Abstract

This seminar seeks to a) explore the scope, experiences and representations of self-employment and b) the ways in which sociologists have understood and conceptualised self-employment. It analyses the kind of activities that are performed by self-employed workers, highlighting the importance of occupational career paths. And, in contradistinction to representations of self-employment as overwhelmingly positive (entrepreneurship) or overwhelmingly negative (namely a core component of gig work), it suggests that self-employment occupies a complex but important ideological, social and economic space in contemporary capitalism.

Speaker

Rachel Lara Cohen is a Professor of Sociology at City, University of London. She is currently writing a book about self-employment. Other interests include non-standard work, work-life boundaries, body work, emotional labour, craft, identity and the relationship of feminism to quantitative methods.