Self-employment on the way in a digital economy: A variety of shades of grey

The aim of this paperis to discuss self-employment in a historical perspective. A historiography of self-employment has to embed the observation into a broader frame-work of international relations and of economic and social developments. Related changes affect diverse institutions like labour markets, systems of education and further education, political organizations, the system of labour relations and, of course, the whole “social system of production” (Hollingsworth, 1998). Vice versa, these changes are also affected by different developments in the sphere of the social, technological and political organization of economy and society. Contemporary discourse about the nature of self-employment falls far too short, if it is not linked to an historical frame-work of thought, which gives contours to ideas and changing interpretations. Especially, the current type of “naive” admiration of self-employment, often in combination with normative upgrading in terms of entrepreneurship, must be advised to analyse and to think historically. At the same time, many present day self-employed “jobs” would have been standard employment contracts some ten years ago. In this respects current de-bates on precarization are also linked with debates on self-employment.