Analysis confirms that the self-employed are more satisfied with their jobs because their work provides more autonomy, flexibility, and skill utilization and greater job security. These underlying mechanisms have been stable over the last 30 years and are not due simply to personality differences. The self-employed job satisfaction advantage is relatively small or nonexistent among managers and members of the established professions-occupations where organizational workers have relatively high autonomy and skill utilization.WHY, AND UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES, IS IT MORE SATISFYING to be self-employed rather than work for an organization? For several reasons, these questions are becoming more important. Self-employment is a common mode of organization for entrepreneurial activities and is common among contingent workers and subcontractors. The incidence of self-employment has been increasing over the last quarter century, and if trends toward flexible, more focused organizations continue, selfemployment is likely to become even more prevalent. 1 The effect of self-employment on psychological health is a controversial issue, since there are strong but conflicting messages about the nature of self-employed work and how it affects individuals. Politicians and entrepreneurship advocates frequently portray self-employment as the route to independence and personal growth. 2 Many U.S. workers view 293

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Data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to investigate reasons for the gender earnings gap among the self-employed. Compared to organizational employment, self-employment may allow workers freer adjustment of work effort in response to changing needs for market work income and household production. Consistent with that hypothesis, the analysis shows that self-employed women's earnings declined with marriage, family size, and hours of housework, whereas self-employed men's earnings increased with marriage and family size. Organizationally employed workers' earnings exhibited a similar but less pronounced pattern, suggesting that in the self-employment sector the structure of female/male relative earnings was more sensitive to family size and composition. Self-employed women and men specialized more intensively in housework and market work, respectively. Women apparently tended to choose self-employment to facilitate household production, and men to achieve higher earnings.A tendency for self-employed women to have relatively low earnings is well documented.According to Aronson (1991), the average annual income of fulltime self-employed women was 37% of the income of full-time self-employed men and 28% of the income of male wage and salary workers. Devine's (1994) estimates put the female/male ratio of median self-employed earnings in 1990 at .47 for full-time, fullyear self-employed workers (compared to .69 for wage-and-salary workers) and at .33

The strategy purity hypothesis argues firms will have better results pursuing a single, businesslevel strategy of either cost leadership or differentiation rather than a mix of both. Since this claim implicitly assumes a developed-economy context, we examine the efficacy of business strategies in transition economies. We find the benefits of a pure strategy are diminished when the institutional environment has a low degree of market orientation but are increased when the institutional environment is more market oriented. Our results indicate a boundary condition for the strategy purity hypothesis and support arguments for an institution-based view of business strategy.

Empirical analysis shows that men with self-employed fathers and higher parental incomes are more likely to be self-employed, the impact of paternal self-employment is leveraged by higher family income, and self-employment is more likely when the father worked in an occupation with task requirements similar to those of an independent business. The idea that the paternal selfemployment effect is attributable to sons following their fathers into occupations inherently more or less conducive to self-employment is not supported.R        -       - (Lentz and

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This study investigates the effect that membership in a financial keiretsu has on the export performance of Japanese manufacturing companies. Companies that belong to one of the six major financial keiretsu are found to have lower export ratios than similar companies who are not members. The negative effects of keiretsu membership appear confined to producer goods companies where intergroup linkages such as preferential trading relationships are tightest. Additional evidence from the producer goods sector showing that keiretsu members do less well on other measures of company performance supports the argument that the cartel‐like properties sometimes ascribed to the keiretsu actually reduce competitiveness, thus dampening export performance. In general, the data do not support recommendations that non‐Japanese companies might look to keiretsu‐type alliances as an organizational strategy that will lead to competitive advantage in global markets. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.