Untitled - socium.ge

Labor in the network society 183At the operational level, every customer and product has a focused team of peoplewho essentially own that customer’s product and own that service to that customerthrough the manufacturing process. If they feel that they need to do something, theyhave all the empowerment and all the authority for that particular customer. Themanagers manage between the customer-focus teams and different teams themselves,to make sure everything fits. There is no person at the operation saying,“You will do this. You will do that.” (Suzik, 1999)Another example of the growth in mediated employment relations lies in theway in which staffing services firms have increasingly entered into long-termcontracts with their client firms, in which they are actually located onsite toprovide a range of value-added management, accounting, and humanresources services along with the provision of temporary personnel. Neuwirth(2004) describes this phenomenon as “institutional internalization,” recognizingthat these “external” organizations have become central actors “internal”to the firm, fundamentally shaping employment relations not only for theirown employees, but, by shaping both explicit and implicit norms of employment,also affecting the employment relationship for permanent employees aswell.Thus, in sum, employment relationships have become increasingly tenuousand volatile, and mediated by a range of institutions external to firms themselves.These employment relations reflect the ways in which firms are tryingto achieve greater flexibility in their relationships with workers, but it isimportant to keep in mind that it is primarily the work activities themselves,not employment relationships, that contribute to long-term economic competitiveness.Firms introduce flexible employment relations, in many cases, in aneffort to promote flexible work, but firms also promote flexible employmentpractices in order to cut costs, shift economic risk, and improve labor controlmechanisms. Such practices may have negative impacts on working conditionsand compensation for employees, while doing little to promote long-termcompetitiveness in the economy. The rise in both flexible work and flexibleemployment, however, has led both workers and employers to turn to a varietyof third-party intermediaries to help them navigate through these complexlabor market dynamics.LABOR MARKETS AND INTERMEDIARIESLabor market intermediaries broker the relationship between workers andemployers. Labor market intermediaries of all types provide services to bothemployers and to workers, related to both employment relations and to workpractices. The most common service that intermediaries provide is to connectpeople to new employment opportunities and to help employers to find workers.