Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy.

Mosco, Vincent

Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004)

THIS BOOK fills an important gap by providing one of the first major research ethnographies of the high-tech sector, a major component of the knowledge economy. To date, serious social science research on the subject has concentrated on documenting or questioning the existence of such an economy. This has primarily involved charting the growth of the data and information components of the economy and documenting occupational shifts from primary (agriculture and extraction) and secondary (manufacturing) sectors to services (tertiary) and information (quaternary) sectors. Beginning with the work of Daniel Bell, analysis turned to the social, political, and cultural significance of these changes and with the critical work of scholars like Harry Braverman and Herbert Schiller, the debate was on.

Amid all the discussion of skills and power, there was very little work that examined the knowledge economy, and specifically the high-tech sector, from the perspective of the participants themselves. Specifically, the authors set out to provide what they call "an empathetic and rich description of the perspectives and practices of the people about whose lives social scientists made claims." (23) They find dominant institutional and free agent perspectives wanting because they neglect the voices of the people involved. The former, drawing on institutional history and social structural analysis, raised fears about the rise of a contingent workforce in this sector, cut adrift from the hard fought social contract that shaped labour and social relations in the period when manufacturing was dominant. The free agent perspective draws on neoclassical economics and provided the intellectual grounding for the rosy glow surrounding the dot-com boom.

Questioning these leading perspectives or metatheories, the authors try to make sense of what the range of actors in the industry have to say. They therefore aim to eschew general conclusions until the end of the book when they try to make sense of the fieldwork. Specifically, they carried out field work from 1997 to 1999 in staffing agencies which place technical contractors in high-tech jobs, interviewed 71 contractors across a range of high-tech fields, and finally carried out fieldwork at the firms that hire these contractors from the staffing agencies. Although Barley and Kunda generally stick to their bottom-up approach, the book is not without a framework, however lightly applied. Opening with Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage", they make use of a dramaturgical perspective that focuses on actors, roles, performances, and identities. This approach leads them to focus on the diversity of motives and dramas that take place in various settings. Rather than seeing a firm as a singular force with a unitary purpose, as they claim most social scientists do, the authors concentrate on the tensions that, for example, distinguish a company's senior executives who take the long view and its hiring managers who face "the everyday tribulations of managing technical projects". Similarly, the authors deconstruct the world of the staffing agency, distinguishing between the pressures to serve clients' needs, provide good placement service to contractors, and meet their own performance goals.

The book is particularly strong in examining the deal-making process that brings clients, contractors, and staffing agencies together. This is primarily because it recognizes that the needs and interests of all three are constantly changing, particularly since they operate in a volatile environment. As a result, standard definitions of roles and functions, and assessments of what constitute standard qualifications, compensation, work routines, and overall expectations are always up for grabs. As a result, all three are constantly renegotiating relationships and redefining information. It is interesting to observe that at the heart of the knowledge economy, so little is certain and so much is left to the interpersonal dynamics of power plays and social construction. In essence, as they describe it, making deals amounted to a three-way market dynamic in which whoever was best able to control flows of information and definitions of key terms--contractors, staffing agencies, or clients--would emerge with the best deal.

After addressing the relationships among these three key participants, the authors hone in on the contractors and their lives on the job. As they see it, itinerant high-tech workers move between seeing themselves and being seen as commodities and as experts, and between the emotions of respect and resentment. In this regard, they are no different from other workers but with much less explicit attachment to a particular employer or task.

The final part of this four-part book shifts from a thick description of relationships and reporting on interviews with informants to mapping the meaning of this form of work. Specifically, they describe three forms of capital that define the opportunities and struggles of the contractor world. Contract work is about the development of temporal capital or the ability to manage, control, enjoy, and trade time. Some of this takes place in social space--what do you do with time, including down time? But it also takes place in rhetorical space. How do you explain the exigencies of time, the multi-faceted "flexibility," for example, to yourself and to others? Contract work is also about human capital, including how to deal with the need to avoid obsolescence through the discipline of continuous training and the luck of picking the right systems and technologies to emphasize. However attentive to developing new skills, contractors concentrating on learning systems and skills that fail to succeed in the marketplace will have wasted their human capital. Finally, contractors live in a world of social capital in which they must make choices about what social networks to join and which to leave and how to cultivate skills in both activities. The book concludes by examining the role of the contractor in the knowledge economy and ventures social policy suggestions in such areas as certifying skills and providing health benefits.

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies is a useful addition to the literature on working in a knowledge economy. It succeeds in providing the thick description that this field has needed for some time. However, it is not without its limitations. Written during the peak of the dot-com boom, the book is very much the creature of its time. With plentiful jobs, contractors could choose from many employers, enabling them to strike rich deals. The world of complex three-way market dynamics has changed significantly in the ensuing years of rapid decline in the industry. Barley and Kunda spend some time discussing the networks and organizations of this workforce but have nothing to say about the trade unions, like the Communications Workers of America, which have spun off organizations like WashTech and Alliance@IBM that have played an important role in organizing and providing information, benefit packages, and lobbying clout for all kinds of high-tech workers, including the contractors described in the book. This book goes a long way to understanding the nature of contracting work among skilled professionals in times of plenty. But the world of scarce jobs, outsourcing, and fights over immigrant visas is a very different one indeed.

Vincent Mosco

Queen's University