On the economic and social benefits of direct selling

Robert A. Peterson, Victoria L. Crittenden and Gerald Albaum

Business Horizons, 2019, vol. 62, issue 3, 373-382

Abstract: The labor market has long included individuals seeking nonemployee, alternative work arrangements. Now, alternative work arrangements such as freelancing, independent contracting, and temporary contracts have entered the lexicon through the following terminology: the gig economy, the sharing economy, the YouEconomy, agile workforce, and contingent workers. There are currently an estimated 18.6 million independent contractors engaged in direct selling. This article reports the first attempt to empirically investigate and document both the economic and social impacts of direct selling in the U.S. Our findings suggest that direct selling has a consequential impact on the U.S. economy and that the direct selling experience fosters a variety of skills that benefit professional activities as well as the personal lives of millions of independent workers.

Keywords: Direct selling; Economic impact; Social impact; Gig economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000768131830209X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:62:y:2019:i:3:p:373-382

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2018.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().