In the Margins: Flexibility as a Mode of Regulation in the Temporary Help Service Industry

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Abstract
As firms increasingly rely on temporary clerical workers, previous control mechanisms centred in the workplace no longer are sufficient to maintain labor discipline and ensure production quality and uniformity. Through participant observation of four U.S. temporary help service firms and two placement sites, this case study reveals forms of control that differ from those in place at more commonly studied manufacturing enterprises. Temporary help service firms have developed a flexible frontier of control which operates on two levels: (i) a bureaucratic level, whereby the THS firm rationalizes jobs in the organization's hierarchy delimiting a set of tasks, competencies, and responsibilities; (ii) a decentralized level, whereby the THS firms indirectly controls workers by decentering regulation and dispersing responsibility for control to individual workers. As such, flexibility appears to be a new post-Fordist strategy for increasing capital accumulation and worker regulation.

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