Juliet F. Brudney:
"An informative, insightful, and multidimensioned view."
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University:
"This book does a simply masterful job of helping us understand contingent work arrangements—numbers, consequences, and public policy concerns. In an area plagued by rhetoric and ideology, it offers facts and analysis, a dose of reality that grounds this important issue."
Anne Brophy, Georgia State University:
"A quick and accessible read for policymakers and students alike. Its challenge to contemporary liberal thinking about poor women's work makes it a provokative text for courses in public welfare policy, women's labor history, and recent feminism, as well as a needed reminder to activists for social justice."
Barbara Reskin, Harvard University:
"Barker and Christensen bring together an outstanding collection of essays on the transformation of American employment. This interdisciplinary volume provides the theoretical, historical, and legal contexts for understanding the reemergence of contingent work, and offers empirical research on its extent and its consequences for workers and their families. This volume will be useful for scholars and students interested in work in America; it is a must for policymakers, unions, and personnel specialists."
Arne Kalleberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
"This multidisciplinary collection of first-rate papers—dealing with contingent workers, flexible workplaces, and their institutional contexts—will be an indispensable resource for anyone concerned with the changing nature of employment relations as we begin the twenty-first century."
"This volume... offers a many-faceted look at the work and the workers at the lower end of the contingent work continuum.... Readers of this volume will gain increased appreciation for how most contingent employment arrangements benefit the firms much more than the contingent workers they employ in usually undesirable jobs. This informative book examines an important labor market phenomenon and will appeal to all students of the labor market regardless of discipline."
Ted Baker:
"Barker and Christensen's well-organized, interesting and useful book takes us on a tour of the downside of changing employment relations. This book is a compelling introduction to the human issues of the downside of contingent employment. It is written at a level that should be accessible and interesting to most undergraduate students."
Judith Stein:
"Interesting and diverse."
"The authors argue that growing numbers of contingent workers have permanently altered labor relations and the so-called employment contract, with employers coming to regard workers as 'disposable' and employees abandoning notions of organizational loyalty."
Arlie Hochschild, University of California, Berkeley:
"Temping, independent contracting, employee leasing, part-time jobs without job security or medical benefits—is this the new American workplace? If so, what does that mean about the social worlds we build at home and at work? This volume gathers some of the best and latest thinking on an issue critical to us all."
