Internships as contingent workforce

Internships is an increasingly popular form of work-based learning, which is becoming the ‘rite de passage’ towards the labour market, especially in the most competitive sectors. Initially promoted and strongly encouraged, more recently research papers and popular publications have started discussing problematic aspects of the internship phenomenon. The term ‘intern economy’ is introduced and possible negative social implications are mentioned. The main purpose of the thesis is to inform various stakeholders about the complex role of internships, especially their increasing role in the labour market, and thus to contribute to a balanced and critical discussion. The second objective is to empirically verify to what extent within the current Belgian French speaking cultural labour market internships are similar to regular work positions. Third, methodological tools for processing big amounts of quantitative and qualitative data of a whole population were tested, combining analysis using Atlas.ti 8.0, Microsoft Excel and SPSS. The main focus of this paper is on the perspective of the employer – the cultural organisation. Existing research is used to highlight key issues and identify propositions for empirical testing. In order to compare job requirements of interns versus employees, the author analyses 905 internship and job advertisements published on the main website for the French speaking cultural sector in Belgium in 2015. The results test existing theories about internships and many assumptions, as defined by the literature review. Some interesting conclusions are reached, confirming that the most popular question of payment is only one of several concerns related to this phenomenon. It is concluded that internship use by cultural organisations depend on their strategy, as not all cultural sectors seek to recruit interns evenly. At the current state, most of interns in Belgian French speaking cultural sector have full-time working weeks similar to regular employees, but their contracts have an average duration of 4 months. Interns also seem to be more used to enhance the communication and promotion of the organisation.