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Keywords Commitment, Contract labour, Employee relations, Change, Australia
Abstract This paper examines the notion of work commitment within the professional contractor workforce - a working relationship that typifies the growing number falling outside that of the traditional and ongoing employer/employee relationship. In particular, attention is given to the commitment-related implications associated with the contracting relationship where both an employing organisation and a contracting agency are involved as both have a vested interest in managing the contractor within this construct. A specific focus of this research is the ability of a contractor to hold dual commitment and to investigate the factors that influence the levels of commitment to each party. The limited nature of data available within Australia means this study is supplemented with the much larger body of data and research from the USA. Implications from the findings of this study for human resource management practices in both contracting agencies and host organisations as well as future research needs are discussed
Introduction
One of the most striking features of the changing world of work is the increasing number of workers falling outside of the traditional view of a worker as a male in a full-time, stable job of indefinite duration (Campbell and Burgess, 1993; Collins, 1990). While non-standard arrangements constitute the fastest growing workforce within the industrialised world, Australia stands out among OECD nations as second only to Spain in its use of such labour (ABS, 1998; Long, 1996). Surprisingly then, while the move to professional contract arrangements have been identified as a particularly significant area of growth within non-standard work (Belous, 1989; Block, 1993; Bridges, 1995; Hakim, 1994; Handy, 1989, 1996; Reich, 1992; Rifkin, 1995), Australia has virtually no data available on this workforce. The isolated and ad hoc nature of both Australian data and investigation lends itself to a comparative focus. In this case the wealth of US data and research on the professional contract workforce has been used to anchor and guide this research paper.
The privileged position of the professional within the changing world of work has been the subject of widely-cited monographs both within Australia and the USA, from the "knowledge workers" of Jones (1995) to the "symbolic analysts" of Reich (1992). Even the advent of redundancies among...