Book review: Self-Employment as Precarious Work: A European Perspective
| Author | Primož Rataj |
| DOI | 10.1177/1388262720945155 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews
Book reviews
Wieteke Conen andJoop Schippers (eds.), Self-Employmentas Precarious Work: A European Perspective,
2019, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, UK, 273 pp., ISBN 978 1 78811 502 5, (hardcover).
Reviewed by: Primoˇ
z Rataj, Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana.
DOI: 10.1177/1388262720945155
Self-Employment as Precarious Work: A European Perspective is an edited volume of contribu-
tions based on discussions at an international meeting at Utrecht University in 2016. This meeting
marked the finalization of the research project ‘Self-Employed without personnel: between free-
dom and insecurity’, begun in 2013
The editors are Wieteke Conen, Assistant Professor at the Social Law department of Leiden
University, and Joop Schippers, Professor of Labour Economics at Faculty of Law, University of
Utrecht, and Economics and Governance and Affiliated Researcher at the Netherlands Interdisci-
plinary Demographic Institute. In fourteen chapters, written by 20 contributors from different
disciplines like (labour) economics, sociology, law, social and political sciences, as well as public
administration, the book examines one of the increasingly important socio-political challenges of
European Union Member States, namely the ‘precariousness’ of work of the self-employed.
The aim of the book is to ‘investigate the scale, nature and implications of self-employment as
precarious work in Europe.’ This is done by addressing research questions that have to date
received limited attention in th e scientific literature with th e intent of adding to the existing
knowledge in two ways. The first concerns the limited insight into recent developments in nature
and quality of self-employment in Europe; the main focus being to what extent self-employed are
self-sufficient entrepreneurs and where and why more precarious forms of self-employment
emerged. By considering ‘precariousness’ as more than merely earned income (i.e. also including
social risk coverage), the second purpose of this study is to establish where and how precarious
self-employment relates to systems of social security and institutional surroundings. The over-
arching purpose is, therefore, ‘to provide evidence-based information to address current and future
challenges related to the changing nature of self-employment and demonstrates where, when and
why self-employment emerges as precarious work in Europe.’
Another important dimension of the book is to study self-employment as precarious work for
societal reasons and not merely scientific ones. Considering that policy debates tend to be dom-
inated by a strong emphasis on the promotion of entrepreneurship and the encouragement of self-
employment as an alternative to unemployment, the idea is to recognize its potential problems,
such as low and insecure incomes, poor social s ecurity and pensions coverage, low levels of
training as well as deterioration in self-employed job quality. By presenting a variety of current
European Journal of Social Security
2020, Vol. 22(3) 338–363
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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