According to the cultural consensus model of business ownership in the United States, business entities seek to grow both in organization size and in revenues. To borrow the framing used by Patrick Bigger and Morgan Robertson (2017), business firms create value for their owners and/or shareholders through growth and maximization of profit, but the underlying societal value of business growth is the foundational semiotic value of the orderly conduct of US society, which, it could be argued, flows from the moralized, economic value (Braverman, [1974] 1998) of human material well‐being. In this article, I examine nonemployer (single‐person) businesses in the context of the economic values of capitalism and the fundamental societal values underlying the capitalist values. In doing so, I ask: What is the noneconomic value contributed to the United States by its 27 million nonemployer business firms? What value does the operation of a nonemployer business firm offer to its owner? My research suggests that nonemployer business firms, through practices of sufficiency, create both economic and social value for their owners. Their foundational societal semiotic value is self‐produced, material self‐sufficiency, which flows from the almost‐mythically American values of independence, freedom, and humility.
Alternatives to traditional waged and salaried work have become increasingly relevant in a postpandemic U.S. labor market in which it seems that everyone hates their job. This article proposes that nonemployer businesses, business firms with no paid employees other than the business owner(s), constitute a distinct economic and cultural category of independent work in the U.S. economy, in addition to being a specific category of small business. Building from anthropological scholarship on entrepreneurship and on alternative forms of work, I argue that nonemployers are a recognizably discrete group from independent contractors because they think of their ventures as businesses. At the same time, nonemployer business owners expend their energy on building more holistic lifestyles rather than on wealth and capital accumulation. These findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in New York and North Carolina from 2017 to 2020. The stories I gathered illustrate that, by doing the work and running the business, nonemployer business owners control the practices and process of their work, and avoid both the precarity of other work arrangements and the stresses of growth-oriented entrepreneurship.
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