‘Selling themselves’: conceptualising key features of freelance work experience

Existing research on freelance workers has highlighted its distinctiveness in terms of vocation, precariousness, work-life boundaries, professional autonomy and co-working. However, there is a need to better understand the lived experience of freelance working and its impact on practitioners compared to traditional employment. Using Arendt’s (1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press) conceptualisation of human activities, I analyse a case study of freelancers through notions of work, labour and action in order to conceptualise distinctive features of freelance work experience. This analysis brings into focus how freelance workers manufacture social arrangements and represent their output and work persona within their respective marketplace, whilst involved in and reliant on non-instrumental forms of sociality. Arendt’s concepts make it possible to conceptualise tensions and contradictions within the underlying ends of everyday freelance activities, and how this affects freelancers on an experiential level.