Since the 1970s the long term decline in self-employment has slowed – and even reversed in some countries – and the prospect of ‘being your own boss’ is increasingly topical in the discourse of both the general public and within academia. Traditionally, self-employment has been associated with independent entrepreneurship, but increasingly it has become a form of precarious work. This book utilises evidence-based information to address both the current and future challenges of this trend as the nature of self-employment changes, as well as to demonstrate where, when and why self-employment has emerged as precarious work in Europe.

Dependent self-employment is widely perceived as a rapidly growing form of precarious work conducted by marginalised lower-skilled workers subcontracted by large corporations. Unpacking a comprehensive survey of 35 European countries, Colin C. Williams and Ioana Alexandra Horodnic map the lived realities of the distribution and characteristics of dependent self-employment to challenge this broad and erroneous perception.

'Precarious Employment' explores the nature and dynamics of precarious employment in contemporary Canada.

This volume presents original theory and research on precarious work in various parts of the world, identifying its social, political and economic origins, its manifestations in the USA, Europe, Asia, and the Global South, and its consequences for personal and family life.

This book investigates work relationships on the border between employment and self-employment. Bringing together economic, sociological and legal research approaches, it analyses why firms deploy dependent self-employed workers, why individuals supply this form of work and by which informal and formal mechanism dependency is created.

Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor