authors of this study, steer a careful, meticulously documented middle course. They examined the observable fact of independent contracting in the high technology industry from three viewpoints: the contractors, the headhunters and the client firms. They say that the contractor is a new, different kind of knowledge worker with a unique set of opportunities and constraints. The book is clearly written, based on apparently sound evidence and illustrated with carefully chosen anecdotes. We suggest that its primary appeal will be to academics and other students of labor market trends, but also recommend it to firms that hire contractors and to contractors themselves - both will benefit from the authors' analysis of their market.

"The Apprentice" starring Dilbert, produced by Margaret Mead

Ah the sweet life of a contract programmer... the big bucks, the independence, the freedom from corporate politics! Barley and Kunda are brilliant anthropologists who take you inside the reality of the contractor's life. You hear their stories, learn their secrets, and smell their nervous sweat. The authors' style is captured nicely by the title of the book. They're irreverent and on-target. They allow you to spy with them--mixing voyeur appeal with hard science. Imagine an episode of "The Apprentice" starring characters pulled from Dilbert, and produced by Margaret Mead. I laughed out loud and took notes. If you work with contractors, if you live with a contractor, if you hire contractors, and for sure if you are a contractor, you must get this book. David Maxfield Director of Research VitalSmarts