Foreword: JMO special issue on self-employment/freelancing

Abstract

First, although there are major differences between countries, as Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data in Figure 1 show, self-employment or own-account working (outside agriculture) now accounts for a substantial share of the employed workforce in many industrialised countries (in some countries as many as a quarter of those in work are self-employed, and self-employment accounts for more than one in 10 of the workforce in around two-thirds of OECD countries). Moreover, it has been growing in the majority of these countries in the last decade or so (Figure 2), and the underlying trend seems to be an upward one. This does undoubtedly challenge the postwar consensus that self-employment was a diminishing archaic form of work, largely confined to agriculture, manual craft activities and a few liberal professions. However, as the paper by Bridge in this special issue argues, from a longer term historical perspective, it is waged employment which should perhaps be seen as the aberration.