Temporary work : an enabler for boundaryless careers ?

Résumé

The aim of the present paper is to examinate
the notion of career applied to the temporary
help service (THS) workers. During the recent
period, leader firms in the temporary help service industry in France are trying to build real
“careers” for their temporary employees, by
using various methods, such as enabling long
term employment relationships, or making
efforts to extend some benefits of the “permanents” employees to the temporary workers
(mutual funds, occupational training…).
Our ambition is to study the impacts of
these evolutions on the temporary employees,
by using the framework of the boundaryless
careers [ex: Arthur and Rousseau – on 1996;
Cadin and al – on 2003]. We formulate the
hypothesis that the professional course of some
specific temporary workers (mobile and qualified) can now be viewed as a real careers,
regarding the framework proposed by the
boundaryless careers theorists.
To validate this hypothesis, we led a qualitative
empirical study (31 interviews conducted with
temporary work agency managers), completed
by a questionnaire administered to a sample of
208 temporary employees.