It Started with the Arts and Now It Concerns All Sectors: The Case of Smart, a Cooperative of ‘Salaried Autonomous Workers’

Murgia, Annalisa; Heusch, Sarah de

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-38246-9_12

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Firstly, we observed a demand for collective representation in respect of accessing social protection. Solo self-employed workers, in fact, encounter difficulties in being represented by the traditional system of interest representation and are only recently approaching emerging freelancers' organizations and cooperatives (Bologna, 2018;Jansen, 2017;Murgia and de Heusch, 2020). This is particularly marked in the Italian context, where employers' associations currently focus mainly on the self-employed with employees, and the main trade union has recognized the importance of protecting workers employed or self-employed alike only very recently.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neither precarious nor entrepreneur: The subjective experience of hybrid self-employed workers

Murgia

Pulignano

2019

Economic and Industrial Democracy

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This article focuses on the ‘hybridity’ of solo self-employment by shedding light on the lived experiences and meanings of the subjects within their institutional and socio-economic contexts. It offers an original perspective to the study of the hybridization of work by linking the subjective and objective conditions underpinning solo self-employed workers. The study found that solo self-employed workers exercise agency over their working lives while facing high levels of insecurity, and that their contextualized experiences are related to the dominant narratives about self-employment. At the same time, however, findings also show that solo self-employed are engaged in (re)-constructing their alternative and dissonant narratives as well.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neither precarious nor entrepreneur: The subjective experience of hybrid self-employed workers

Murgia

Pulignano

2019

Economic and Industrial Democracy

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“…Beyond examples of subjective distancing regarding such logics (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Storey et al, 2005), a few studies have recently analysed attempts by freelancers to organise on a professional basis to counteract the ongoing processes of individualisation (Maestripieri and Cucca, 2018; Norbäck, 2021). In the European context, specific organisations have also emerged to gather freelancers from different sectors and offer them an alternative to self-employment (Bureau and Corsani, 2017; Murgia and de Heusch, 2020). These freelance organisations – at the core of our study – were created with the explicit aim of supporting freelancers by improving their access to social protection and including them in a community without encroaching on their business autonomy (Bajard and Leclercq, 2019; Charles et al, 2020).…”

Section: From Individualised Workers To Alternative Organisations?mentioning

confidence: 99%

In search of alternatives for individualised workers: A comparative study of freelance organisations

et al. 2021

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This article contributes to the debate on the enterprise culture, which is characterised by the celebration of risk-taking and self-realisation, which in turn also implies self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce. It does so by investigating organisations created with the aim of finding alternatives for freelancers, who epitomise the processes of individualisation typical of late capitalism. The organisations studied, both companies and cooperatives, aim to enable freelancers to combine autonomy in running their business with access to labour and social rights and inclusion in a collective. Drawing on a multiple case study conducted in France and Italy, the article investigates how organisations can counteract the processes of self-responsibilisation and atomisation of the workforce by enacting principles typical of alternative organisations. This study thus provides a twofold contribution to critical organisational theory and sociological literature on the individualisation of work and feasible alternatives to it. Our findings show, first, that the enterprise culture can be challenged through alternative organising even when freelancers – a category of workers embodying the contemporary processes of individualisation – are at stake. Second, the study of these emerging organisations also contributes to the flourishing debate on alternative organisations by adding an original empirical contribution to ongoing reflections on alternatives to market capitalism.

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“…More recently, research has begun to investigate to what extent and under which conditions the solo self-employed are able to develop collective practices of organizing, focusing not only on unions, but also on chambers of commerce, business associations, cooperatives, new freelancers associations, and more grassroots claims-making activities (Murgia and Selmi, 2012 ; Battisti and Perry, 2015 ; Wynn, 2015 ; Brandl and Lehr, 2016 ; Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick, 2017 ; Jansen, 2017 ; Bologna, 2018 ; Mezihorák et al, 2019 ; Murgia and de Heusch, 2020 ). In fact, given their heterogeneous composition, it is not surprising that this hybrid group of workers encounters difficulties in being represented by traditional systems of collective representation.…”

Section: The Collective Representation Of Solo Self-employed Workersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hybrid Areas of Work Between Employment and Self-Employment: Emerging Challenges and Future Research Directions

et al. 2020

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The growth of non-standard employment relations has created one of the major challenges in terms of workers' rights as well as collective representation in European societies. Among non-standard employment relations, so-called "solo self-employed"-self-employed workers without employees-are challenging the very foundations of our labor markets, that is to say the opposition between employers and employees, fostering the development of emerging "hybrid" areas of work. The heterogeneity of the solo self-employed is difficult to capture from official statistics, which are still based on traditional classifications, and questions also the legal categories that qualify these workers. Moreover, the fact that solo self-employed workers do not form a homogenous group, and are diverse in terms of their activities, interests and needs, calls for changes in the way trade unions, employer organizations, and new freelancer associations develop collective actions, claims-making activities, and strategies of organizing. With the aim to achieve an in-depth understanding of the increasingly extensive and populated categories of the solo self-employed, this contribution aims at reconstructing the state of the art within different fields of study, such as employment relations, labor law, industrial relations and social movements, and at offering some possible future research directions.

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It Started with the Arts and Now It Concerns All Sectors: The Case of Smart, a Cooperative of ‘Salaried Autonomous Workers’

Cited by 7 publications

References 34 publications

Neither precarious nor entrepreneur: The subjective experience of hybrid self-employed workers

Neither precarious nor entrepreneur: The subjective experience of hybrid self-employed workers

In search of alternatives for individualised workers: A comparative study of freelance organisations

Hybrid Areas of Work Between Employment and Self-Employment: Emerging Challenges and Future Research Directions

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