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The main goal of this article is to present a new taxonomy of contingent employment that better represents the wide variety of part‐time, temporary, and contract employment arrangements that have emerged since Feldman's review.

Reviews the literature over the past 15 years.

The paper suggests that contingent work arrangements can be arrayed along three dimensions: time, space, and the number/kind of employers. In addition, analysis of the recent research on contingent employment should be expanded to include worker timeliness, responsiveness, job embeddedness, citizenship behaviours, quality of work, and social integration costs.

The article suggests that a wider range of individual differences (including education, race, citizenship, career stage, and rational demography) all serve to moderate the relationships between different kinds of contingent work arrangements and outcome variables.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this editorial is two‐fold: first, to provide an overview of team‐related issues in the particular realm of contingent work arrangements, and second, to introduce the collection of articles encompassing this special issue.

The editorial is a general literature review that provides the readers of this special issue with a broader scholarly literature framework. The editorial also provides a historical context of the field. First, the phenomenon of contingent work arrangements is discussed. Second, attention is given to identification of major strategic factors, which have been contributing to the growth of contingent work arrangements. Third, team‐related issues of differentiation, integration, and cooperation are discussed.

The overview of research in the area of contingent work arrangements demonstrates that such work arrangements are diverse in their contractual structure. The rationale for which organizations use contingent work arrangements are diverse, as are the reasons why employees undertake such work outside the scope of the traditional employment model. Research in this area has grown primarily with the focus on economic, legal, and social factors influencing the expansion of non‐standard work arrangements. Less research is found in the area of individual, managerial, and organizational consequences of this expansion.

This editorial – and the special issue in particular – gives attention to understanding the array of experiences associated with contingent workers with the purpose of accumulating theoretical knowledge in this field, but also – and perhaps more importantly – to add to the transition from evidence‐based knowledge to practical advice.

The purpose of this paper is to compare knowledge employees' perceptions of contingent work with their managers' perceptions, highlighting potential differences in their respective psychological contracts which might produce dissonance in the employment relationship.

Original research using interviews and scalar data of both contingent knowledge workers and their managers are reported. The study sample consists of 32 contingent knowledge workers and 33 managers in five industries in Canada: two public sector and three private sector.

The results of this study indicate that differences exist between contingent knowledge workers and their managers with how contingent work affects career goals, promotion opportunities, and training and development opportunities. Additionally, differences occur in the constructs that mirror the traditional empirical measurements of the psychological contract. Two major themes are revealed: coping with uncertainty and integration with the organization on the part of contingent workers and managers.

This study contributes to research on contingent employment as it compares manager and contingent knowledge worker responses in terms of the psychological contracts formed by each.

Although the organizational practice of using “contingent or non-traditional workers” has been escalating since the mid-1980s, only recently has research begun to focus on the consequences of this practice. In unionized workplaces, labor leaders have begun to organize these workers. Although it is believed that contingent workers are responding positively to union organizing drives, little is known about the attitudes and behaviors of contingent workers as union members. Using the Union Commitment scale developed by Gordon, Philpot, Burt, Thompson and Spiller (1980), the research project reported here compares the Union Commitment of traditional faculty and three categories of adjunct faculty. The results reveal that there are no significant differences across these employee groups for the factors of Union Loyalty, Responsibility to the Union, Willingness to Work for the Union and Alienation from the Union. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.

Using two nationally representative data sets, we examine the wages, benefits, and social insurance of contingent workers compared with standard employees in South Korea. In addition, we measure employers’ investments in their contingent workforce. Our results indicate that contingent workers have become the dominant form of labor in South Korea after the 1998 Asian financial crisis and are faced with working conditions that are discriminative compared with those of standard employees. We also find that employers’ investments in contingent workers as human resources, as well as the upward mobility of contingent workers, are limited in the Korean labor market. Overall, our findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the working poor, including the social exclusion of contingent workers in an advanced developing economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the differential effects of workplace stress and the use of social support by contingent vs standard employees.

Conservation of resources (COR) theory is used to frame research questions. Using content analysis of 40 interviews from individuals in the hospitality industry, differences between the levels of stress reported by contingent and standard employees as well as differences in their use of social support networks to offset stress is examined.

Contingent employees report experiencing more stress than do standard employees in the same profession. Furthermore, contingent employees seek out more social support than do standard employees. There was no difference between the two groups with respect to the desire for social support from three sources: vertical, horizontal, and customer groups.

This study extends the literature on contingent workers, the literature on how different types of employees deal with stress, as well as adding to the COR literature by showing that contingent employees experience and assuage their stress differently than do standard employees.

This paper seeks to challenge the claim that traditional and non‐traditional employees differ significantly in terms of their needs, personality characteristics, and work motivation patterns, by surveying management consultants in Canada.

The study is based on a quantitative online survey undertaken among 204 Canadian management consultants in 2008, representing both traditional employed consultants, contingent consultants, and company representatives.

The study demonstrated no significant differences with regard to needs, motivation, and personality characteristics between traditional and non‐traditional employed management consultants, which means that no significant changes to existing human resource management policies seem to be needed.

The existing literature on contingent employees' needs, personality characteristics and work motivation has mainly been devoted to the study of differences between traditional and non‐traditional work arrangements seen as single groups. This study extends and complements the understanding of the underlying dimensions of both the explicit and the implicit contract within the contingent management consultant‐organization relationship in order to explain the influence of these dimensions on the human resource management strategies. The underlying assumption is that non‐traditional work arrangements vary according to the type of job and the context in which the job is performed.

This paper aims to illustrate a simple, holistic overview of contingent workforce management.

This paper’s viewpoint outlines benefits and challenges that employers and employees encounter with contingent work arrangements and highlights relevant human resource (HR) practices to effectively manage contingent workforce.

Benefits to employers are cost-effective hiring solutions, filling-up skill requirements, increasing numerical flexibility and diversity and broadened talent pool. Challenges include legal ramifications, hidden costs, confidentiality and security issues, low organisational commitment and productivity. For employees, benefits are working flexibility and financial gain and gaining work experience. Challenges include dependence on economy, irregular work hours, health risks and exploitation and differential treatment by employers. “Value-adding” practices of holistic hiring, onboarding, performance management, workplace training and developing resilient organisational culture can effectively manage contingent workforce.

This paper provides a broader outline of benefits and challenges, both from employers’ and employees’ perspectives, linked with precarious employment. Further investigations on employers’ and employee’s perspectives based on specific types of contingent work arrangements (e.g. temporary agency workers and gig workers) can give in-depth insights.

This paper provides a simplified framework of pros and cons of contingent employment, along with practical HR remedies to manage contingent workforce.

In this study differences in trust, commitment and justice perceptions were investigated between contingent and core employees in two hotels, as well as their effects on work behaviour. Contingent workers showed lower commitment to the team and to the organisation, and displayed less favourable work‐related behaviours than core employees. Commitment to the team mediated between job status (contingent vs. core employees) and five work‐related behaviours. Furthermore, depending on job status, trust and commitment were differentially related to work‐related behaviours. The implications of these results are discussed.