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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.Design/methodology/approachAdopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208 articles.FindingsThe authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.Originality/valueThe field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’ career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a sustainable career perspective on contingent work.

We explore the role that contracting plays within the careers of managerial workers. Contracting distances workers from organizational coordination and politics, aspects of organizational life that are often central to the managerial role. Nonetheless, managerial workers make up a substantial proportion of the contracting workforce. Qualitative interviews with managerial contractors indicate that the tension between the natures of contracting and managerial work means that managerial contractors carry out substantially more bounded work than regular employees, and that this boundedness can shape the role that contracting plays in their careers. Examining the employment histories of MBA alumni of a U.S. business school, we show that workers with fewer subordinates and greater personal demands are more likely to enter contracting. We also find that contractors report better work–life balance but receive lower pay both while contracting and in subsequent regular employment. Whereas prior research has highlighted the financial benefits and temporal demands of contracting for highly skilled workers, our findings introduce important boundary conditions to our understanding of high-skill contracting: the nature of the occupation is critical.

The increasing variety of contingent work raises the question of how employers choose between various types of contractual arrangements. The authors review relevant Employment Relations and Strategic HRM literature and distinguish four types of contingent contracts along the dimensions of costs and control. They argue that employers are making choices based on cost and control constraints but are able to reshape these constraints through “institutional toying.” Their case study of a German manufacturing plant and R&D center illustrates the mechanisms of institutional toying, which are consistent with the literature on institutional loopholes and exit options. The article develops propositions that explain the diversity of contingent work arrangements and show how toying strategies enlarge the range of options available to employers.

While the role of individual differences in shaping primary appraisals of psychosocial working conditions has been well investigated, less is known about how objective characteristics of the employee profile (e.g., age) are associated with different perceptions of psychosocial risk factors. Moreover, previous research on the link between employment status (i.e., work contract) and such perceptions has provided mixed results, leading to contradictory conclusions. The present study was conducted on a nationally representative sample of theItalian employed workforce surveyed with computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) methodology. The principal aim of the study is to bridge this gap in the extant literature by investigating the interplay between two key characteristics of the employee profile (i.e., age and work contract) in shaping employees’ perceptions of psychosocial risk factors. Given the disparate literature scenario on the interplay between age and employment status in shaping primary appraisals of psychosocial stressors, we formulated and compared multiple competitive informative hypotheses. Consistent with the principles of the conservation of resources (COR) theory, we found that older contingent employees reported a higher level of psychosocial risk than their permanent peers who, in turn, were more vulnerable than middle-aged and younger workers (regardless of their employment status). These results highlight the importance of simultaneously assessing multipleobjective variables of the employee profile (i.e., age and employment status) which may act to shape subjective perceptions of psychosocial risk factors for work-related stress. Given our findings, employers and policy makers should consider older contingent employees as one of the workforce sub-populationsmost vulnerable to negative work environments.

An earlier article by Gallie, Felstead, Green and Inanc demonstrates that employee insecurity can be divided into job tenure insecurity (anxieties about the continuity of employment) and job status insecurity (anxieties about the loss of valued features of the job). Here it is argued that job tenure insecurity can be further divided into acute and generalised variants. The former tracks the level of involuntary redundancies in the UK data and is grounded in a realistic assessment of the likelihood of involuntary job loss. The latter is driven by a range of factors, including the economic cycle and the intensification of work that is also associated with rising job status insecurity, and the permeation of insecurity through new sections of the workforce. Its greatest extent was in the mid-1990s and it rose again in the years following the 2008/2009 recession.

This article draws on a case study of a high-end food-service firm, where most workers are undocumented Mexican immigrants. This firm has institutionalized employment relations characterized by flexibility, precariousness, and contingency. I specify its unique market context, showing how vulnerable and precarious employees are essential to the firm’s ability to control business uncertainties. Pulling from Alvin Gouldner (1954) I develop the concept of the mock calendar as a micro-level strategy of management that obscures the conditions of precarious employment at this firm. The mock calendar communicates time and scheduling. It is “mock” because it is illusory: it changes and shifts according to managers’ daily manipulations. However, given the high-end and uncertain market niche this company operates in, managers are forced to provide workers with symbolic and meager material concessions. I conclude by suggesting that scheduling manipulation is an undertheorized arena of workplace control. Given recent literature that documents the widespread problems of wage theft, overtime violations, and lack of paid breaks for many service workers, understanding the micro processes that maintain and reproduce forms of twenty-first-century precarity is extremely relevant.

