Independent or Dependent? European Labour Statistics and Their (In)ability to Identify Forms of Dependency in Self-employment

Rossella Bozzon () and Annalisa Murgia ()
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Rossella Bozzon: University of Milan
Annalisa Murgia: University of Milan

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2022, vol. 160, issue 1, No 7, 199-226

Abstract: Abstract In the studies on labour market change and transformation of employment relations, the growth of new forms of self-employment, including platform work, has raised a broad debate about how to define, classify, and analyse the wide range of positions within the heterogeneous category of self-employed workers. This article analyses the emergent methodologies used in European comparative labour statistics to identify forms of dependency in self-employment. Using the 6th wave of the 2015 European Working Condition Survey and the 2017 ad hoc module on self-employment from the European Labour Force Survey, this article discusses how the representation of dependent self-employment changes by adopting a different operationalization of economic and operational dependency. Findings show how different indicators of dependency change the representation of self-employment in different economic sectors, affecting our understanding of the transformation of working arrangements within self-employment and the boundaries between employment and self-employment.

Keywords: Self-employment; Dependent self-employment; Dependent contractors; Economic dependency; Operational dependency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-021-02798-1

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