L’intérim, un milieu favorable au déroulement de carrières nomades ?

Temporary work : an enabler for boundaryless careers ? The aim of the present paper is to examinate the notion of career applied to the temporary help service (THS) workers. During the recent period, leader firms in the temporary help service industry in France are trying to build real "careers" for their temporary employees, by using various methods, such as enabling long-term employment relationships, or making efforts to extend some benefits of the "permanents" employees to the temporary workers (mutual funds, occupational training...). Our ambition is to study the impacts of these evolutions on the temporary employees, by using the framework of the boundaryless careers [ex: Arthur and Rousseau – on 1996; Cadin and al – on 2003]. We formulate the hypothesis that the professional course of some specific temporary workers (mobile and qualified) can now be viewed as real careers, regarding the framework proposed by the boundaryless careers theorists. To validate this hypothesis, we led a qualitative empirical study (31 interviews conducted with temporary work agency managers), completed by a questionnaire administered to a sample of 208 temporary employees. We then built a typology drawing from the results, based on two criteria (employability and preference for temporary work), which allowed us to isolate a class of "boundaryless temporary workers". These employees demonstrate four important characteristics: – High level of preference for temporary work; – Strong perceived employability; – Limited perceived job insecurity; – Positive opinion towards the notion of "temporary career". These results must be considered with caution, because they raised complex institutional and psychological issues concerning the notion of "temporary career". Institutionally, we can demonstrate that the temporary work legal frame in France is not adapted for workers willing to pursuit a long term career under temporary status. Under a psychological point of view, we notice that the social image of the temporary work remains strongly associated with uncertainty and job insecurity. This social image generates a stigmatization for the long-term temporary workers in their everyday life (ex : discriminations). All these obstacles contribute to explain that the percentage of "boundaryless temporary employees" on our sample is low (15% of the respondents).