Institut für Bildung, Arbeit und Gesellschaft

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    The problem of embedding: Towards a concept of embedding in the context of the triadic work relationship between freelancers, hiring firms, and agencies in German medicine and IT
    (2025) Ehlen, Ronny; Ruiner, Caroline
    In social sciences as well as in politics, there has been growing interest in the phenomenon of triadic work relationships between solo self-employed, hiring firms, and agencies in recent years. Most debates focus on rather low qualified work contexts, usually characterized by an oversupply of work. Instead, knowledge-intensive industries nowadays tendentially face a lack of qualified work supply. Thereby, these industries provide initial conditions that tend to favor freelancers. This holds in particular for German medicine and IT, where freelancers are offered better earning opportunities and working conditions than they would have as permanent employees in the same job. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid so far to triadic work relationships under those initial conditions. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the relationship between highly qualified solo self-employed (i.e. freelancers), hiring firms, and agencies in the knowledge-intensive industries of German medicine and IT. Moreover, existing research on triadic work relationships requires analytical instruments to understand and conceptualize the practices of solo self-employed, hiring firms, and agencies in and with regard to their triadic work relationship. In critical engagement with the embeddedness approach, the dissertation elaborates on this issue. While usually applied in a way that (post )rationalizes an actor’s practices as consequential regarding her or his social relations, here the active side of embeddedness is especially emphasized. It is argued that even though an actor is embedded somehow, she or he is nonetheless capable of reflecting on their embeddedness, developing sophisticated strategies, and intentionally exercising practices aiming at shaping their embeddedness in a – from the actor’s perspective – purposeful way. Thus, understanding an actor’s practices as an active dealing with her or his embeddedness according to the actor’s interests leads away from the rather theoretical problem of embeddedness, i.e. the question of how actors are embedded in social relations. Instead, it leads to the practical issue of how actors actually become embedded in a purposeful way. This issue is defined as the problem of embedding. Based on the consideration, that the problem of embedding in particular holds for contingent work relationships, this dissertation applies the basic conceptual framework to the empirical background of triadic work relationships between freelancers, hiring firms, and agencies in German medicine and IT. Against this background, the dissertation asks how the aforementioned triadic work relationship actors are related to the problem of embedding, how they deal with it, and what regularities and structures can be identified. It answers these questions by regarding to the findings of four papers that empirically address the triadic relationship between solo self-employed, hiring firms, and agencies in German medicine and IT. As a result, it develops the idea of embedding as a practice that strategically and intentionally aims at shaping an actor’s own embeddedness or the embeddedness of others, as far as it is intended to serve the actor’s own interests. Moreover, it shows that an actors’ embeddedness and embedding is related to a structural, political, and/or a cultural-cognitive dimension on a micro-, meso-, and/or macro-level. These dimensions and levels are interrelated and can be combined or played out against each other by the actors. Beyond that it is worked out that an actor’s derivation of embedding practices from her or his embeddedness is a (socio-)cognitive process that is related to perception and reflection. In contrast, shaping the actor’s embeddedness by embedding is a practical process that is related to legitimacy and context. Based on these findings a conceptual model of embedding is developed. In sum, the dissertation provides three major contributions: a) By working out the problem and the concept of embedding, it provides a novel perspective on (triadic) work relationships based on the embeddedness concept of Granovetter. b) By investigating the triadic relationship of freelancers, hiring firms, and agencies in medicine and IT, this dissertation extends our knowledge of triadic work relationships in knowledge-intensive fields. Thereby, it also examines the generalizability of existing findings on triadic work relationships in contexts characterized by rather low qualified work. c) By transferring the embeddedness approach to (triadic) work relationships, this dissertation examples the potential of relating the sociological subdisciplines of the sociology of work and the new economic sociology to each other.