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Toward a sustainable career
perspective on contingent work:
a critical review and
a research agenda
Jana Retkowsky
Department of Management and Organization, School of Business and Economics,
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Sanne Nijs
Department of Human Resource Studies, Tilburg University,
Tilburg, The Netherlands, and
Jos Akkermans, Paul Jansen and Svetlana N. Khapova
Department of Management and Organization, School of Business and Economics,
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to provide a synthesis of the contingent work field and to advocate a
sustainable career perspective on contingent work.
Design/methodology/approach –Adopting a broader review approach allowed to synthesize the
contingent work literature across contingent work types (temporary agency work, gig work and freelance
work) and develop a sustainable career perspective on contingent work. The authors searched for empirical,
conceptual and review articles published from 2008 to December 2021. In total, the authors included 208
articles.
Findings –The authors advocate a sustainable career perspective that allows for organizing and synthesizing
the fragmented contingent work literature. Adopting a sustainable career perspective enables to study
contingent work from a dynamic perspective transcending one single organization.
Originality/value –The field is suffering from fragmentation and most importantly from an oversight of how
contingent work experiences play a role in a persons’career. This paper addresses this problem by adopting a
sustainable career perspective on contingent work.
Keywords Contingent work, Alternative work arrangements, Nonstandard work, Gig work, Temporary
work, Temporary agency work, Freelance work, Career, Sustainable career
Paper type Literature review
Introduction
Contingent work (i.e. workers who have short-term contracts with organizations; Katz and
Krueger, 2019) is a defining characteristic of today’s labor markets. To illustrate, in
Europe in 2020, 10.5% of workers were contingent (Eurostat, 2021). Similarly, 10% of all
workers in the United States are contingent workers (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020).
Sustainable
career perspec-
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gent work
© Jana Retkowsky, Sanne Nijs, Jos Akkermans, Paul Jansen and Svetlana N. Khapova. Published by
Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for
both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication
and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/
legalcode
Funding: This research project is funded by Instituut Gak. Reference number is 2018-971 –
Psychologie van de flexibilisering.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1362-0436.htm
Received 30 June 2022
Revised 3 November 2022
Accepted 3 November 2022
Career Development International
Emerald Publishing Limited
1362-0436
DOI 10.1108/CDI-06-2022-0181
Moreover, the context in which contingent workers operate is changing (e.g. Ashford et al.,
2018). For example, labor market intermediaries (LMIs), which connect contingent
workers to work available in the labor market (Bonet et al., 2013), are a new, rapidly
emerging type of organization. The most familiar LMIs are online platforms in the gig
economy, such as Uber or Upwork, which are replacing the human resource (HR) function
in the world of work outside traditional employment relationships (Duggan et al.,2020;
Meijerink and Keegan, 2019). Taken together, these changes highlight that the contingent
work phenomenon has become a prevailing characteristic of today’slabormarkets(De
Cuyper et al., 2011) and has significantly increased in complexity with the introduction of
LMIs and the gig economy.
The societal prevalence and increasing complexity of the contingent work phenomenon
have coevolved with a proliferation of research on how contingent work influences people’s
work experiences. Several systematic reviews and conceptual papers have been published
examining, for example, the psychological impact of short-term contracts (Ashford et al.,
2007;Connelly and Gallagher, 2004;De Cuyper et al., 2008,2011;Feldman, 2006) and the
influence of technology on the contingent work experience (Jabagi et al., 2019;Meijerink and
Keegan, 2019). However, the steep increase in research has not led to a more integrated
understanding of the phenomenon because research is conducted in different research
streams that are barely connected (cf. Ashford et al., 2007;Burke and Van Stel, 2011). Since
those different streams all tend to use their own terminologies and concepts, we argue that the
increase in research has led to less rather than more conceptual clarity and consistency.
Hence, a synthesis of those research streams could further stimulate the development of
knowledge on contingent work and help researchers to position their work in current
(fragmented) debates in the literature.
The circulation of different terms in the literature—typically coined within different
disciplines—to denote contingent work illustrates the fragmentation of the literature. For
example, nonstandard work (i.e. sociology), atypical work (i.e. OB) and alternative work
arrangements (i.e. OB and HRM) are used interchangeably as general denotations for
contingent work (Kalleberg, 2000;Selenko et al., 2018). Contrary to these more generic terms,
different terms are used for contingent work in specific work contexts. Cappelli and Keller’s
(2013) influential classification illustrates this, as it is “informed by and reflects the legal
distinction[s]”(Cappelli and Keller, 2013, p. 575). Drawing on Cappelli and Keller, as well as
Kuhn and Maleki (2017), researchers distinguish temporary workers, agency workers,
freelancers (also referred to as independent professionals, contractors, solopreneurs or self-
employed workers, gig workers, platform, or on-demand workers), on-call workers and
seasonal workers as distinct contingent worker types. Overall, there is considerable
conceptual complexity and inconsistency in the area of contingent work.
