Solo self-employment, entrepreneurial subjectivity and the security-precarity continuum

Evidence from private tutors in the supplementary education industry

Bibliographic Data

ID4139534
AuthorsL Holloway (0000-0002-7662-6638, Geography and Environment, Loughborough University, UK, corresponding author), Helena Pimlott‐wilson (0000-0002-1329-7718, Geography and Environment, Loughborough University, UK)
Year2021
Volume53
Issue6
Pages1547-1564
Publication date2021-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0308518x211009237
OpenAlexW3159624535
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited54

Entrepreneurship is regarded by policy makers and politicians as an accelerant for economic development. Economic geography demonstrates that rather than stimulating 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 heterogeneous 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

Economics · Entrepreneurship · Epistemology · Political science · Precarity · Realm · Self-employment · Sociology · Subjectivity · Gender Studies · Global Educational Reforms and Inequalities · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

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