Since the early 1990s the temporary staffing industry experienced rapid growth in many areas of Europe, although the extent and rate of this growth varied across the continent. The existing literature on labour market intermediaries and the temporary staffing industry fail to adequately address the importance of national institutional arrangements. This thesis addresses the research lacuna by providing a comparative study of temporary staffing industries in three different political-economic contexts: the United Kingdom, Germany and the Czech Republic. This contributes to a greater understanding of the role of the temporary staffing industry in each country, how it is structured, and the key institutions involved. These three case studies profile the size and characteristics of each temporary staffing industry but also discuss the key institutions present in each case, and the relationships which drive or restrict its change. This thesis includes analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data to provide a detailed picture of each national temporary staffing industry. The research reveals three nationally distinctive formations of the temporary staffing industry within the context of the European Union. While the UK has the largest temporary staffing industry in Europe, it remains highly fragmented. With an established presence in many sectors of the labour market the industry seeks to increase its presence in professional occupations, and its collaboration with public employment services. While the temporary staffing industry in Germany has experienced significant growth since 2003, resistance remains from the trade unions against the use of temporary agency work, and the state remains greatly involved in determining working conditions. The presence of collective bargaining between the trade unions and trade associations remains a key relationship in this system. The temporary staffing industry in the Czech Republic is still in the early stages of growth and as such regulations are still being formulated, and agencies are still establishing branch networks in an environment where a large number of informal agencies are already present. While temporary staffing agencies and trade associations remain active in pursuing growth for the temporary staffing industry, the extent to which these changes took place varied between countries. This thesis argues the form of each national temporary staffing industry is a reflection of the complex historical, and contemporary, national institutional arrangements, and as such, its form and role varies.

Migrant workers have long constituted a fundamental part of the hospitality sector in the UK. Taking up jobs such as housekeeping, kitchen portering and plate waiting, these workers have formed an essential yet undervalued role in the service economy. Typically insecure and low paid; such work is normally secured through a third party agency presenting a complex employment relationship between the worker, agency and organisational setting. It is this relationship that forms the focus of this PhD research, which aims to understand the daily experiences of migrant workers focusing on the dynamic relationship between power, discourse, subjectivity and work processes and the performing of identities in specific socio-cultural settings. The study draws on data gathered from a twelve-month full-participant ethnography in a hospitality employment agency to provide insights into the ways through which agencies seek to control workers remotely to craft migrant agency workers as compliant subjects. The research considers how contracting organisations use both regulatory and disciplinary practices to construct migrant agency as organisational non-members in order to sustain transactional impersonal relationships with them. Finally, the study explores the ways in which migrant agency workers negotiate their identities, drawing on a range of national, cultural, religious and moralistic discourses to craft acceptable versions of the self. The study suggests that the subject positions crafted from the discourses of the employment agency, contracting organisations as well as migrant workers own identity discourses often work in tandem to sustain and reproduce agency work and agency workers. This thesis offers three contributions which provide greater insights to the current understandings of identities, migrant labour and temporary employment. Firstly through taking an identities lens, the thesis has provided new insights into the control and regulation of migrant agency workers. Secondly, this thesis contributes to a more nuanced depiction of migrant agency workers’ identity work. Thirdly, the thesis sheds new light on how experiences of stigma and liminality are constituted and contested at the level of identity.