In this paper, we use contingent work as a generic term for flexible work as contingent
work is still the most commonly used term, particularly among organizational behavior (OB)
and human resource management (HRM) scholars (Connelly and Gallagher, 2004). However,
we acknowledge the consensus is continuously shifting in this rapidly advancing field. For
example, in their recent article, Caza et al. (2022) proposed using gig work, which is typically
characterized as online platform-mediated work, as a new umbrella term for contingent work.
Given that contingent work is still the most common umbrella term at the time of writing this
article, we use this term. In addition, we refer to gig work as a collection of activities involving
microtasks mediated by an online platform (see also Cropanzano et al., 2022).
Besides a lack of interdisciplinary connections and consistency, another noteworthy
observation is that most of the literature has focused on contingent workers’work experience
during their work at one organization (e.g. Allen, 2011;Guest et al., 2010). Given the increased
prevalence of LMIs that connect contingent workers to multiple organizations over time, the
dominant focus on studying one single organization is problematic. This focus has
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limitations because it ignores contingent workers’experiences across organizations and
between the phases of employment. Contingent workers operate ‘“in-between’spaces,
betwixt and between work roles, organizations and career paths”(Ashford et al., 2018, p. 25).
Therefore, we propose a career perspective that does justice to the complex reality of
contingent work. Arthur et al. (1989, p. 8) defined a career as “the unfolding sequence of a
person’s work experiences over time.”Hence, a career perspective enables a temporal,
personal and contextual understanding of their needs. In addition, practitioners and
policymakers increasingly discuss how to support contingent workers throughout their
careers in the new world of work (McKinsey Global Institute, 2016); thus, we must generate a
more thorough understanding of their careers.
To address this problem, we advocate a sustainable career perspective (De Vos et al., 2020)
that allows for synthesizing the contingent work literature. We use the sustainable career lens
to analyze and critically review the fragmented contingent work literature. Van der Heijden
and De Vos (2015) defined sustainable careers as “sequences of career experiences reflected
through a variety of patterns of continuity over time, thereby crossing several social spaces,
characterized by individual agency, herewith providing meaning to the individual”(p. 7).
De Vos et al. (2020) argue that three dimensions are central to analyzing career sustainability:
person,context and time. Applied to contingent work, the person dimension looks at
characteristics of the contingent worker (e.g. perceptions, agency) that influence the work
experience; the context dimension highlights the situational factors (e.g. organization, sector)
at play in the contingent worker’s work experience; and the time dimension highlights
changes over time (e.g. shocks, transitions) that shape contingent workers’career experiences
(cf. De Vos et al., 2020). These three dimensions actively interact with each other to shape
career sustainability, characterized by the indicators of happiness, health and productivity
across the lifespan. For example, specific competencies or behaviors may be more or less
effective in safeguarding one’s career sustainability in different organizations and countries
(i.e. context) and in various life and career stages (i.e. time).
In all, the main contribution of this article is therefore to propose a career perspective on
contingent work research based on a sustainable career perspective (De Vos et al., 2020), which is
well-suited to move the field forward. This lens enables us to organize the contingent work
literature and offer an integrative framework of contingent work by focusing on contingent
workers’career experiences (Baruch and Sullivan, 2022;De Cuyper et al., 2011) instead of
describing only experiences in one organization, based on the type of contingent work performed
(cf. Cappelli and Keller, 2013;Guest et al., 2010;Van den Tooren and de Jong, 2014). Therefore,
this career perspective presents an overview of patterns in contingent work research, as well as
identifies opportunities for future research on sustainable careers of contingent workers. This
helps both contingent work and career researchers to further theorize on the interplays between
person, context and time (Ancona et al., 2001) in contingent workers’careers as well as
developing practical implications for supporting contingent workers’career pathways.
