Book Review: Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies

Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies
by Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda
Princeton University Press, 2004

This is a book that describes what I do for a living. Therefore, should I be surprised that I found the book to be of great interest?

Consultants play a major role in the economic development industry. Their role has grown steadily over the past decade as ED organization tackle increasingly complex tasks and as the role of specialized knowledge and skill in the field has grown. My forecast is that the role of economic development consultants will become even more important in the future.

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. I liked the book at the time, but wondered if it was really talking about "what I do." The book was a little overdone in retrospect.

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. With a background in organizational behavior, I always thought this assessment was wrong-headed.

Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, the authors of Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies, steer a careful, meticulously documented middle course. I liked it. 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.

Here are some of the salient points you might take away from the book:

• Contractors, who are defined as professionals who take temporary assignments, constitute a new kind of employee with a new kind of relationship with employers.

• Viewing contractors as members of a “Free Agent Nation” is simple-minded.

• Contracting has emerged as a new kind of labor organization, enabled by the eclipse of bureaucratic fi rms and the ascendance of the free market.

• Contractors speak of freedom and flexibility, but their reality may not match their rhetoric.

• A contractor’s relationship with a contracting fi rm is ambiguous and often tense.

• Contractors rely on their skills to survive since they lack traditional career paths and buffers against unemployment.

• Contractors spend a great deal of time investing in and sharpening their skills.

• The contractor’s three main forms of capital are: social relationships, time and knowledge.

• When the tech bubble burst, contractors fared about the same as full-time employees.

• Contracting is likely to be a long-term factor in the labor market.

Buy the book at Amazon.com.