This thesis looks at the relationship between labour migration and socio-economic well-being of the rural households in the communities in Northeastern Thailand, and provides one of the few detailed case studies of the costs and benefits of labour mobility within Southeast Asian labour market system. This research aims to deepen our understanding of the implications of labour migration at micro-level. More specifically, the study aims to examine 'how much such labour migration and remittances do support the rural households and their family members left-behind?' by seeking a holistic assessment based on well-being perspectives with mixed-methods approach. To appreciate this question, we must first understand that there has been rapid economic development and change in Thailand over the past decades, and Thailand is now a leading economy in Southeast Asia that is evolving into a global and regional migration hub for outgoing, incoming, and transiting migrants. The rural communities in Northeastern Thailand, however, have experienced economic and environmental marginality, and as a result, have developed an institutionalised and self-sustaining migration culture after the Vietnam War in 1975. Yet existing research does not tell us much about what are the consequences of the labour migration on well-being for the households in this area. The research explores associations between remittance behaviours and gender difference using sex-disaggregated data, measures dimensions of poverty alleviating effects on the three Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty indices, and assesses economic well-being of the rural households (on the basis of differing participation in labour migration) and non-economic well-being of the family left-behind. On the evidence of this research with various levels of significance in regression analyses, international labour migration and remittances have several implications on rural households in Northeastern Thailand. Firstly, the results show that women and migrants from poorer households behave more altruistically, while men and migrants from richer households behave more contractually. These heterogeneities in remittance behaviours also linked to the asset accumulation patterns for migrants' own future well-being and related to inheritance culture of the rural Thais. Secondly, labour migration is a rational economic strategy of rural households to combat poverty and to improve economic well-being. The analysis reveals clearly that the entire income gap and most of the gap in economic well-being between households with and without migrants can be accounted by availability of remittances. However, the remittances also increase economic inequality (i.e. disparities in well-being) among households in the communities as well-known. Finally, the absence of adult children (for the elderly) or parents (for children) because of international labour migration does not create major disruptions of the non-economic well-being of the family members. The possibilities for frequent correspondence, returns, and the economic benefits of migration contribute to cushion the negative impacts of migration. Most of all, the extended family system plays a decisive role in functioning as a support mechanism.

Internal migration has played a major role in the transformation of post-reform China. To explore how migrants have experienced change I consider three aspects of the lives of a particular group of migrants working in a restaurant in Shanghai: work experiences, intimate relationships with partners and families, and leisure time. I aim to highlight both men and women’s experiences in order to analyse the significance of gender alongside social class and hukou status as markers of social division in China. Based on more than seven months of participant observation and interviews, mainly with migrant workers, between 2011 and 2014, my thesis aims to illuminate how this shift in location has affected their lives: how gender operated in their daily lives; how their experiences were gendered; and how agency was exercised, how subjectivity was expressed. In examining these different dimensions I consider how these migrants dealt with a range of tensions and hierarchies, such as the denigration they encountered from customers; the inconsistency between job hierarchy and gender hierarchy; how they reinterpreted filial piety; and how their income and time-constrained leisure formed part of their coping strategies in gender-differentiated ways. Primary findings are that these migrant workers experienced change in complex and contradictory ways. Some male workers in the lowest-level jobs, whose work primarily depended on physical labour, were disadvantaged in this gendered, feminised and hierarchical workplace. Their financial disadvantage made it difficult for them to find wives and to conform to the image of primary breadwinner post-marriage. However, men despite their disadvantaged position in the work place and in partner finding still exercised their male privilege in everyday gender relations and likewise the women still experienced sexual harassment. In comparison, the female migrant workers benefited in some ways by moving away from the tedium of rural lives and by becoming financially independent wage labour, but at the same time they still performed their filial obligation of financially supporting their natal families. These workers negotiated their changed circumstances in gendered ways. I argue that their subjectivities were influenced by a range of factors, including consumer culture and the patriarchal system, which was mediated through filial piety.

We introduce signals to search models of two-sided matching markets and explore the implications for efficiency. In a labour market model in which firms can advertise wages and workers can choose effort, we find that advertisements can help overcome the Diamond paradox. Advertisements fix workers' beliefs, so that workers will react if firms renege on advertisements. Firms then prefer to advertise truthfully. Next, we consider a market with two-sided heterogeneity in which types are only privately observable. We identify a simple condition on the match output function for agents to signal their types truthfully and for the matching to exhibit positive assortative matching despite search frictions. While our theoretical work implies that the efficiency of matching increases as information technology spreads, empirical matching functions typically suggest that it declines. By estimating more general matching functions, we show that the result of declining efficiency can partly be attributed to omitted variable bias.

