The Dynamics of Control of Migrant Agency Workers: Over-Recruitment, ‘The Bitchlist’ and the Enterprising-Self

Abstract

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.