The Dynamics of Control of Migrant Agency Workers: Over-Recruitment, ‘The Bitchlist’ and the Enterprising-Self
基于对一家临时中介机构的隐蔽民族志研究，探讨移民工人在短期合同工作中如何感知过度招聘和非正式排名系统带来的控制，以及他们的社会经济状况和身份如何影响其回应。
This article explores migrant workers’ experiences of organisational control while undertaking temporary agency work. This study is based on a ‘covert’ ethnographic study set at a temporary employment agency that short-term contracts workers to the catering and hospitality industry. The findings show how control is perceived by workers to emerge from the over-recruitment, coupled with the allocation of work through an informal ranking system. Migrant workers’ specific socio-economic circumstances and their race and gender identities informed their responses to these systems, resulting in the buy-in to discourses of enterprise. The result was actors who are complicit, if not active, participants in self and peer regulation. As such, this article contributes to the literature on enterprising-selves, control of temporary agency workers and the wider manufacturing consent literature.