Grenzüberschreitende Arbeitnehmerüberlassung. Die Konstitutierung von Märkten und transnationaler Regulierung im interregionalen Vergleich

• Applicant: Professorin Karen A. Shire, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2012 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 227795227

The proposed research examines the creation of cross-border labor markets for temporary agency work. The focus is on the role of private labor market intermediaries and the emerging governance of cross-border temporary placements in two world regions – the European Union and East Asia. Theoretically the research draws together theories of transnational organizations and the economic sociology of market-making. Both perspectives foreground the role of actors and focus on the negotiated order of institution-building to regulate labor markets. The leading research questions concern how and why markets for temporary labor are taking on transnational dimensions, and whether these markets can and will be governed by transnational institutions, or remain outside the scope of current international and national regulations of temporary agency work. In order to generalize beyond the EU as the typical unit of reference for many transnationalization studies, the research design is inter-regionally comparative, building on the language-based regional competence of the research team in East Asian studies. Private firm organizations (transnational temporary staffing firms) and interest communities (employer and labor representatives) form the units of analysis, while the interplay of national and (supranational) regional activities constitute the levels of analysis in the proposed research design. The state of research on the transnationalization of temporary staffing indicates that in both Europe and East Asia the integration of transformation countries into regional economies has intensified the extension of agency placements across national borders: in East Asia, to and from China, and in Europe, from Hungary, the Czech Republic and especially Poland. A number of variations and some surprising similarities between Europe and East Asia are hypothesized. The first addresses regional differences in the transnationalization of the staffing industry, with European global players developing a transnational identity, while transnationalization in East Asia has developed through the diffusion of the Japanese model of staffing to other East Asian contexts. A second regional difference involves the national embeddedness of labor, which is particularly strong in Europe, and may be hindering the emergence of regulations for cross-border staffing placements. The weaker role of organized labor in representing temporary agency workers in East Asia has largely excluded labor from intra-regional labor market-making, but the emergence of social movement type labor unions may be creating a stronger transnational community for labor representation in East Asia in its place. Finally, given signs of regulatory fragmentation in the EU, new governance forms may be the most effective form of regulating cross-border labor markets in both regional contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants