Customer Reviews

Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy

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Ah the sweet life of a contract programmer... the big bucks, the independence, the freedom from corporate politics! Barley and Kunda are brilliant anthropologists who take you inside the reality of the contractor's life. You hear their stories, learn their secrets, and smell their nervous sweat. The authors' style is captured nicely by the title of the book. They're irreverent and on-target. They allow you to spy with them--mixing voyeur appeal with hard science. Imagine an episode of "The Apprentice" starring characters pulled from Dilbert, and produced by Margaret Mead. I laughed out loud and took notes. If you work with contractors, if you live with a contractor, if you hire contractors, and for sure if you are a contractor, you must get this book.

David Maxfield
Director of Research
VitalSmarts

Some years ago, during the height of the technology stock bubble, a book entitled "Free Agent Nation" made quite a splash by glorifying the phenomenon of independent contracting. Less famously and far less optimistically, a number of economists and anthropologists pointed to this trend as a grave sign of the decay of workers' position in American society. Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, the authors of this study, steer a careful, meticulously documented middle course. They examined the observable fact of independent contracting in the high technology industry from three viewpoints: the contractors, the headhunters and the client firms. They say that the contractor is a new, different kind of knowledge worker with a unique set of opportunities and constraints. The book is clearly written, based on apparently sound evidence and illustrated with carefully chosen anecdotes. We suggest that its primary appeal will be to academics and other students of labor market trends, but also recommend it to firms that hire contractors and to contractors themselves - both will benefit from the authors' analysis of their market.

As a contractor, owner of a contracting firm, and publisher this book has found one of the best spots in my library: open, and on the desk. I use it, refer to it, and think it is an excellent book.

If you're a contractor, you'll find yourself nodding your head and realizing that this is a smart piece of work.

I think recruiters should read this book as well.

It's going for this publication, too, the evidence that relevance is not too often linked with the publishing year. One might subject a publication on this topic from the millenium turn rather to the criticism of being outdated than notorious or hidden classics of more distant past (roughly following the proverbial "news of yesterday"). By any means: No, it isn't. On an early stage and in a business where complexity has turned from machinery into extremely mobile abstract code, the authors touched a pivotal point of society which is the written and unwritten expectational concept individuals and corporations operate upon and western governments are amidst in the struggle about (far-easterners apparently are not that concerned, still not or never...), above the professional field addressed. Barley/Kunda deliver broad empirical basis and unlock the findings into considerations open for discussion between many "camps" instead of locking up the results in a ,err, castle of reasoning. A very fertile reading this was (in particular with the furtherly broadening potential together with "le travail en miettes" of georges friedmann, I incidentially ran across by the time, a recommendable experience), certainly a must as well for people involved in politics for that matter. It's an asset. (And, off the record, it's not quite a torture to read!)

David Gehle,
Freiburg, germany