Group 2005

Plenary speaker: Steve Barley
 

Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies

Abstract:

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 technical contracting or about the people who do it.  Drawing on his newly
 published ethnography of contract labor markets, Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy (co-authored with Gideon Kunda and published by Princeton University Press), Barley will discuss 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.  In this talk Barley will pay specific attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that arise when firms employ contractors and how managers and employees deal with those contradictions in practice. The study provides a window onto the changing nature of work and employment, especially in IT and computer related occupations.

Bio:

Stephen R. Barley is the Charles M. Pigott Professor of Management Science and Engineering and the Co- Director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford's School of Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. in Organization Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to coming to Stanford in 1994, Barley served for ten years on the faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. He was editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly from 1993 to 1997 and has served on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Journal, The Journal of Management Studies and Organization Science. He has been the recipient the Academy of Management's New Concept Award. Barley was a member of the Board of Senior Scholars of the National Center for the Educational Quality of the Workforce and co-chaired National Research Council and the National Academy of Science's committee on the changing occupational structure in the United States. The committee's report, The Changing Nature of Work, was published in 1999. Barley teaches courses on the management of R&D, the organizational implications of technological change, organizational behavior, social network analysis and ethnographic field methods. He has written extensively on the impact of new technologies on work, the organization of technical work and organizational culture. He edited a volume on technical work entitled Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in the United States published in 1997 by the Cornell University Press. Barley is currently working on a multi-pronged study of contingent work among engineers and software developers in the Silicon Valley. He has served as a consultant to organizations in a variety of industries including publishing, banking, computers, electronics and aerospace.

from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/people/faculty/barley/