Editorial

Excerpt

Over the past two decades, organization and management scholars have been engaged in research on the concepts of contingent, i.e. non-standard work (Barker and Christensen 1998; Hipple 1998; Burton-Jones 1999) and boundaryless careers (Arthur 1994; Kanter 1989, 1995; Arthur and Rousseau 1996; Gunz et al. 2000; Kunda et al. 2002). This scholarly research reflects the growing relevance of contingent work in practice (Purcell and Purcell 1998). The external workforce, e.g. independent contractors (freelancers), temporary workers, and employees of service firms, is part of the phenomenon of contingent work. However, external workers are not necessarily peripheral workers (Bidwell 2009). As knowledge intensive firms in dynamic industries in particular increasing rely on an external workforce (Matusik and Hill 1998; Mallon and Duberley 2000; Kunda et al. 2002; Roessing and Kaiser 2013), it is important to recognize that external workers often perform highly skilled and knowledge-intensive work (Kozica and Kaiser 2012; Süß and Becker 2013). Therefore, we can analytically separate the external workforce into low-skilled and high-skilled groups (Marler et al. 2002; Bidwell 2009). The growing proportion of highly-skilled external workers (Storey et al. 2002: 5) is the focus of this special issue. …