Working at the Boundaries : An Introduction to Solo Self-employment

This chapter explores the academic debate on self-employment, often scattered across different disciplinary areas, by proposing a closer dialogue between labour studies – both sociological and legal – and cultural studies, which are more concerned with the individual and collective representations of freelancers and solo self-employed (SSE) workers. Through a trans-disciplinary and multi-method approach, the SHARE research programme investigated how SSE workers are measured, classified, and represented at both national and European levels. The chapter also illustrates the three parts that compose the volume: the state of the art on solo self-employment in terms of statistics, labour law, and social and worker rights; the epistemological and methodological perspective; and the main results of empirical research conducted using statistical, legal, and ethnographic approaches.