Pierce 2001

P1: VENDOR/GVG/GGT P2: LMD
Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph069-quas-345741 September 25, 2001 9:1 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999
Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 4, Winter 2001 (°

C 2001)
Book Review
Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workplace. By Rogers, Jackie Krasas.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. 197 pages, paperback, ISBN: 0-8014-
8662-9.
One consequence of the transformation of the American economy in the

last twenty-five years is the growing number of contingent work arrangements
in a wide range of occupations, firms, and industries (Spalter-Roth and Hartmann
1998). Such jobs are typically characterized by uncertain tenure and do not provide
workers with benefits such as health plans, disability leave, or paid vacation days.
Moreover, many people working in these jobs do so involuntarily. In other words,
they would prefer full-time, permanent positions, but are unable to find them (Tilly
1996).
One of the largest categories of workers in the contingent labor force is temps.
Between 1968 and 1992, temporary service employment soared fifteen-fold, from
100,000 to 1.5 million workers in the United States (Tilly 1996, p. 155). Despite
the phenomenal growth of this workforce, and the host of problems these jobs
present for workers, such as lack of job security and benefits, there has been little
attention to these workers among scholars of contemporary labor studies. Jackie
Krasas Rogers’s important and timely new book fills this gap by considering the
experiences of temps who work in both “high-skill” and “low-skill” temp jobs.
Based on interviews with temporary clerical workers, contract lawyers, and agency
personnel, and on participant observation as a temp herself, Rogers argues that
temporary work has not one, but many, faces. Her main intent is to show not only
how the experiences of temporary workers differ across occupational categories,
but to illuminate how gender and race shape the experiences of these workers
within different occupational contexts.
There are many things to recommend about this excellent book. First, it is
important in that it distinguishes between different types of temporary work. In
the scant literature that exists, the focus has been on clerical work (Henson 1996;
Parker 1994), but not on other types of temporary work, particularly professional
and other highly skilled positions. Second, it demonstrates that there is variation
533
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534 Book Review
by gender and race in the experience of temporary work. As Rogers observes, both
temporary law and clerical work are gendered. They are “considered ‘female’
undertakings and women’s overrepresentation in temporary work is naturalized
rather than problematized” (p. 158). White middle-class women are viewed as ideal
candidates for such work. On the other hand, white men working in such positions
are often viewed as “defective men,” lacking the requisite masculine motivation to
succeed. By contrast, men of color do not encounter the same assumptions white
men do because they are not expected to have the same orientation to work.
In addition, Rogers provides an important discussion about whether tempo-
rary workers experience their jobs as exploitation or as freedom to pursue their
own interests and desires. While clerical workers often feel exploited on their
jobs, women contract lawyers often describe their work as freeing from many of
the constraints they faced in corporate law firms. For instance, many of the women
lawyers found that they could better balance career and family life by doing temp
work than by working in the more bureaucratic and restrictive environment of cor-
porate law firms. Despite these advantages, these women also realized that temp
work did little to help build their professional networks or, ultimately, their careers.
Rogers’s book also dispels many myths about temp workers, such as the
notion that such jobs might someday become permanent positions or that temp
work is just one step to upward mobility in a corporation or a career. In reality,
however, very few jobs become permanent and most temps find that such work
does not give them the experience or skills that would enable them to get better
jobs. Furthermore, many of the workers Rogers interviewed temp involuntarily,
that is, they would prefer permanent positions, but have not been able to obtain
them, thereby debunking the notion that such workers temp because they choose
such arrangements. Finally, Rogers’s conclusion provides an intelligent account
of the difficulties this unregulated labor force faces in attempting to unionize and
in finding case law that would potentially protect them from wage discrimination,
sexual harassment, and other work-related problems.
Although Rogers provides an insightful analysis in showing how temporary
work is gendered, she is less successful in theorizing the process of racialization.
She provides many examples that speak to the continuing significance of race in
hiring decisions, such as clients who implicitly request white workers by specifying
to agencies “no Marias,” which means no Latinas, or “no Kims,” which means no
Asian Americans (p. 72). However, Rogers’s analysis falls short in theorizing how
the temporary work process racially forms these differences. Part of the problem is
her implicit understanding of race as an additive category for describing workers
and their varied experiences. As feminist scholar Elizabeth Spelman (1989) argues,
an additive analysis simply adds race to gender as if they were variables in a
mathematical equation rather than conceptualizing the context through which race
and gender interact to produce difference and inequality. Rogers falls into the
trap of adding race onto gender in many examples. For instance, she argues that
Book Review 535
personal appearance is an important temporary employment requirement for all

women workers, but white women need only be “pleasant looking,” while women
of color must be “drop-dead gorgeous” (p. 72). My disagreement here is not with
her point or with her evidence, but rather with her conceptual neglect of the context
which produces the differences she describes.
Relatedly, like many social scientists, Rogers tends to focus on race when
the temporary worker is not white, as if white workers do not have a race. As
cultural historian and critic George Lipsitz has written, “Whiteness is everywhere
in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see . . . As the unmarked category against
which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has
to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations”
(1998, p. 1). Further, as Lipsitz and others have argued, whiteness is a structural
feature of inequality in social relations, providing individuals with differential ac-
cess to and investment in privilege, property, and wages (Roediger 1990; McIntosh
1998). What is missing from Rogers’s analysis, then, is an understanding of how
whiteness, along with gender, as a structural feature of inequality produces and
reproduces difference and inequality. Revising her conclusion to theorize the ways
the temporary work process is gendered and racialized would be a more convincing
and accurate explanation of the differences and variations she discovers.
Despite this theoretical weakness, Rogers’s book does provide the best con-
temporary account of the gendered experiences of temporary workers in varied
occupational settings. Her ethnographic descriptions are rich and detailed, par-
ticularly when drawing from her own experiences to supplement her interview
material, and the book itself is highly readable. I strongly recommend it for under-
graduate and graduate courses on work and occupations, organizations, sociology
of gender, and contemporary labor studies. Additionally, it would be of interest to
anyone who has worked as a temp and highly instructive to those who may employ
them.
Jennifer L. Pierce
American Studies
University of Minnesota
pierc012@tc.umn.edu
REFERENCES
Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Henson, K. (1996). Just a temp. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
McIntosh, P. (1998). White privilege. In M. Anderson & P. H. Collins (Eds.), Race, class and gender:
An anthology, third edition (pp. 94–105). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Parker, R. (1994). Flesh peddlers and warm bodies: The temporary help industry and its workers. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Roediger, D. (1990). The wages of whiteness. London: Verso.
536 Book Review
Spalter-Roth, R., & Hartmann, H. (1998). Gauging the consequences for gender relations, pay equity,
and the public purse.” In K. Barker & K. Christensen (Eds.), Contingent work (pp. 87–111). Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Spelman, E. (1989). Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Tilly, C. (1996). Half a job: Bad and good part-time jobs in a changing labor market. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.

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P1: VENDOR/GVG/GGT P2: LMD

Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 4, Winter 2001 (°

One consequence of the transformation of the American economy in the

534 Book Review

Book Review 535

personal appearance is an important temporary employment requirement for all

536 Book Review

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