The Work Environment in Fixed-Term Jobs: Are Poor Psychosocial Conditions Inevitable?

The work environment in fixed-term jobs: are poor psychosocial conditions inevitable? Following the transformation of the working environment, researchers attempt-ing to conceptualize the world of work have been forced to adopt new approaches. At least in industrialized Western societies, the crisis of mass-production, the call for flexibility, the de-skilling of labour, the new contradic-tions of the labour process, and even discussions about the approaching end of wage labour, are concepts that have preoccupied work sociologists since the 1970s. Temporary employment, however, tends to have fallen outside the focus of these discussions. As Campbell and Burgess (2001: 172) point out, in the recent past there was a time in which most forms of temporary employment were dismissed ‘as historical relics ’ on the path to a modern and rationalized system of working life. The path has, however, led in just the opposite direction: the clear increase in temporary employment has raised its status on the research agenda. Currently, temporary employment is a concept which embraces many of the core contents of the ‘modern classic ’ themes concerning the sociology of work. The concept is a combination of old and new; it is new if we look at the titles and keywords of recent publications, old if we direct attention to the subject matter, or, as summarized by Kalleberg et al. (2000: 256) in their recent analysis of atypical forms of work, ‘[a] recurring theme in the sociology and 193 Debates and Controversies