Method
We deliberately chose a broader review approach that allowed us to critically review the
fragmented contingent work literature (Brawley, 2017). In particular, we searched for terms
referring to contingent work (e.g. contingent work, alternative work arrangements,
temporary work, flexible employment, gig work and nonstandard work). Next to adopting
these umbrella terms in our search strategy, we also searched for articles dealing with one
specific type of contingent worker such as freelancer, independent professional, independent
contractor, agency worker, on-call worker or gig worker. Specifically, based on the frequency
of publications on these topics until 2008 (see details about this year below), we identified the
following scholarly disciplines as the most relevant to our review: applied psychology
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tive on contin-
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(e.g. Journal of Organizational Behavior), management (e.g. Human Resource Management
Journal), sociology (e.g. Work, Employment and Society) and entrepreneurship (e.g. Small
Business Economics). Our inclusion criterion was that an article’s central theme should deal
with the experiences of contingent workers. In 2008, the last review article appeared that
extensively synthesized empirical studies across contingent workers and their attitudes and
behaviors (De Cuyper et al., 2008). To ensure we captured the relevant developments in this
fragmented field, we searched for empirical, conceptual and review articles published from
2008 to December 2021. In total, we included 208 articles. Although we are confident that our
search strategy resulted in articles that represent the fragmented field of contingent work, we
by no means claim to be exhaustive in the articles we include. The aim of our study is not to
systematically review the existing body of literature, but to critically review the patterns in
the literature and provide a career perspective that can help organize the fragmented
literature and guide future research endeavors. Full details about our 208 included articles
can be found in the online supplementary material.
Applying a sustainable career perspective to reorganize the contingent work
literature
We organize the contingent work literature based on the sustainable career framework
(De Vos et al., 2020). This framework is valuable for several reasons. First, the contingent
work literature is fragmented within and across multiple disciplines, which all tend to use
their own terminologies and concepts. This issue makes the comparability of these literatures
difficult, hence hindering the scholarly development in the field. Second, existing research on
contingent work has over-emphasized studying (cross-sectional) snapshots of contingent
work experiences, even though these experiences all occur as a part of these workers’career
paths. These two problems can be solved by adopting a sustainable career perspective to
analyze and organize the contingent work literature because it creates a common language
that allows scholars from different disciplines to share their insights with each other. For
example, psychologists have primarily studied individual experiences of contingent work,
whereas sociologists have prioritized how their work context makes them a precarious group.
Analyzed from a sustainable career perspective, this allows psychologists and sociologists to
study how the person and their context may interact to shape contingent workers’career
experiences. Second, temporal processes are inherent to a sustainable career perspective, thus
allowing scholars to analyze contingent work experiences across people’s working lives. Such
a perspective can provide more insight into the key antecedents, mechanisms and boundary
conditions impacting contingent workers’careers. In the next section, we organize the
literature along the three dimensions of the sustainable career framework: person, context
and time and detect patterns in the current body of literature on contingent work. Note that
when coding the articles, they could be coded into multiple dimensions. For example, if a
study included both individual and contextual factors, this article would be relevant for both
dimensions. See Figure 1 for an overview.
Person dimension: individual as an agent
The person dimension reflects the role of individual career actors as the primary agents
responsible for their career sustainability. Organizing the contingent work literature within
the person dimension, we recognize two different streams that have evolved separately: (1) a
well-established literature regarding personal motives to engage in contingent work and (2) a
nascent literature regarding contingent workers’career resources.
We found that a literature stream has evolved around motives to engage in contingent
work (cf. Bernhard-Oettel et al., 2008;Sobral et al., 2019). Important motives for engaging in
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contingent work –often referred to as push/pull factors –can be traced back to being
voluntary or involuntary in the flexible contract situation (Keith et al., 2019;Lopes and
Chambel, 2017;Sobral et al., 2019). Motives are complex due to several push (e.g. increased
autonomy regarding when and where to work, higher earnings) and pull (e.g. having no
choice, use it as a stepping stone to attain secure employment) factors (Sobral et al., 2019).
Studies show that when workers are pushed into contingent work, it leads to negative
outcomes, such as decreased job satisfaction and well-being (Lopes and Chambel, 2017).
These findings show that pushed contingent workers are at risk in the labor market.
The second literature stream focuses on career resources. The fact that contingent
workers need to maintain their workstream constantly because of their short-term work
relationships creates the need to develop resources to help them navigate their careers.
Specifically, career resources are factors that enable an individual to be resilient and in control
of their career (cf. Hirschi, 2012). For example, career competencies and career adaptability
are necessary career resources that constitute a contingent worker’s career potential. Career
competencies are knowledge, skills and abilities essential for career development (Akkermans
et al., 2013), and career adaptability is defined as a psychological resource to cope with
uncontrollable external events, such as transitions (Savickas and Porfeli, 2012). Several
studies on contingent work have, often implicitly, studied such career resources. For example,
social skills (Galais and Moser, 2018) and feedback-seeking behavior (Lapalme et al., 2017)
Figure 1.
