accompanied New Labour's imperatives to reform the public sector along the lines of private enterprise (McGuigan, 2004).
My paper will explore how the entrepreneur of the self responds to austerity, and will examine how well we are served by this approach at a time when jobs and livelihoods are under threat, and where collective responses and organisation may actually be needed. In a period of cutbacks and job losses, does the legitimacy of this approach come under question, or does it intensify further?
It will be based on interviews with people working in higher education and the arts, which I am exploring both as workplaces and also sites for the theorisation (and the challenging) of the concept of the entrepreneur of the self. I will also draw on my experience as a union activist.
Harrison, E. Self-employment in Expansion and Recession
Self-employment has been a puzzling and contested phenomenon over a period of thirty years. For some it is a exemplar of the sort of 'entrepreneurial spirit' that holds the key to economic growth; for others it is shorthand for a multitude of sub-contracted, peripheral forms of employment at the margins of the economy. It is also widely thought to wax and wane along with the economic cycle.
The current period of austerity therefore seems an appropriate time to explore what has been happening to the self-employed, and how they have experienced these changes in terms of reported job quality, and their perceptions of their working environment and the wider society.
The paper draws on data from multiple surveys going back twenty years - Employment in Britain, the Skills Surveys, and two rounds of the European Social Survey - to look at the relationship between the economic context and the nature of self-employment. In doing so it presents a more disaggregated picture of 'the self-employed' than is customary. It shows the enduring interactions between employment status and the age, gender, occupational location and organisational circumstances of the individual jobholder, when it comes to predicting the quality of their work situation and their perceptions of it.
City University London
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