Blurring corporate boundaries: Staffing agencies, human resource practices and unions in the new employment relationship

Corporations are dramatically restructuring as the boundaries between internal and external organizational functions are becoming blurred. The increased use of outsourcing arrangements and contingent labor are giving rise to new types of inter-firm partnerships. Drawing on comparative ethnographic data from two different staffing services, a private agency and a non-profit, union-affiliated staffing organization, I demonstrate how contemporary staffing agencies connect more intimately to firms, changing the traditional employment relationship.; In the dissertation, I argue that staffing agencies are actively shaping labor market dynamics, rather than simply reacting to impersonal market forces. I show how the staffing agencies studied played a critical role inside their client firms, becoming institutionalized actors taking on a range of functions that were once reserved for HR departments and unions. Many corporate managers are now turning to staffing agencies to recruit and manage a temporary and sometimes permanent workforce. At the same time, a broad range of workers are now using staffing agencies to navigate the complex terrain of the labor market.; Adapting to these changes in the employment relationship, Working Partnerships Staffing Service (WPSS), the union-affiliated organization studied, ventured far beyond familiar territory, operating within the marketplace as a competitor to private-sector staffing agencies. I found that while this organization sought to create an alternative worker-centered staffing service, they continually ran the risk of reproducing normative models of staffing, as the sociological literature on isomorphism would predict. And yet, I discovered that WPSS innovatively mobilized across the different fields of organized labor, staffing, and workforce development to forge a new model for staffing.; The contemporary labor market landscape is rapidly changing as an increasing number of workers---temporary, temp-to-perm, contract, and self-employed---join the payroll of staffing agencies. Transformations in the Silicon Valley provide a vivid backdrop for this sociological analysis of the changing relationship between employers, workers, and unions. The findings presented advance our knowledge of the blurring of boundaries between staffing agencies and their client firms and signal the need for newly designed public policies to address changing employment structures.