Rejection, Adoption or Conversion. The Three Ways of Being a Young Graduate Auto-Entrepreneur

This article presents the use of the new French fiscal regime for small scale business: the auto-entrepreneur plan. This focuses on young graduates entering the job market by registering to this plan. In trying to understand how these young graduates adapt to their new situation, the survey reveals that auto-entrepreneurs have ambivalent feelings that betray the plan’s ambiguities. Does it support business creation (and entrepreneurship) or train to entrepreneurial labour? In the analysis of the respondents’ discourse and the accommodations they make, this article reveals the multiple uses and meanings of the auto-entrepreneur plan. They have created an identity for themselves and for others as they navigate through employment, activity, independence and professionalism. Three ideal-typical patterns of the young graduates’ social uses of the auto-entrepreneur plan are identified and discussed in this article: the ‘independent salaried’, the ‘entrepreneurial unemployed’ and the ‘convert entrepreneur’. This categorization helps understand the processes of what appears to be a conversion to entrepreneurial labour, prior entrepreneurship. Entering the workforce through the auto-entrepreneur plan promotes a learning and internalisation of different standards, those of the entrepreneurial labour (self-promotion, availability, self-learning, adaptation to market constraints, autonomy, accountability...) that result in accepting a high degree of insecurity and loss of rights. Faced with this entrepreneurial mandate, each young graduate reacts differently: rejection, adoption or conversion.