Introduction: self-employed professionals in a comparative perspective

Chapter 1 contextualizes self-employment in a comparative perspective, explaining the reasons—economic and technological—that support in particular the growth of self-employed professionals, who offer highly qualified and specialized skills that perfectly respond to the needs of contemporary capitalism. The proliferation of these occupations, functional to the services economy, which deviate from traditional employment relationships, pose challenges to the systems of institutional regulation of labour, welfare and collective representation. The chapter deals with the topic of the individual dimensions of autonomy at work (legal status, work content and working conditions), and addresses the issue of how work autonomy is governed in different European national contexts. It emphasizes the importance of understanding in which institutional settings professionals develop their activities and where they may find policy responses to emerging needs for social protection and collective representation. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to describing the structure of the book, presenting a summary of the content of each of the chapters.