Leveraging Limits for Contract Professionals

Abstract

How do contract professionals seek to control their working time? Here, the authors identify boundary work strategies through which contractors—both shift workers and project workers—maintain distinctions from employees with standard jobs. Drawing from interviews with contractors in three occupations, the authors identify sources of leverage for control of working time in payment systems, outsider status, and occupational networks. These structures allow contractors to reinforce boundaries between contract and standard employment and resist the overtime and overwork associated with standard jobs. Boundary work between contingent workers and employees may therefore generate inequalities of control, with implications for workers, managers, and organizations.