Freelancing Expertise

Contract work is more important than ever—for better or for worse, depending on one's perspective. The security once implied by a full-time job with a stable employer is becoming rarer, thereby erasing one of the major distinctions between "freelance...

Debra Osnowitz is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Clark University.

The book examines the nature of freelance work from a number of angles: the relative advantages and disadvantages and the calculus made by the freelancers; the way in which they have to display their expertise (the 'performance'); their experience of marginalization when working for and on the premises of employing organizations; their utilization of networks and the way they manage their (non-organizational) careers. The book widens its lens with a reconsideration of the implications of contracting for the nature of work relations.... The book's undoubted strengths are to be found in the imaginative, open-minded and thorough-going nature of the assessments made... [and its] underlying values-driven commitment to fairness and equity in the landscape of diverse forms of work.

Matthew Bidwell:

Osnowitz provides a thorough analysis of high-skilled contracting arrangements with a focus on how contractors experience their working lives.... The strength of this book lies in the author's rich descriptions of contractors’ experiences... paying particular attention to the way that expertise defines the lives of her informants.... She also offers a rich depiction of the ambiguities in the contractors’ roles... present [in organizations] as commercial suppliers rather than as members.

Stephen Sweet, Ithaca College, author of Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy:

Debra Osnowitz's compelling analysis identifies the strategies contract workers use to chart careers, the rewards unique to contract work, and the substantial personal risks involved. By contextualizing contract work in a historical perspective and through analysis of in-depth interviews, Freelancing Expertise reveals contract work to be an alternate to, and consequence of, the limited rewards obtained in traditional career jobs. This is a remarkable contribution to understandings of the new economy.

Vicki Smith, University of CaliforniaDavisco, author of The Good Temp:

Freelancing Expertise is a detailed and nuanced description of important dimensions of contracting work today. Debra Osnowitz asks how contractors manage the risks that are entailed when they lack a steady employment contract. While analyzing the experiences of professional contractors in the fields of high technology and publishing, Osnowitz provides comparisons to people in similar occupations who are regular employees and people in similar temporary employment relations but in different occupations. Osnowitz's understanding of how an external labor market works is very original and cutting edge.