Topical overview of
existing contingent
work research
organized according to
the sustainable career
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among agency workers were positively related to attaining permanent employment. Self-
profiling and career control among agency workers were positively related to informal
learning (Preenen et al., 2015). Furthermore, freelancers’networking behavior related
positively to career success (Jacobs et al., 2019;Van den Born and van Witteloostuijn, 2013).
Personal branding can also be a tool for freelancers to acquire future projects and nurture the
entrepreneurial self (Gandini, 2016;Sutherland et al., 2020;Vallas and Christin, 2018). In
addition, an entrepreneurial orientation helps gig workers experience meaningful work
(Nemkova et al., 2019). Finally, resilience, internal locus of control, emotional stability, self-
efficacy and capabilities such as cognitive flexibility and learning agility were introduced by
Ashford et al. (2018) and McKeown and Pichault (2020) as essential resources for gig workers
and freelancers.
Taken together, contingent work research at the individual level has predominately
focused on personal motives and, to a lesser extent, on contingent workers’career resources
(albeit implicitly). Such findings align with sustainable career thinking in the sense that
contingent workers’personal characteristics, such as motivation and career resources, are at
the core of their career sustainability. Yet, the finding that pushed contingent workers are in a
risk group shows that some careers of contingent workers are inherently at risk for featuring
long-term career unsustainability when workers lack career resources (Bal et al., 2020;Kost
et al., 2020).
Context dimension: structural factors in contingent workers’careers
In the career literature, several scholars have argued that context is essential for
understanding career experiences because careers do not evolve in a vacuum (e.g. Inkson
et al., 2012). Contingent workers are, by definition, in a volatile environment characterized by
the absence of a stable organizational membership over time (Caza et al., 2022)–making it
imperative for researchers to capture contextual insights into their careers. The context
dimension of the career sustainability paradigm highlights various contextual layers as
important structural factors in the work environment, such as the organizational, group,
private life, occupational sector and institutional levels (De Vos et al., 2020). Specifically, these
different contextual layers are essential because they are crucial elements that contribute to
distinct contingent worker career experiences.
One commonality for all contingent workers is that they operate in a context beyond
organizational boundaries (Spreitzer et al., 2017). Contingent workers either have two
employers simultaneously (e.g. agency workers and on-call workers), or they work with
multiple clients and platforms simultaneously (e.g. freelancers and gig workers). Thus, it is
crucial to look beyond organizational boundaries to investigate (1) how complex relations
encompassing multiple organizations and technological advancement supersede the
traditional organizational level and (2) how various levels, such as group, private life,
occupational sector and institutional, influence contingent workers’career experiences. Next,
we organize contingent work research according to the different layers of context discussed
in sustainable career research.
Synthesizing the contingent work literature at the organizational level, we recognize
several studies that have contributed to explaining unique organizational contextual factors
that influence contingent workers’career experiences. To illustrate the influence of multiple
organizations, we found studies focusing on agency workers that examined the triangular
relationship between client organization, agency organization and agency workers. For
instance, studies investigated HRM practice outcomes such as commitment, psychological
contract fulfillment, perceived organizational support, organizational citizenship behaviors
and counterproductive workplace behaviors by applying them to the triangular relationship
(Connelly et al., 2011;Galais and Moser, 2009;Giunchi et al., 2015). These studies found that
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both the client and agency organizations are critical contextual factors that influence agency
worker career experiences. Hence, contingent workers’careers are influenced by the multiple
work relations in which they are embedded.
We found additional studies regarding the influence of organizational contextual factors in
the literature on gig work. For example, several studies outline how organizational HRM
practices are perceived differently by gig workers, which, in turn, are likely to shape their work
experiences (Connellyet al., 2021;Jabagi et al., 2019;Meijerink and Keegan, 2019). Organizational
HRM practices are important in shaping the general “employment relationship”(Van De Voorde
et al.,2012). However, conceptualizing organizational HRM practices in work relationships that
include at least three parties –the gig worker, requesters/clients and the online platform
provider –is complex in the gig economy. For instance, performance systems are replaced by
online, platform-based client rating systems (Duggan et al., 2020;Meijerink and Keegan, 2019),
whereby ratings can be perceived differently depending on the design of the rating system.
While positive feedback via high ratings is likely to increase the perceived competence of a gig
worker, algorithmic punishments are likely to have adverse effects on the gig worker’s career
experiences (Jabagi et al., 2019;Nemkova et al.,2019).
