Self-Employment Career Dynamics: The Case of `Unemployment Push' in UK Book Publishing

The recent revival of self-employment in the UK and other advanced industrialized economies has been viewed contrastingly as an indication of economic vitality and, alternatively, as a form of labour market deficiency. These different perceptions rest essentially on two opposing processes of entry into self-employment -'entrepreneurial pull' and `unemployment push'. The research reported here, into freelancing in book publishing, reveals patterns of entry into self-employment which reflect the presence of both these processes, plus additional configurations and changes over time. The respondents, being predominantly female, were ultra-typical of those who swelled the self-employed workforce during the 1980s, when the number of female self-employed without employees doubled in the period 1981-93.