What Do (And Don’t) We Know About Part-Time Professional Work?

As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, people are living and working in ways that are far richer and more varied than any single scholarly model can capture. And as organisations and employees alike tinker with (or in some cases recraft entirely) how, when, and where work is done, management scholars are realising that we need new frameworks for explaining and understanding the role and meaning of work (and our attachment to work organisations) (cf. Ashford et al., 2007). The focus of this particular chapter is part-time work, and more specifically still, managerial and professional part-time employees. As the literature review which follows will show, this is a group of employees with particular characteristics that differentiate them both from other nontraditional professional workers (such as contractors or teleworkers) and from other groups of part-time employees (classified in the literature as ‘earners’, rather than ‘career workers’). The underlying argument is that the part-time professional employee is a socially constructed category, rather than a descriptively demographic one, and can be best understood with reference to both broad institutional logics and local organistional efforts to enact its meaning. What follows is an overview of the literature in this area, a discussion of some of the general themes or questions which continue to be raised about the meaning, enactment, and sustainability of a part-time professional working arrangement, and some discussion of future research directions to address these questions.