Across much of the gig economy, algorithmic management is used to control workers. It
decreases gig workers’independence on platforms and constrains horizontal and vertical
transitions (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016;Wood et al., 2019). Such work unleashes the disruptive
role of technology in contingent work relations (Brawley and Pury, 2016). Workers are
managed on platforms via algorithms resulting in a reconfiguration of the traditional
employment relationship (Duggan et al., 2020;Kellogg et al., 2020). This reconfiguration of the
traditional employment relationship leads to a diffusion of responsibilities at the platforms
and clients regarding who is in charge to support gig workers’careers (Kost et al., 2020;
Rahman and Valentine, 2021). The lacking identification of an employer for gig workers
(Stewart and Stanford, 2017) shows the importance of applying a network view consisting of
the platforms, clients/customers and gig workers’themselves to understand career
development in the gig economy.
Although the organizational level has been studied extensively in the contingent work
area, research on the group-, private life-, occupational sector- and institutional levels is less
developed. Specifically, contingent work research has tried to understand contingent
workers’career experiences by directly integrating the team and private life dynamics (i.e. by
incorporating specific concepts on that level in study designs). Yet, the institutional and
occupational sector levels have received less scholarly attention or were merely indirectly
addressed (i.e. by not integrating explicit concepts on that level in study designs).
As a consequence of contingent workers’working beyond organizational boundaries,
dynamics on the group level can unfold in different ways. Contingent workers can be prone to
be excluded from their team by their current “employer”or client (McKeown and Pichault,
2020). For instance, contingent workers working in blended teams consisting of contingent
workers and traditional workers receive little advice and develop few friendship networks
within the team. Furthermore, they might be stigmatized (Boyce et al., 2007;Wilkin et al.,
2018). This indicates that contingent workers likely face unique group-related obstacles in
their career. In contrast with contingent workers working in teams, others working alone
have been referred to as micro-entrepreneurs. Specifically, gig workers primarily work alone
without any team (Friedman, 2014). Building connections, often facilitated through internet-
based communities, with peers who both engage in contingent work and work alone, can
create supportive environments which decrease anxiety and foster productivity and
creativity (Petriglieri et al., 2019;Schwartz, 2018). To illustrate, coworking spaces can
function as a modern social environment to meet like-minded people and foster social support
among contingent workers (Gerdenitsch et al., 2016). Further, Tassinari and Maccarrone
(2020) discuss active solidarity and the emergence of collective action among gig workers
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working on food delivery platforms. In addition, Gegenhuber et al. (2021) found a range of
voice mechanisms for gig workers on other platforms. These potential stigmatizations and
support systems show that group dynamics can lead to upward and downward cycles in
contingent workers’careers.
Organizing the studies on the private life level, we note that this level of analysis is crucial to
understand the career experi ences of contingent workers because of spillover effects between the
professional and non-professional spheres (De Hauw and Greenhaus, 2015). Contingent workers
tend to struggle with work and non-work boundaries because they often work irregular hours
(Gold and Mustafa, 2013). Shevchuk et al. (2019) put forward that gig workers’nonstandard
work hours adversely affect their life partnerships and caregiving responsibilities. In addition,
contingent workers’lack of stable income can put them into precarious financial situations
(Butler and Stoyanova Russell, 2018), causing insecurities that spill over to families and
households (Kalleberg, 2009). Specifically, decisions on critical events in a contingent worker’s
private life, such as family formation or marriage, can affect their career sustainability.
The occupational sector level has only been indirectly addressed in the contingent work
literature, except for two recent studies showing that lawyers experience lower professional
status when working on online labor platforms (Yao, 2020) and photographers experienced
that platforms undercut their professional status (McDonald et al., 2021). The indirect role of
occupational sector has been addressed by, for example, several studies that examined career
experiences of food delivery riders and taxi drivers (Duggan et al., 2021;Ravenelle, 2019) and
freelance workers in the IT and creative sectors (e.g. McKeown and Pichault, 2020;Petriglieri
et al., 2019). From a career perspective, it is important to understand how contingent workers
can face unique career opportunities and obstacles in different sectors. For example, a case
study on contingent workers using Upwork found that the platform introduced barriers for
them, such as capped wages and intensive performance pressure, due to the high global labor
supply in the creative sector (Popiel, 2017). In contrast, professional status can be a source of
security for contingent workers in the health care sector (Wall, 2015).
Finally, how the institutional level can influence contingent workers’career experiences is
unexplored yet, promises exciting insights. For example, freelancers and gig workers do not
automatically have any social protection (e.g. health care and sickness benefits,
unemployment benefits). This lack of social security implies that they need to manage
their social risks themselves. However, not all of them are taking action in this regard, which
can influence their long-term career sustainability (Friedman, 2014).
