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This thesis explores professional work and professional career development from the perspective of those working non-standard hours. It considers the various forms of non-standard working practices current within the professional labour market and examines how the working identities of professionals are constructed and how non-standard working practices impact on a professional's plans for their career development. Drawing on empirical research, involving questionnaire surveys of, and face to face interviews with, accountants and architects in the UK, the thesis details the strategies adopted by a growing number of professionals in order to meet their home and work commitments. The thesis offers a further consideration of theories of non-standard working within the professions, examining theories of time deviance within the professional labour market. It develops and expands existing theories of professional development by exploring the development of the professional project from within professions as well as between professional groups. The study concludes from its exploration of data about professionals at different stages of their careers, that the 'traditional' notion, that a professional career is necessarily full time, involving long hours and high workplace visibility, is changing. The thesis argues that a better understanding of professional identity needs to be developed, taking into account the multi-faceted nature of contemporary working lives. It concludes that, until within the professions, recognition is given, to changing working practices, those working non-standard hours will continue both to be undervalued and to have their professional identities challenged and undermined.

This thesis investigates the quality of atypical employment to reveal whether support for the generation of temporary and part-time jobs is an effective policy for labour market renewal or whether it leads to labour market segmentation. This issue is investigated through analyses of the quality of atypical employment, with the following components of atypical work investigated: working-conditions, wages, poverty risk, exposure to unemployment and/or labour market drop out, as well as the extent to which atypical employment leads to the standard employment contract, termed its 'bridging function'. Strong and consistent variation in the quality of atypical work (relative to standard contract employment) combined with evidence of a weak bridging function is taken as an indicator of labour market marginalisation for these workers. Evidence of labour market marginalisation would suggest that non-standard contracts foster market segmentation. A key component of the analyses asserts that institutional context will structure atypical worker outcome with comparative analysis run on three countries to test this hypothesis. The countries chosen for the analysis varied in their combination of institutions thought to structure labour market outcome. The institutions thought to structure labour market outcome were classified into two groups, or axes, thought to structure labour markets in a different manner. The first group of institutions were thought to influence the relative openness or flexibility of markets, while the second was thought to influence the integration of labour market outsiders. Denmark is presented as a flexibly integrative labour market, the French market is presented as rigidly integrative and the United Kingdom is labelled flexibly non-integrative. The empirical analyses revealed strong and consistent variation in the quality of atypical work (relative to standard contract employment) and while the evidence suggests that temporary employment does provide a bridging function, the same was not true of part- time employment. This led us to conclude that policies which have sought to flexibilise the labour market through the generation of temporary and/or part-time employment are likely to contribute to market segmentation. Nonetheless we established important differences between countries which provided insights into the labour market conditions which were the most supportive of atypical worker inclusion.