Osterman will be working on a book, Spare Parts: The Deconstruction of Work, which will include discussion of freelancing and contract work but will seek to broaden the discussion to include other significant changes in how people relate to organizations. The key theme running through the book will be changing relationships between employees and organizations.
He will focus on the nature of the attachment between employees and organizations rather than on whether attachment per se has broken down. In taking this tack Osterman departs from the common perception that the ties between employees and their employer have broken as opposed to, changed. In order to obtain national patterns for organizational attachment he utilizes data from the Current Population Survey tenure supplement and the PSID.