Precarious versus Entrepreneurial Origins of the Recently Self‐Employed: Work and Family Determinants of Canadians’ Self‐Employment Transitions

Abstract

We investigate the wage work and family determinants of self‐employment entry using a panel study of Canadian workers (Canadian Work Stress and Health Study). Rather than treating the self‐employed as a homogenous group—a characterization that conflates entrepreneurial ventures with lower quality and more precarious self‐employment—we disaggregate self‐employment entrants by occupational class. Descriptive analyses show that the nonprofessional self‐employed—the most common form of self‐employment observed in the study—are considerably more likely to report low income (<$25,000) and insufficient work hours compared to wage workers and the professional self‐employed. Event history analyses based on a multinomial logistic model also reveal that poor wage‐work quality—including low income, job insecurity, and unchallenging work—increases the likelihood of a transition from wage work into nonprofessional self‐employment. In contrast, job autonomy and human capital predict an increased likelihood of a transition into professional self‐employment. Our results suggest that both classic entrepreneurial and forced motivations explain self‐employment entry when the self‐employed's occupational class is distinguished; however, findings are mixed regarding the salience of work‐family factors in predicting self‐employment entry. We discuss the value of using a “good jobs, bad jobs” perspective to disaggregate the pathways from wage work into lower versus higher quality self‐employment.

The Impact of Economic Inequality on Entrepreneurship: Does a Society’s Stage of Development Make a Difference?

“…The findings that the positive association between inequality and entrepreneurship weakens at high levels of development, whereas development has no significant effect on the extent to which inequality shapes survivalist entrepreneurship, further support this conclusion. These findings are consistent with sociological research showing large increases in precarious self-employment (Glavin, Filipovic, and van der Maas 2019;Moulton and Scott 2016;Vosko and Zukewich 2006) and high-income inequality upswings in many advanced economies in recent decades (Auguste 2018).…”

The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences of the Ideology of “Do What You Love”

“…In addition, I intentionally use the terms more precarious and less precarious to indicate my position that a comparison between precarious and non‐precarious professionals is flawed. Following scholars who have challenged the categorical or homogeneous classifications of precarity (Gill and Pratt 2008; Glavin et al 2019; Ocejo 2017), I imagine precarity as a nuanced spectrum. I recognize, for instance, that professionals who opt into more precarious roles may experience precarity differently than those who did not.…”

Über-Alienated: Powerless and Alone in the Gig Economy

“…With regard to the hypothesized association between platform work and alienation, financial strain may operate in one of two ways. First, there is emerging evidence that many workers pursue platform work out of financial necessity (Kessler, 2018)-a possibility that is supported by a wider nonstandard work literature, which reveals that insufficient wage work opportunities motivate many transitions into selfemployment (Glavin et al, 2019). Financial difficulties may therefore operate as a confounding factor that precedes and predicts the experience of alienation and the decision to become a platform worker, creating a spurious association between our focal independent variable and outcome.…”