New Forms and Patterns of Employment: The Role of Self-Employment in Britain

This research constitutes the UK contribution to an international socio-legal research project entitled „New forms and conditions of employment: the development of the legal and regulatory framework for the labour market“.
The report explores the relationship between the growth of self-employment and the changing patterns of industrial and social organisation, legal regulation and state policy, and hence examines the conditions which could explain its growth. The report recognises that self-employment in fact spans a variety of forms of autonomous working, from independent entrepreneur to the most dependent forms of own account workers such as homeworkers, and therefore begins by assessing the extent to which the legal determination of employment status recognises such diversity and is able to accomodate it. After considering particular aspects of female self-employment, and questioning such notions as the existence of a natural tendency of ethic groups to entrepreneurship, the report concludes by examining the relationship of self-employment to the growth of small firms and to government policy.