Variegated global expansion: Internationalization strategies in the temporary stafﬁng industry Neil M. Coe a,⇑ , Jennifer Johns b , Kevin Ward a a Geography, School of Environment and Development, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK b School of Management, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK article info Article history: Received 11 January 2010 Received in revised form 13 September 2010 Keywords: Business services Internationalization Transnational corporations Temporary stafﬁng industry Corporate strategy Labour markets abstract This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the internationalization processes of business ser- vice sectors through an analysis of the 20 leading TNCs in the temporary stafﬁng industry. While these TNCs broadly conform to a loosely coordinated decentralized or multinational organisational model, there is signiﬁcant ﬁrm-to-ﬁrm, spatial and temporal variability in the internationalization strategies that they employ, deriving from both the breadth of the industry – i.e. the range of different stafﬁng activities that it encompasses – and the inherently territorially-embedded nature of stafﬁng industry activity. These complexities are exempliﬁed through consideration, in turn, of the scope of stafﬁng TNCs, their for- eign direct investment strategies, levels of central coordination, and degrees of standardization. The anal- ysis demonstrates that, due to the need to respond to markets, temporary stafﬁng TNCs exhibit highly spatially and temporally variable internationalization strategies and there are considerable barriers to both the centralization of control and the standardization of business practices. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction That labour markets are inherently local – both in terms of their unique intersections of supply and demand dynamics and their regulation (Peck, 1996) – has become something of a truism in re- cent geographical literature. And yet the powerful salience of this argument is readily apparent when one studies an industry whose very business is intervening in, and actively reshaping, local labour markets and yet whose leading ﬁrms have actively sought over the past two decades to expand and coordinate their operations at a global scale. The temporary stafﬁng industry is a deceptively simple sector consisting of privately-owned labour market inter- mediaries that meet the needs of client organisations for (usually short-term) contract workers of many kinds. 1 It is a large, fast growing, and relatively under-researched industry that has exhibited strong internationalization dynamics since the mid-1990s. The sec- tor, worth an estimated US$105bn worldwide in 1996, had expanded to US$310bn in global revenues by 2007 (CIETT, 2009), and, to give but one measure of internationalization dynamics, the USA giant Manpower expanded its presence from 52 to 82 countries over the decade 1999–2009. This international spread and expansion of tem- porary stafﬁng is of economy-wide signiﬁcance: stafﬁng agencies place workers in all sectors of the economy, and hence can be seen as promulgators of different kinds of labour market ‘ﬂexibility pack- ages’ across a range of clerical, technical and blue-collar occupations (Peck and Theodore, 2002; Theodore and Peck, 2002). This paper is about the internationalization strategies of the leading transnational temporary stafﬁng agencies and the particu- lar challenges of coordinating and controlling activities at the glo- bal scale in an industry that is both innately ‘local’ and powerfully shaped by national regulatory forces. Put another way, it is con- cerned with the challenges of ‘managing across’ considerable insti- tutional heterogeneity (Faulconbridge, 2008). As the ensuing analysis will demonstrate, temporary stafﬁng offers an example of a particular kind of business service sector in which internation- alization strategies are highly complex and spatially variable, shaped as they are to a high degree by host market conditions (cf. Faulconbridge et al., 2008). Our existing knowledge of these as- pects of the temporary stafﬁng industry is embryonic at best. Re- cent contributions have offered a range of national case studies in which the increasing signiﬁcance of stafﬁng TNCs is becoming apparent (e.g., Coe et al., 2008c, 2009a,b,c) alongside initial proﬁles of internationalization in the industry (see Ward, 2004; Peck et al., 2005; Coe et al., 2007). Building upon and signiﬁcantly extending such recent work, this paper is the ﬁrst to offer a thorough and detailed assessment of the internationalization strategies of the 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.09.003 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: neil.coe@manchester.ac.uk (N.M. Coe). 1 Temporary stafﬁng is actually deﬁned by the nature of the triangular relationship between the stafﬁng ﬁrm, the temporary employee and the client ﬁrm; while the employment relation exists between the employee and the stafﬁng agency, the work relation is determined by the client ﬁrm (Gonos, 1997). Geoforum 42 (2011) 61–70 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum