Abstract

Liisa Lähteenmäki

Dep. Of Sociology

University of Turku

Temporary agency work and the making-up of a new worker

The main interest of my study is the way the labour market actors’ discursive strategies and disciplining technologies are shaping and moulding the identities of the workers. The research is two-fold: Firstly it looks at the technologies and discourses of power: the law, the politics and the actors in the processes of defining the rules of the labour market. Secondly it grapples these changes as a process of moral regulation. In my presentation I’ll explore the concept of moral regulation and its usefulness in theorizing about the growth of the temporary agency work and its consequences for the workers. Temporary agency work offers both challenges and possibilities to employees and employers alike. From the employee’s point of view, temporary agency work demands engagement without promises to reciprocity. This in turn requires a certain attitude and ethos from the workers, which is often both made clear and concealed by the temporary work agencies.

Corrigan and Sayer define the moral regulation in their historical sociology of English State formation (1985, 4) as follows: “[Moral regulation is]…a project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for granted, in a word obvious, what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order”.

The paper presents and problematizes the ways in which moral regulation has been used in different studies, including ones that explore the working life. I am especially interested in how moral regulation is identified and used in distinct studies and how these ways might be useful in my own research. I try to assess the explanatory power of moral regulation while trying to understand and interpret the qualifications and spirit desired by the temporary work agencies. Also I am pondering whether the concept needs some theoretical back-up from other theories.