To conclude, organizing the contingent work literature into the sustainable career context
dimension shows the importance of looking at contextual factors beyond the traditional
organization. This emphasis on the role of context in sustainable careers allowed us to
organize the literature (cf. De Vos et al., 2020) and introduce a common contextual language
for the disparate perspectives on contingent work (i.e. organizational, group, private life,
occupational-sector and institutional levels). These multiple levels are essential and need to be
considered when analyzing contingent workers’career sustainability.
Time dimension: changes in contingent workers’career experiences
De Vos et al. (2020) advocate a dynamic perspective on sustainable careers, whereby time can
have different meanings for distinct types of workers, such as contingent workers. In particular,
contingent workers operate in a dynamic environment due to their short-term contracts. When
contingent workers finish one contract or job situation, they may experience various transitions.
For example, they may transition from contingent work to unemployment, from contingent
work to traditional employment or continuing with contingent work (e.g. moving to a new
temporary client). Based on all these possibilities, contingent workers will likely accumulate
widely varied work experience over time (Clinton et al., 2011), which results in multiple dynamic
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career pathways. Therefore, although contingent work research has predominantly focused on
snapshots of one moment in time, the sustainable career lens shows that contingent work
experiences need to be studied from a temporal perspective (Ancona et al., 2001).
Based on our literature review, we identified a “stepping stone”concept that examines
transitions into traditional employment and suggests that some contingent workers see their
first contingent work project as a stepping stone to traditional employment in an
organization. However, research shows that only some workers successfully manage the
transition, while others remain in contingent work (Esteban-Pretel et al., 2011). Furthermore,
not all contingent workers have the same likelihood to transition successfully: temporary
workers seem to benefit from the contingent work stepping stone more than agency workers
or freelancers (Berton et al., 2011;Givord and Wilner, 2015). Contingent workers engaged in
agency work for an extended time reported lower well-being both in the workplace and
outside work than those beginning the agency work (Chambel and Sobral, 2019). For
contingent workers, performing low-skilled “gigs”in the gig economy, their transitions to the
outside of the gig economy are likely to be constrained. Their often complex diverse career
pathways can be interpreted as unfocused by HR managers outside of the gig economy
decreasing the likelihood to be hired (Kost et al., 2020). Taken together, these findings suggest
that the dynamic processes and long-term career impacts of contingent work on those who
aspire to obtain traditional employment are critical, yet not well understood.
Another concept introduced in this regard is liminality, as it is important in explaining
contingent workers’career experiences. For example, after a project has finished, some
contingent workers do not move into another working position and are instead in an in-between
phase. Liminality is characterized as a phase in which workers face high uncertainty about their
future work situation (Ibarra and Obodaru, 2016), which is a key part of the contingent work
experience (Winkler and Mahmood, 2015). These in-between phases of unemployment lead to
emotional highs and lows among contingent workers (Rowlands and Handy, 2012). Hence, we
emphasize that liminality needs to be considered as a temporal factor because it is an in-between
phase that shapes contingent workers’dynamic work exper iences over time (Ancona et al.,2001).
To have a sustainable career as a contingent worker, it is a key skill to manage intense varying
emotions caused by the volatile career environment (Caza et al.,2022).
Moving contingent work research forward: interplays between person, context
and time
Figure 1 shows that although we identified research on every dimension, there is a lack of
research incorporating all three dimensions. This is problematic because, in career experiences,
person, context and time constantly interact (De Vos et al., 2020). Therefore, we now use the
organizing framework of sustainable careers to elaborate on several avenues for studying
contingent workers’careers at the intersection of these three dimensions. Specifically, we
highlight four concepts that promise to shed light on the person, context and time interplay in
contingent workers’career experiences: person-career-fit, career shocks, employability and
flexicurity. We chose these specific topics because person-career-fit, career shocks and
employability have already been frequently addressed within a career sustainability framework
(De Vos et al., 2020;Van der Heijden et al., 2020). These topics are likely of particular value for
understanding the career experiences of contingent workers functioning in a volatile
environment. Although to date not explicitly researched from a sustainable career
framework, the concept of flexicurity aligns nicely with the underlying idea of the framework
as it acknowledges that person, context and time interact in shaping experiences. More
specifically, studying flexicurity can unravel how institutional and legislative factors shape
career experiences and add value by placing the experiences of contingent workers in their wider
institutional context. Table 1 provides an overview.
