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Solo self-employment, entrepreneurial subjectivity and the security-precarity continuum: evidence from private tutors in the supplementary education industry
journal contribution
posted on 2021-03-29, 12:54 authored by Sarah HollowaySarah Holloway, Helena Pimlott-WilsonHelena Pimlott-WilsonEntrepreneurship is regarded by policy makers and politicians as an accelerant for economic development. Economic geography demonstrates that rather than stimulate entrepreneurship in general, policy makers should support specific forms of entrepreneurship that fuel wider growth. The paper’s original contribution is to insist that entrepreneurship research must also explore less growth-oriented, but crucially very widespread, forms of entrepreneurial activity. The paper therefore places solo self-employment—the self-employed without employees—centre stage as an exemplar of this trend. Research is presented on private tutors who run businesses from home, offering children one-to-one tuition in the burgeoning supplementary education industry. The paper scrutinises the causes, configuration and consequences of such solo self-employment as an economically marginal, but numerically dominant, form of entrepreneurship. In so doing, it makes three conceptual advances in the exploration of heterogenous entrepreneurship. First, in examining why individuals become self-employed, the paper moves beyond classic efforts to understand entrepreneurship through binary push/pull mechanisms in models of occupational choice. Instead, the analysis demonstrates the importance of risk in entrepreneurship and paid employment, highlighting the multiple pathways into solo self-employment as opportunities and constraints coalesce in individual’s lives. Secondly, in considering how the solo self-employed think about business, the research breaks through conventional definitions of entrepreneurship to demonstrate that solo self-employment involves a distinctively entrepreneurial subjectivity and practices. Thirdly, by investigating the consequences of solo self-employment, the findings transcend dualist interpretations of self-employment as the realm of entrepreneurial wealth or economic precarity, highlighting instead a security-precarity continuum in immediate and long-term outcomes.
Funding
Leverhulme Trust (grant number RPG-2018-335)
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Environment and Planning A: Economy and SpaceVolume
53Issue
6Pages
1547-1564Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by SAGE under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-03-22Publication date
2021-04-29Copyright date
2021ISSN
0308-518XeISSN
1472-3409Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Prof Sarah Holloway. Deposit date: 23 March 2021Usage metrics
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