Self-Employed Workers: Calling the Shots or Hesitant Independents? A Consideration of the Trends

he growth in self employment between the late 1970s and mid 1990s gave rise to a large multi-disciplinary body of research. More recently a number of theoretical perspectives have postulated a significant role for self employment in the new economic circumstances of the late 20th and early 21st century. However, there is sharp disagreement about the type of self employment and associated prospects that will emerge. For example, within a ‘knowledge economy’ perspective (Castells, 2000), the scope for professional, rewarding, de-institutionalized self employment is considerable, while the image of a second modernity, associated with a ‘Brazilianisation’ (Beck, 2000) of employment conditions is characterized by highly precarious and low quality non-standard contracts including self employment. During the 1980s and early 1990s, explanations of rising self employment polarized into two perspectives: entrepreneurial growth versus the marginalized worker. Conservative governments of the time claimed to have unleashed a previously repressed independence of spirit among the British workforce, a view supported by a number of commentators (Bannock and Peacock, 1989; Casson, 1990; Daly, 1991). Critics, however, associated the growth in self employment with high levels of unemployment and large organization restructuring (Blanchflower and Oswald, 1990; Linder, 1992; Rainbird, 1991). More recently this debate has resurfaced in different terms, prompted by further organizational and labour supply developments, with the self-employed conceptualized as either ‘portfolio’ or marginalized workers. In brief, self-employed portfolio workers are typically professionals, favoured by education, who flexibly exploit an emerging ‘new deal’