Accountability, Compliance and Ethical Risk in the Contingent Workforce Economy: A Cross-Market Governance Framework for Staffing Intermediaries

Abstract

Staffing intermediaries supply labour to organisations that direct the work but do not employ the worker, and they do so across markets whose labour regulation, enforcement capacity and levels of informality differ sharply. Scholarship on this arrangement is substantial but fragmented: one literature explains why firms externalise employment, a second examines whether compliance instruments work, a third explains individual conduct, and a fourth analyses algorithmic direction and worker data. None speaks to the others. This article reviews and integrates those four literatures around a single organising claim: that the recurrent failure in intermediated employment is not the absence of rules but the absence of an identifiable party answerable under them, a condition designated here as accountability diffusion. Eighty-nine sources are coded into four thematic clusters and synthesised into three products: a typology of four intermediary governance regimes defined by the interaction of answerability clarity with enforcement capacity; a mapping of nine ethical risk categories across four market types; and three reproducible failure pathways running from structural condition to realised harm. A four-stage maturity ladder converts the diagnosis into an assessable instrument. The review's central and falsifiable claim is that compliance investment reduces ethical risk only where conformance findings attach to a named answerable party, and that in the absence of such coupling additional compliance activity improves what is measured while leaving what is at stake unchanged.