This thesis examined to what extent a particular class of highly mobile professionals has internalized the contemporary discourse of corporate global nomadism, proposed by the researcher as an example of the kind of corporate discourses that are emerging to encompass the ideology of neoliberalism and which are inscribed in a particular genre of popular managerial and globalization literature through prescription of ideal attitudes and forms of behaviour. The researcher selected a representative sample of corporate texts that comprises books by management gurus and popular writers on globalization and corporate websites by consultancy firms, and collected personal narratives or life stories from a sample of professionals who in the pursuit of work have relocated internationally more than once. These texts were cross-analysed to identify how the discourse of corporate global nomadism is manifested, whether in similar or contradictory ways. This analysis combined the methodological framework of critical discourse analysis with narrative analysis, with a particular emphasis on deconstruction and intertextuality. A characteristic feature of this study is the use of online communication technologies to encompass research participants who are geographically dispersed. The principal original contribution to knowledge of this dissertation is the relationship made between the contemporary discourse of corporate global nomadism and the ideology of neoliberalism. The methodologies and methods used in the elaboration of this research are also important contributions. The most prominent finding of this study is that the attitudes of the research participants towards their own mobility are contradictory as their self-representation from the standpoints of the context of work and the private sphere are discursively confronted. This dissonance in the narratives represents struggles in the life of the research participants as they attempt to meet corporate demands for continuous global mobility. The findings of this study show that despite the persuasive power of certain corporate discourses they are not passively assumed by individuals, meaning that the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism as a dominant ideology underlying modern organizations is not absolute, because individuals consciously or subconsciously resist and challenge the messages it conveys.

The significance of flows of temporary, skilled labour migrants under conditions of globalization is widely acknowledged. Using a case study of elite cricket professionals moving from the UK to Australia for a maximum duration of 6 months, out and return migration flows and processes are examined. In doing so, this thesis exposes migration motives, notably in relation to career progression and personal development, and the processes and regulations that control temporary sojourns. Furthermore, the discussion reveals important social, cultural, economic and familial impacts of undertaking temporary, skilled, international migration. Using this case study of a sport-led migration, a largely under-researched occupational sector in migration studies, a number of theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions are provided, which advance knowledge of skilled, international migration. First, utilising Bourdieu's (1986) notions of capital as an analytical framework, the comparative importance of migration motives are emphasised. Second, it is shown that migration can be viewed as a normalised aspect of a skilled worker's career trajectory, and that desired outcomes can be achieved during increasingly temporary stays overseas. Third, a three phase model of the migration flow is adopted to enable the development of professionalization and migration within cricket to be examined. It is asserted that cricket, as a professional sport, has changed under conditions of globalization, alongside smaller scale developments initiated by both employers and intermediaries, and the migrant cricketers. It is concluded that these connections will have salience for the other skilled occupations identified in Salt's (1997) typology of highly-skilled migrants.

Social connections represent an important determinant of economic agents’ behaviour. The three chapters of this thesis empirically analyse the effect of different types of networks on several economic outcomes. The first chapter analyses the role played by co-worker networks on immigrants’ employment outcomes. It investigates how immigrants’ job search outcomes are affected by the labour market outcomes of co-workers from the same country of origin. Using matched employer-employee micro data from Italy and an instrumental variables approach, I show that an increase in the employment prospects of socially connected workers improves immigrants’ job search outcomes. The paper also sheds light on the different mechanisms generating the social effect and it highlights the role of migrant networks in explaining immigrant segregation. Chapter 2 employs a unique dataset on articles, authors and editors of the top four economics journals over the period 2000-2006 to investigate the role of social ties in the publication process. Connections between editors and authors are identified based on their academic histories. Regression results show that the existence of a social tie with an editor positively affects publication outcomes of connected scholars. The analysis of citations shows that connected articles receive on average a higher number of citations than non-connected ones. The final chapter focuses on the impact of female managers on female workers’ employment outcomes. Exploiting changes in the share of female managers induced by firms’ takeovers, I find no statistically significant effect of an increase in the presence of female managers on employment outcomes of female workers. However there is an interesting negative effect on wage inequality within the acquiring firm, which may matter for both equity and efficiency reasons.