ObjectivesTo investigate the association between maternal employment precarity and infant low birth weight (LBW), and to assess if this association differs by race/ethnicity.MethodsData were collected from 2871 women enrolled in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adult Cohort. Employment precarity was evaluated using a summary variable that combined several employment attributes: availability of employer-sponsored insurance, income, long shifts, non-daytime shifts, availability of employer sponsored training or educational benefits and membership in a union or collective bargaining unit. Employment precarity scores (a sum of the number of negative employment attributes) were categorised into low (0–2), medium (3) and high (4-6). LBW was defined as weight less than 2500 g at birth. Modified Poisson models were fit to calculate risk ratios and 95% CIs and adjusted for maternal age, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, nativity, prepregnancy body mass index, alcohol consumption, smoking during pregnancy and infant year of birth. We assessed effect modification by maternal race/ethnicity using a composite exposure-race variable.ResultsWomen with high employment precarity had higher risk of a LBW delivery compared with women with low employment precarity (RR: 1.48, 95% CI: 1.11 to 1.98). Compared to non-Hispanic/non-black women with low employment precarity, non-Hispanic black women (RR: 2.68; 95% CI: 1.72 to 4.15), Hispanic women (RR: 2.53; 95% CI: 1.54 to 4.16) and non-Hispanic/non-black women (RR: 1.46; 95% CI: 0.98 to 2.16) with high employment precarity had higher risk of LBW.ConclusionsWe observed higher risk of LBW in pregnancies of women with high employment precarity; this association was stronger among black and Hispanic mothers compared to non-Hispanic/non-black women. Findings of this study can be used to inform antenatal care and identify workplace policies to better support women who work during pregnancy.

Nonstandard employment relations-such as part-time work, temporary help agency and contract company employment, short-term and contingent work, and independent contracting-have become increasingly prominent ways of organizing work in recent years. Our understanding of these nonstandard work arrangements has been hampered by inconsistent definitions, often inadequate measures, and the paucity of comparative research. This chapter reviews the emerging research on these nonstandard work arrangements. The review emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of contributions to this field, including research by a variety of sociologists, economists, and psychologists. It also focuses on cross-national research, which is needed to investigate how macroeconomic, political, and institutional factors affect the nature of employment relations. Areas for future research are suggested.

The aim of this review was to address the inconsistency in previous research, on the effect of non-standard employments on subjective well-being, with the use of metaanalysis. This was done by examining the standardised mean difference in global subjective well-being, or whole life well-being, between employees in non-standard employment and permanent employment. The scientific databases Web of Science, Scopus and EBSCOhost were systematically searched for studies on the connection between non-standard employment and subjective well-being. From the initial 1307 results of the systematic literature search, we identified 33 relevant primary studies published since 2004 in a variety of countries throughout the world. Meta-analytic results from a total of 55 independent effect sizes (N = 476 454) suggest that employees in non-standard employment experience lower global subjective well-being (d = -0.05) compared to employees in permanent employment. Moderator analyses indicate that if primary studies control for subjective job insecurity or employability, it will remove the statistically significant effect of global subjective wellbeing between employees in nonstandard employment and permanent, resulting in d = -0.05 to d = 0.01 and d = 0.01, respectively. We can therefore conclude that non-standard employments do have a statistical significant small negative effect on global subjective well-being. However, evidence suggest that the negative effect is more due to the subjective perception of job insecurity and employability rather than the objective condition of non-standard employment.

Evidence indicated that shift work is a contributing factor to risk of obesity and leads to cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), but few researches have examined the moderating effects of job demand and contingent work schedule on overweight and obesity. Thus, we assessed the modification effect of contingent work schedules and job demand on overweight and obesity among Taiwan's civil servants. Multistage stratified random cluster sampling was used based on a proportional probabilistic sampling (PPS) in a national survey for civil servants. A total of 20,046 participants from 647 registered governmental institutions were enrolled and anonymously and voluntarily filled out web-based questionnaires. Compared to fixed work schedule, odd ratios (ORs) of obesity and overweight were 1.63 and 1.78 times in contingent work schedule, respectively. In addition, the modification effects of contingent work schedule and high job demand on overweight and obesity with Rothman's synergy index were 2.43 and 2.56, respectively. Using a hierarchical regression model adjusted for covariates, both high job demand and contingent work schedule were interactively associated with overweight and obesity compared to low job demand and fixed work schedule. Since precarious schedules affect employee's obesity through work-related stress and unhealthy behaviors, further research is needed to determine whether interventions aimed at modification of work schedule may be useful in combating obesity.