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Person-career-fit
The key mechanism bringing the three sustainable career dimensions together is the notion
of dynamic person-career-fit, which is the degree to which a worker’s career aligns with their
needs and personal values (De Vos et al., 2020). Sustainable career development is an
idiosyncratic process in which contingent workers demonstrate agency in striving for
person-career fit over time and are impacted by contextual factors. De Jager et al. (2016) and
Brawley (2017) argued that we need to understand the unique factors and contingent
workers’needs that influence contingent workers’person-career-fit. The multiple employers
or clients that contingent workers interact with can, over time, play a role by constraining or
nurturing person-career-fit. For example, gig workers may voluntarily engage in gig work for
a limited amount of time and experience high levels of person-career fit. Yet, agency workers
likely experience lower levels of person-career fit even in shorter periods because they often
strive for a permanent contract with an employer. Studying these processes from a dynamic
and systemic perspective (De Vos et al., 2020) allows for a more comprehensive and
interdisciplinary understanding of contingent workers’career experiences.
Person-
career-fit
Which personal and contextual factors
enable or hinder contingent workers from
achieving person-career fit over time?
How do contingent workers at different life
stages encounter distinct barriers and
enablers to achieving person-career fit?
How do contingent workers form and
manage their multiple commitments to
organizations over time? How does it
influence their careers if they do not align
their various commitments? What is the
nature of these alignments or
misalignments?
Delphi study to identify relevant
stakeholders with their constraining or
supporting “power”on contingent
workers over time
Ethnographic studies to examine how the
interplay between personal and contextual
factors of contingent workers’career
experience evolve over time
longitudinal within-person and between-
person studies to identify antecedents,
outcomes, mechanisms and boundary
conditions related to person-career fit
Career
shocks
What career shocks do contingent workers
experience?
What are the short-term and long-term
consequences of these career shocks?
How do contingent workers cope with
negative career shocks and capitalize on
positive career shocks?
In-depth interviews to explore the different
types of career shocks among contingent
workers
Quantitative process methods (e.g. growth
modeling, latent profile analysis) to
examine the distinct sequences of short-
term and long-term consequences
Employ-
ability
Why do some contingent workers manage
to build a portfolio over time, based on their
sequences of projects, and thereby increase
their employability, while others do not?
How can employability be enhanced over
time across multiple organizations?
What type of social and economic resources
are exchanged between contingent workers
and their stakeholders contributing to their
employability enhancement?
In-depth interviews to explore constraints
and enablers of employability
enhancement
Process methods to analyze upwards and
downwards cycles over time which unfold
through the interplay of personal (e.g.
motives, career resources) and contextual
(e.g. sector) factors
Longitudinal studies to understand
intrapersonal differences in the
employability of contingent workers
based on personal and contextual factors
Flexi-
curity
How can flexicurity systems be designed to
stimulate sustainable career experiences?
How do different legislations influence the
career experiences of contingent workers?
Case studies on countries that have
advanced flexicurity polices to examine
how they can foster career sustainability
Comparative studies on flexicurity policies
across countries
Table 1.
New research
directions and
exploratory research
questions based on a
sustainable career
perspective
CDI
Furthermore, we propose that there is a potential polarization between the strong
(e.g. more pulled) and weak (e.g. more pushed) contingent workers; that is, there may be a
so-called Matthew effect at play (cf. Forrier et al., 2018). Some contingent workers are likely to
attain and strengthen their person-career-fit by capitalizing on their career resources over
time (Ashford et al., 2018), while others may lack access to career resources due to structural
factors, such as missing structure regarding working time, income instability, or major power
asymmetries in work relationships (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016), resulting in a further decline
of person-career fit. Therefore, we encourage researchers to examine the development of
contingent workers’person-career (mis)fit to understand their distinct career trajectories
better.
Career shocks
Future research should also examine career shocks among contingent workers to understand
the interaction of the person, context and time dimensions. Career shocks are disruptive
events that cause deliberate career reflection and potential changes in contingent workers’
careers (Akkermans et al., 2018). Such shocks have a demonstrably strong impact on workers’
career decisions (Seibert et al., 2013) and career success (Blokker et al., 2019). Furthermore,
career shocks significantly impact entrepreneurs’career decision-making (Rummel et al.,
2021). Consequently, we expect contingent workers to be particularly prone to career shocks
due to many different career experiences, such as transitioning between jobs and projects and
facing financial and employment insecurity. Recent examples particularly salient for
contingent workers’careers are the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation
trend, which, for many contingent workers, has triggered short-term and long-term career
changes (Akkermans et al., 2020;Spurk and Straub, 2020). While these developments have
influenced all workers, contingent workers are especially influenced due to their precarious
working conditions and regular job and career transitions. For instance, the COVID-19
pandemic may be a source to amplify the resilience or vulnerability of contingent workers
(Spurk and Straub, 2020). Similarly, the Great Resignation has triggered many career
transitions, possibly also between paid employment and contingent work, or between
different types of contingent work. Studying such career shock-induced career transitions
would be a fruitful way forward to studying contingent workers’careers.