This study examines how institutional actors interpret, influence and respond to skills availability in the labour market for graduates. It researches and draws lessons from the Maltese experience of managing graduate employability over three decades, focusing on the three fastest-growing economic sectors, namely, Accountancy, Pharmachem and ICT, each of which is the subject of a case study. The study investigates the interaction of governments, firms, higher education institutions and professional associations in identifying skills shortages and gaps, as well as in devising policy frameworks and skills regimes at national, sectoral and corporate levels. Drawing upon theories of employability and employee skills, first, there is development of an analytical framework to examine how these institutional actors affect the labour market, which informs the analysis of the three case studies. The qualitative research involved an interpretative analysis of key policy documents related to graduate employability and seventy in-depth interviews with interlocutors positioned in strategic policy making, senior management, academic, expert and professional leadership roles within government, regulators, major corporations, higher education institutions, training providers and professional associations. The data was thematically analysed. Twelve key themes emerged from the in-depth interviews, which included the following: use of different language; the meaning of employability; the value of credentials; the role of the University; perceptions; expectations; competitiveness; modes of training provision; labour mobility; placements and incentives; collaboration and skills gap. The institutional actors across the three focal sectors, namely, accountancy, pharmachem and ICT tended to emphasise some themes more than others, these having previously been identified in scholarly literature (Appendix 1). Both patterns and inconsistencies emerged from a comparison of the accountancy, pharmachem and ICT sectors. In so far as the labour market is concerned, the study revealed a lack of technical skills and major non-technical graduate skills gaps, specifically, in the aspects of communication, teamwork and problem-solving. A number of professional characteristics or behaviours were also identified as lacking with Accountancy, Pharmachem and ICT graduates, namely, attitude, confidence, drive, professional outlook, independent working, personality fit and a ‘can do’ approach. The study revealed the absence of permanent systemic connections between the formulation of national and sectoral economic strategies on the one hand, and higher education and training policies on the other. Consequently, state higher education institutions have been responding reactively to labour market needs, which could explain the endemic skills gap which the study found. The study concludes by discussing limitations and limits to this research as well as recommending policy initiatives and further research that could contribute to the science and practice of public policy in this field.

Depuis les années 1970, le salariat à temps partiel s’étend sur les marchés de l’emploi allemand et français. Le rôle joué par l’intermédiation publique dans ce phénomène constitue l’objet de cette thèse. Nous l’étudions de manière comparative par l’immersion ethnographique dans quatre agences, par une analyse quantitative portant sur 2000 offres stockées et par une enquête socio-historique sur les dispositifs d’indemnisation. Grâce à ce matériau, nous mettons au jour les transactions temporelles auxquelles sont exposés les chômeurs durant leur traitement institutionnel. Au sein des agences d’intermédiation, les heures recherchées par les chômeurs jouent le triple rôle d’outil de gestion, d’outil d’intermédiation et d’outil d’arbitrage marchand. Elles sont mobilisées, manipulées et négociées durant les entretiens en face-à-face auxquels sont convoqués les chômeurs. Au terme des interactions, de nombreux profils de recherche sont révisés, en abaissant le nombre d’heures d’emploi souhaitées. Ce rationnement du temps d’emploi est organisé autour de trois modes de régulation, inégalement présents sur les différents terrains : une régulation par l’indemnisation-chômage, une régulation par les pratiques professionnelles des conseillers et une régulation par les progiciels informatiques d’appariement. Le temps d’emploi souhaité par les chômeurs apparaît ainsi comme un objet d’action publique. À partir de nos résultats empiriques, nous montrons que les logiques sociales de la rencontre bureaucratique établissent un lien étroit entre les ressources mobilisables dans l’interaction et les positions envisageables sur le marché de l’emploi. De plus, cette thèse présente les guichets d’intermédiation comme un niveau de régulation de l’emploi à part entière. / Since the 1970s, part-time employment has grown in the German and French labour markets. The relation between public intermediation and part-time employment is the subject of this thesis. Our comparative analysis is based on ethnographic immersion in four agencies, a quantitative analysis of 2000 job offers stored in the agencies files and a socio-historical inquiry concerning the unemployment benefit systems. With these data, we expose the temporal transactions experienced by the unemployed during their institutional treatment. Within the agencies, the working hours sought by the unemployed represent a tool with three functions: managing the registered users, matching employers and jobseekers, and arbitrating the relation between capital and labour. These hours are mobilized, manipulated and negotiated during the compulsory interviews between caseworkers and unemployed. Thus, many research profiles are modified, in the sens of lowering the desired amount of employment hours. This rationing of hours is organized around three modes of regulation, always perceptible but inequally significant in the various agencies: benefits-oriented regulation, professional regulation and computerized regulation. The working hours the unemployed look for appear as an object of public action. Based on our empirical results, we show how the configuration of bureaucratic encounters establish a close relation between the social resources mobilized during the interaction and the position on the labour market. In addition, this thesis present the employment agencies as an autonomous level of employment regulation.