From monster.com to headhunters, there is a multitude of different entities or institutions that seek to facilitate the matching of workers and firms. These are Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs), their diversity encompassing online job search engines, criminal records providers, public employment offices, state regulatory bodies, labor unions, centralized job matching markets, and temporary help agencies. Notwithstanding this heterogeneity, however, these entities serve a common set of labor market roles. Studies of Labor Market Intermediation deciphers the scope in which third party market forces have to intercede where workers and firms meet—how much they aid this process, impede it, or in some cases, exploit it. By building a conceptual foundation for analyzing the roles that these understudied economic actors serve in the labor market, and further developing a qualitative and, in some cases, quantitative sense of their significance to market operation and worker welfare, this volume enhances understanding of economic actors whose importance is only growing as employment becomes more fluid. The relationship between employees and firms is more complex than may be assumed at first glance, and becomes more so when one takes into consideration the advent of new technology and the ever-increasing rate at which people change careers. Cross-national in scope, the volume is distinctive in coalescing research on a set of market institutions that are typically treated as isolated entities into a coherent whole and, more ambitiously, setting a research agenda for assessing the roles played by third party actors in the labor market.