For this reason, we advocate that analyzing career shocks impacting contingent workers
helps us to understand complex and dynamic contingent work experiences over time. Career
shock is a fruitful concept to study person, context and time interactions, as it allows
capturing across contexts disruptive events that can significantly impact contingent
workers’career sustainability. Hence, we hope that contingent work and career scholars will
start to examine how and why career shocks can impact contingent workers’careers.
Employability
There is a need for studies that examine how employability can be a securing anchor for
contingent workers in their careers. Employability is the likelihood of finding a new job in the
labor market (Forrier et al., 2015) and is considered a panacea to overcome job insecurity in the
fading parenting relationship between organizations and workers (Forrier and Sels, 2003;
Kinnunen et al., 2011). Yet, how contingent workers can become and stay employable in the
long run is a complex issue (Barnes et al., 2015;Fugate et al., 2021;Kovalenko and
Mortelmans, 2016). For instance, organizations often do not invest in enriching contingent
workers’employability due to the short-term work relationship. Thus, a key future avenue is
to examine how contingent workers’employability enhancement can be achieved across
multiple employment relationships over time. Such studies can theorize about employability
related to social exchanges arising from the interdependence of contingent workers and their
Sustainable
career perspec-
tive on contin-
gent work
stakeholders (e.g. colleagues, clients, LMIs, institutions) (Chambel and Sobral, 2011;Forrier
et al., 2018;Fugate et al., 2021). As multiple stakeholders make up the context of contingent
workers, studies that take a multistakeholder approach and study how we can make
employability enhancement a shared responsibility are especially helpful (Barnes et al., 2015;
Chambel and Sobral, 2011). Hence, employability is a well-suited concept to study the
sustainable career perspective’s person, context and time interaction because contingent
workers’employability development across their career is a shared responsibility between
contingent workers and their stakeholders (Kost et al., 2020).
Flexicurity
A final avenue for future research is studying flexicurity and contingent work. Flexicurity is
an institutional-level concept. Wilthagen and Tros (2004) state that the concept of flexicurity
is roughly defined as the nexus of flexibility and security. Stated differently, flexicurity is
about strategies to simultaneously enhance flexibility and security in the labor market.
Thereby, security can take three forms: (1) job security, (2) employment security, or (3) income
security. Specific flexicurity designs vary among institutional legal national systems, such as
the number of short-term contracts a contingent worker can have from the same “employing”
organization in a row, as the flexibility-security matrix is shaped differently among countries
(Beuker et al., 2019). The most well-known example is likely Denmark’s flexicurity policy.
Those strategies combine active labor market policies aimed to activate workers toward
being more flexible while also providing generous social welfare policies to support those
in need.
Research is needed to explain the effects of distinct flexicurity policies on contingent
workers’career experiences. In addition, we need theorizing on how flexicurity can be
translated to the organizational level to understand the roles and responsibilities of
organizations that hire contingent workers (Kornelakis, 2014;Zhang et al., 2015). In this vein,
LMIs play a crucial role in supporting and securing work for contingent workers performing
non-standard career paths (Lorquet et al., 2018). In short, these studies will be insightful on
how (external) security systems can be designed on institutional and organizational levels to
influence contingent workers’career sustainability (Semenza and Pichault, 2019). Flexicurity
is a fitting concept to study the person, context and time interactions impacting contingent
workers’career sustainability because it can be a contextual buffer to safeguard an
individual’s flexibility over time.
Conclusion
Contingent work is a prevailing characteristic of the labor market in the new world of work
(Katz and Krueger, 2019). Although research into this phenomenon has been expanding
rapidly, insights continue to be fragmented across different literature streams. In this article,
we organized and synthesized the fragmented contingent work literature through a
sustainable career lens. This perspective takes into account that contingent workers’career
experiences result from a complex and dynamic interplay between personal and contextual
factors over time. Based on our review and synthesis of the contingent work literature, we
identified several areas for future research that offer the most potential for knowledge
development. Specifically, we propose research should focus on person-career fit, career
shocks, employability and flexicurity to help this research area move forward. We are
convinced that further advancing our understanding of how these (f)actors shape the career
experience of contingent workers is essential for creating sustainable careers for contingent
workers. As such, we hope our critical review and research agenda will spur new research on
contingent workers’careers and helps build interdisciplinary connections in this area.
CDI
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Supplementary material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online.
Corresponding author
Jana Retkowsky can be contacted at: j.retkowsky@vu.nl
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