Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies PDF Author: Stephen R. Barley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691119434
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
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.

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies PDF Author: Stephen R. Barley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691119434
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies PDF Author: Stephen R. Barley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400841275
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
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.

Extracting Accountability

Extracting Accountability PDF Author: Jessica M. Smith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262362422
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
How engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries attempt to reconcile competing domains of public accountability. The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. In Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, she finds the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability—to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others. Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics—from critics of their industry to their own friends and families. She shows how the social license to operate and an underlying pragmatism lead engineers to ask how resource production can be done responsibly rather than whether it should be done at all. She analyzes the liminality of engineering consultants, who experienced greater professional autonomy but often felt hamstrung when positioned as outsiders. Finally, she explores how critical participation in engineering education can nurture new accountabilities and chart more sustainable resource futures.

Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce

Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309454050
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Recent years have yielded significant advances in computing and communication technologies, with profound impacts on society. Technology is transforming the way we work, play, and interact with others. From these technological capabilities, new industries, organizational forms, and business models are emerging. Technological advances can create enormous economic and other benefits, but can also lead to significant changes for workers. IT and automation can change the way work is conducted, by augmenting or replacing workers in specific tasks. This can shift the demand for some types of human labor, eliminating some jobs and creating new ones. Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce explores the interactions between technological, economic, and societal trends and identifies possible near-term developments for work. This report emphasizes the need to understand and track these trends and develop strategies to inform, prepare for, and respond to changes in the labor market. It offers evaluations of what is known, notes open questions to be addressed, and identifies promising research pathways moving forward.

The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital

The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital PDF Author: Alan Burton-Jones
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online
ISBN: 0199532168
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 717

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Book Description
This Handbook provides a much needed, authoritative, and inter-disciplinary survey of concepts, applications, and research on human capital, the stock of human capabilities and knowledge found in organizations. It is designed for scholars and graduate students in business and across the social sciences, as well as policy makers and practitioners.

Making the Cut

Making the Cut PDF Author: David Pedulla
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691241430
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
An in-depth look at how employers today perceive and evaluate job applicants with nonstandard or precarious employment histories Millions of workers today labor in nontraditional situations involving part-time work, temporary agency employment, and skills underutilization or face the precariousness of long-term unemployment. To date, research has largely focused on how these experiences shape workers’ well-being, rather than how hiring agents perceive and treat job applicants who have moved through these positions. Shifting the focus from workers to hiring agents, Making the Cut explores how key gatekeepers—HR managers, recruiters, and talent acquisition specialists—evaluate workers with nonstandard, mismatched, or precarious employment experience. Factoring in the social groups to which workers belong—such as their race and gender—David Pedulla shows how workers get jobs, how the hiring process unfolds, who makes the cut, and who does not. Drawing on a field experiment examining hiring decisions in four occupational groups and in-depth interviews with hiring agents in the United States, Pedulla documents and unpacks three important discoveries. Hiring professionals extract distinct meanings from different types of employment experiences; the effects of nonstandard, mismatched, and precarious employment histories for workers’ job outcomes are not all the same; and the race and gender of workers intersect with their employment histories to shape which workers get called back for jobs. Indeed, hiring professionals use group-based stereotypes to weave divergent narratives or “stratified stories” about workers with similar employment experiences. The result is a complex set of inequalities in the labor market. Looking at bias and discrimination, social exclusion in the workplace, and the changing nature of work, Making the Cut probes the hiring process and offers a clearer picture of the underpinnings of getting a job in the new economy.

A Fractured Profession

A Fractured Profession PDF Author: David R. Johnson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421423537
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Exploring the growing division among academic scientists over a profit motive in research. The commercialization of research is one of the most significant contemporary features of US higher education, yet we know surprisingly little about how scientists perceive and experience commercial rewards. A Fractured Profession is the first book to systematically examine the implications of commercialization for both universities and faculty members from the perspective of academic scientists. Drawing on richly detailed interviews with sixty-one scientists at four universities across the United States, sociologist David R. Johnson explores how an ideology of commercialism produces intraprofessional conflict in academia. The words of scientists themselves reveal competing constructions of status, conflicting norms, and divergent career paths and professional identities. Commercialist scientists embrace a professional ideology that emphasizes the creation of technologies that control societal uncertainties and advancing knowledge toward particular—and financial—ends. Traditionalist scientists, on the other hand, often find themselves embattled and threatened by university and federal emphasis on commercialization. They are less concerned about issues such as conflicts of interest and corruption than they are about unequal rewards, unequal conditions of work, and conflicts of commitment to university roles and basic science. Arguing that the division between commercialists and traditionalists represents a new form of inequality in the academic profession, this book offers an incisive look into the changing conditions of work in an era of academic capitalism. Focusing on how the profit motive is reshaping higher education and redefining what faculty are supposed to do, this book will appeal to scientists and academics, higher education scholars, university administrators and policy makers, and students considering a career in science.

Deconstructing the Welfare State

Deconstructing the Welfare State PDF Author: Paula Hyde
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317661362
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Who are NHS middle managers? What do they do, and why and how do they do it’? This book explores the daily realities of working life for middle managers in the UK’s National Health Service during a time of radical change and disruption to the entire edifice of publicly-funded healthcare. It is an empirical critique of the movement towards a healthcare model based around HMO-type providers such as Kaiser Permanente and United Health. Although this model is well-known internationally, many believe it to be financially and ethically questionable, and often far from 'best practice' when it comes to patient care. Drawing on immersive ethnographic research based on four case studies – an Acute Hospital Trust, an Ambulance Trust, a Mental Health Trust, and a Primary Care Trust – this book provides an in-depth critical appraisal of the everyday experiences of a range of managers working in the NHS. It describes exactly what NHS managers do and explains how their roles are changing and the types of challenges they face. The analysis explains how many NHS junior and middle managers are themselves clinicians to some extent, with hybrid roles as simultaneously nurse and manager, midwife and manager, or paramedic and manager. While commonly working in ‘back office’ functions, NHS middle managers are also just as likely to be working very close to or actually on the front lines of patient care. Despite the problems they regularly face from organizational restructuring, cost control and demands for accountability, the authors demonstrate that NHS managers – in their various guises – play critical, yet undervalued, institutional roles. Depicting the darker sides of organizational change, this text is a sociological exploration of the daily struggle for work dignity of a complex, widely denigrated, and largely misunderstood group of public servants trying to do their best under extremely trying circumstances. It is essential reading for academics, students, and practitioners interested in health management and policy, organisational change, public sector management, and the NHS more broadly.

Knowledge Economies and Knowledge Work

Knowledge Economies and Knowledge Work PDF Author: Bill LaFayette
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 178973777X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Our global economy is going through a major transformation, from an industrial economy, to a knowledge economy, rendering knowledge a primary factor in production. In this practical, real-world focused book, expert authors come together to define and discuss knowledge work.

IT Consultant Diploma - City of London College of Economics - 12 months - 100% online / self-paced

IT Consultant Diploma - City of London College of Economics - 12 months - 100% online / self-paced PDF Author: City of London College of Economics
Publisher: City of London College of Economics
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 7727

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Book Description
Overview This course deals with everything you need to know to become a successful IT Consultant. Content - Business Process Management - Human Resource Management - IT Manager's Handbook - Principles of Marketing - The Leadership - Information Systems and Information Technology - IT Project Management Duration 12 months Assessment The assessment will take place on the basis of one assignment at the end of the course. Tell us when you feel ready to take the exam and we’ll send you the assignment questions. Study material The study material will be provided in separate files by email / download link.