IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/entsoc/v9y2008i02p337-365_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

“You know we are not an Employment Agency”: Manpower, Government, and the Development of the Temporary Help Industry in Britain

Author

Listed:
  • Forde, Chris

Abstract

This article looks at the early development of the temporary help industry in Britain. It focuses on the activities of one of the largest suppliers of temporary workers, Manpower, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on material from The UK National Archives, the article examines Manpower's efforts to gain access as a genuine employer to the state employment exchange network to advertise their temporary vacancies. The article reveals the incremental changes in attitude within the government towards Manpower's activities and argues that this gave the company a competitive advantage over other employment agencies, facilitating their development of relations with the government and the trade unions in Britain over the 1970s and 1980s. The main conclusion of the article is that explicit attention needs to be paid to the actions and strategies of agencies themselves in order to develop an adequate understanding of the growth and development of the temporary help industry.

Suggested Citation

  • Forde, Chris, 2008. "“You know we are not an Employment Agency”: Manpower, Government, and the Development of the Temporary Help Industry in Britain," Enterprise & Society, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(2), pages 337-365, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:9:y:2008:i:02:p:337-365_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1467222700006984/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Benjamin Hopkins & Chris Dawson, 2016. "Migrant workers and involuntary non-permanent jobs: agencies as new IR actors?," Industrial Relations Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(2), pages 163-180, March.
    2. Julie Rayner & Alan Lawton & Helen Williams, 2012. "Organizational Citizenship Behavior and the Public Service Ethos: Whither the Organization?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 106(2), pages 117-130, March.
    3. Chris Forde & Robert MacKenzie, 2010. "The Ethical Agendas of Employment Agencies Towards Migrant Workers in the UK: Deciphering the Codes," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 97(1), pages 31-41, December.
    4. Kim Hoque & Ian Kirkpatrick & Alex De Ruyter & Chris Lonsdale, 2008. "New Contractual Relationships in the Agency Worker Market: The Case of the UK's National Health Service," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 46(3), pages 389-412, September.
    5. Wen Chen & Xiao-Jiao Song & Yanping Li, 2021. "Factors Affecting the Sustainable Development of HRS in Transforming Economies: A fsQCA Approach," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-19, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:entsoc:v:9:y:2008:i:02:p:337-365_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eso .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.