Independent Professionals in Contemporary Work: Evidence from Ireland

Abstract

Independent professionals (IPros) are a rapidly growing segment of the contemporary workforce, providing high-skill, knowledge-intensive services to client organisations without entering formal employment relationships. Operating through project-based and contract arrangements, IPros play an important role in organisational performance, innovation and flexibility. Despite their growing prevalence and importance attracting scholarly attention, research on IPros remains limited. This is especially in the human resource management area, which has largely focused on either permanent employees or lower-skilled forms of non-standard work. Existing frameworks developed for permanent employees, gig or low-skilled contingent work inadequately capture the complex work status, identity dynamics, and career development that characterise IPros’ work. Thus, there is limited theoretical and empirical understanding of how IPros experience work, manage identities, and perceive organisational supports in contemporary labour markets. A deeper understanding of IPros‘ work and career experiences is therefore important for HRM literature and practices in increasingly flexible labour markets. It enables the development of more context-sensitive theory frameworks and organisational management approaches that better reflect the realities of this emerging workforce segment. To address this gap, the thesis integrates paradox theory, social identity theory and inclusive HRM literature to explore IPros‘ work and career experiences in order to answer the following questions: (1) What key themes emerge in the literature on IPros’ work and career experiences? (2) How do IPros‘ professional and organisational identities shape their work outcomes? (3) How does inclusive HRM influence IPros’ sustainable career outcomes? The aim of this thesis is to investigate IPros’ work and career experiences. To so do, this thesis is organized into three logically interconnected studies which address the above research questions. In particular, Study 1 answers the first question and presents a systematic review of 143 studies published in the past thirty years (1993-2025). Study 1 serves as the conceptual foundation of this thesis by systematically reviewing existing research on IPros and identifying the autonomy-precarity mega paradox that characterizes IPros‘ work and career experiences. It establishes the overarching theoretical context of this thesis and highlights critical gaps in existing research. Study 2 and Study 3 are conducted in parallel and both focus on IPros’ work experiences and career outcomes, but examine these issues from distinct yet complementary perspectives. Therefore, based on the findings from Study 1, Study 2 focuses on the professional organisational identity paradox identified in Study 1 and adopts an individual-level perspective to examines how IPros‘ dual identity shape their work outcomes. Therefore, Study 2 explores the IPros‘ identity paradox via a quantitative time lagged survey (N=280). Study 3 focuses on the same theme as Study 2, but adopts an organisational-level perspective and deepens our understanding of IPros' work outcomes by exploring the influence of inclusive HRM practices on IPros‘ sustainable career outcomes. Therefore, Study 3 draws on the inclusive HRM literature and the sustainable career framework, and conducts a quantitative cross-sectional study (N=681) to test how inclusive HRM predicts IPros’ sustainable career outcomes. Overall, the thesis reveals the reality of IPros‘ work and career experience. It contributes to the HRM literature and IPros research, advances the paradox theory and social identity theory by offering novel insights on non-traditional work arrangements. This thesis also provides practical suggestions to client organisations, human resource practitioners, policymakers and IPros.