Marie-Josée Legault

Strategic Human Resources management is irrelevant when it comes to highly skilled professionals in the new economy

The goal of this paper is to explain the commitment behaviour of highly skilled professionals in Canadian business-to-business (B2B) technology services companies that do not have a formal and explicit managerial commitment strategy and to emphasize the need to take the organizational context into consideration when developing a theory that seeks to account for differences in employees organizational commitment. Our contribution is to reappraise the relevance of the traditional organizational commitment definition in this organizational context, a new organizational form. We demonstrate that in the companies which are different from the traditional bureaucratic organizational forms and which employ highly qualified professionals, the employment relationship is based on a psychological contract that is not accounted for in the strategic HRM theory. Indeed, the basic principles of strategic HRM dictate that an organizations most valuable asset is its employees; it is therefore incumbent on management to do whatever is necessary to retain its workforce, readily described as a key resource, and to use human resources management (HRM) practices as tools to elicit commitment. In a study of highly skilled workers in Canadian business-to-business (B2B) technology services companies belonging to the so-called ‘new economy’, we observed that although the competitive advantage enjoyed by these companies depends to a large degree on the creativity and innovativeness of their workforce, these companies barely have any official HRM policies, and the HR department plays a very unobtrusive role. Yet, no one could say that the employees in these firms are not committed – on the contrary! This situation has several implications in terms of career for these professionals, in terms of HR practices for the employers. Nevertheless, until now, existing theoretical models of organizational commitment have shown little interest in highly skilled workers in general and even less in new economy professionals.

Women’s Experiences on the Path to a Career in Game Development

This chapter seeks to identify whether there is a dominant, presupposed career pipeline to a career in game development and then looks for women and women’s experiences at each stage of that pipeline. It concludes that a dominant pipeline does exist and that this pathway both disadvantages women who attempt it and marginalizes other pathways. Along the way women deal with obstacles that can delegitimize their choices and experiences and/or make the assumed pathway inhospitable. This chapter relies on published literature as well as data from the 2014 and 2015 Developer Satisfaction Surveys (DSS) conducted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) in partnership with the authors.

Why Might a Videogame Developer Join a Union

This paper contributes to the union renewal literature by examining the union voting propensity of workers in the high-tech tertiary sector of videogame development toward different forms of unionization. We used exclusive data from a survey of videogame developers (VGD) working primarily in Anglo-Saxon countries. When looking at the factors related to voting propensity, our data indicated that the type of unionism matters and that industry/sectoral unionism is an increasingly salient model for project-based knowledge workers. This is an important policy dimension given that the legal structures and norms in Anglo-Saxon countries still tend to support decentralized enterprise-based unionism. It is also important for unions insofar as their organizing tactics remain geared toward a shop-by-shop approach or, at least, a localized geographical approach. Although additional work is required, our analyses lends support to the argument that high-commitment and high-involvement workplaces can engender a desire for collective representation and voice such as is offered through unionization. Whether this is because such workplaces step over a breaking-point line where the requirement for full alignment with employer goals becomes untenable and a source of discontent, whether this represents the existence of dual commitment where a representative agent like a union is seen as necessary to protect the work that people love, or whether there is a combination of these forces is not yet clear, but it is a critical area of future study for project-based knowledge workers.

Highly Skilled Workers and Employment Risks Role of Institutions

This paper analyzes the construction of risk and its effects on three groups of highly skilled professionals doing project work (video game designers, freelance journalists, and performing artists). Our results reveal that high qualifications are not a universal protective factor in the risk society. They suggest, rather, that the political economy of the various markets in which knowledge workers offer their services, as well as the institutions that structure these markets—or do not—is at least as important in determining the fate that awaits them when they are old or sick and that these other factors help create, among these highly skilled workers, a variety of risk societies.