Towards the End of Career Management? HRM and the Growing Role of Labour Market Intermediaries
The HRM literature has been discussing for some time the evolutions observed in the field of careers, opposing the conventional model of organizational careers with emerging boundaryless careers, reflecting a new psychological contract between workers and organizations at the beginning of the 21st century. In this context, HR managers must attract new talent, while knowing that their involvement in the organization will be limited in time. The unprecedented development of project-based work, which falls midway between employee and self-employed status, seems to reinforce this “modern” vision of careers. However, an in-depth observation of the current labour market evolution shows that careers of project-based workers do not only result from individual initiatives of workers offering their talents on the market. These workers often use intermediation structures that become essential partners of the management of career paths via a full range of supporting devices. Through conceptual work on the notion of labour market intermediaries and multiple contrasted case studies focusing on the Belgian labour market, our paper illustrates the diversity of forms taken by this intermediation process. It also emphasizes two ideal-types reflecting opposite views on the way professional transitions can be secured: the first one considers project-based workers as “quasi-employees”; the second as “quasi self-employed”. We then highlight how this triangular game leads us to question career management as a sovereign power of the HR function.