Daniel Larsson, Socilogy, Umeå University

2010-2015

The aim of the project was to investigate material condition and socio-political attitudes among the self-employed. The point of departure was to illustrate and deepen the understanding of the self-employed as a heterogeneous group. Self-employed in general, and not the least in research on social class, has been understood as a more or less homogeneous group or category. The project furthermore focused on two research areas where the heterogeneity among the self-employed have not been investigated: a) socio-political attitudes and b) material living condition.

Even though research on the self-employed is extent and impressing, attention has mainly been paid on topics such as the impact of economic growth (Alvarez & Crespi, 2003), institutional perquisites for self-employment (Henrekson & Jakobsson, 2001) and motivations to become self-employed (Arum & Mueller, 2004). But regarding socio-political attitudes and material living condition there has not been much attention. During the time we wrote the research application some studies on poverty existed which contained interesting results regarding the self-employed. But these studies were and still are few, and focus have not been on the self-employed - but poverty in general. These studies did not either differentiate self-employed based on aspects of heterogeneity. The reason why these two fields have not used self-employed as a study object is most likely because the self-employed is a problematic group to investigate theoretically and that self-employed constitute about 10% of the population, implying that in most existing data the n-numbers are to low to allow for complex analyses. That was also the reason why the project collected data where the self-employed were oversampled - which gave us a unique data set.

In the project the following overarching questions were asked: 1) What kind of material resources do self-employed have and what kind of self-employed are poor, 2) what kind of socio-political attitudes do various types self-employed have, 3) What impact do local contexts have for the material living condition and socio-political attitudes among the self-employed, and 4) what kind of self-employed have an entrepreneurial personality trait and what impact does this have for socio-political attitudes and material living conditions.

The three most important results
A substantial proportion of the research conducted in the project have dealt with material resources and well-being. One important result is that the poverty rate is higher among the self-employed compared with regular employed, while the self-employed do not have lower living condition. Poverty was measured with a standard income poverty measurement and living condition was measured with a deprivation measurement. In the project it was further found that the regular employed income poor have substantially lower living condition than self-employed poor. There are many suggestions how this can be the case. Self-employed have greater opportunities to commit economic crimes, self-employed can have access to resources via their firm and the self-employed may have somewhat different preferences than the regular employed. The income of the self-employed can furthermore be less regular than the income of the regular employed, which may affect the annual based income measurement. With the data at hand we have not had the possibility to investigate these suggestions, which in any case is probably hard to do. One important conclusion is that the measurement on income poverty, used in many poverty studies, most likely overestimate the poverty levels among the self-employed.

In the project we also investigated well-being based on the motivation to become self-employed. In this study the point of departure was the research fields 'involuntary' self-employed and latent self-employed (i.e. regular employed who want to be self-employed). It was found that 'involuntary' self-employed constitute about 12% of the self-employed in Sweden. These self-employed tend to enjoy less of the positive aspects traditionally associated with self-employment; they have lower degree of subjective well-being than other self-employed and regular employed, and have a lower degree of work autonomy. We also found a large group (30%) of the regular employed that wanted to be self-employed. These individuals are similar to self-employed in many aspects, for example regarding personality traits and valuing freedom and independency. On the other side, the group in general have lower subjective well-being than self-employed. These findings in particular contribute to the international research field by focusing on autonomy and personality traits among 'involuntary' self-employed and by using a representative sample of self-employed, which can be compared with regular employed - something that is not common in the research field.

In another study we are working on we investigate whether 'involuntary' self-employed, besides having lower subjective well-being, also have lower material living condition. The results show that 'involuntary' self-employed do not have lower incomes and do not have higher poverty rates than other self-employed. But the 'involuntary' self-employed do have lower material living condition measuring the relation between what the individual cannot afford but want to have and what the population actually have (non self-employed are included in the population).

New research questions generated by the project
One new research question generated by the project consider how self-employed deal with the relation between work and family. Two recurrent questions in the field on self-employment and work-family conflict are 1) do self-employed have more work-family conflict than regular employed and 2) to what extent women can use self-employment as a strategy for dealing with competing demands of work and family. In the article attention was also paid on the impact of more time with the family as a motivation to become self-employed. The results show that self-employed in general experience more work-family conflicts than regular employed, except for self-employed women without employees. These women experience lower conflict between work and family and also in greater extent have 'more time with the family' as motivation to be self-employed. Family related motives was also shown to be of importance for both female and male self-employed with employees; the level of experienced conflict between work and family is substantially lower if the family is an important motivation to be self-employed. These results are particular interesting in relation to the international research field on work-family conflict since we have used representative data for self-employed and regular employed and since the study analysed the impact of gender as well as whether the self-employed have employees. These are important aspects of heterogeneity among the self-employed not accounted for in previous research.

The international presence of the project
The most obvious international presence of the project is that the studies have and will be published in international journals. Some of the studies have also been presented on various international conferences. Daniel Larsson and Ingemar Johansson Sevä for example presented a study on poverty and the overlap between poverty and deprivation among the self-employed at the ESPANET-conference in Edinburgh in 2012 and at a conference in Dublin in 2011. Daniel Larsson also presented the issue of poverty and deprivation among the self-employed on a network meeting (PREWO) in Copenhagen in 2014. We are further in an early stage of establishing collaboration with a research team from the University of Twente in Holland, led by Giedo Jansen. For the moment Jansen is PI for a project resembling our project, and we have agreed to take further contact in the beginning of 2016.

Research information outside the scientific community
On a seminar organised by Tankesmedjan Tiden the 22th April 2015 Daniel Larsson presented and discussed 'involuntary' self-employed and poverty among the self-employed. The PI has further been contacted by Johan Lindgren, publisher at Studentlitteratur, about producing teaching materials related to the project.

Publicity strategies
One of the articles has been published in a full open-access journal. The other articles will become open-access after the time-period the publishers demand the studies to be non-open has expanded. We have contacted UB at Umeå university to help with contacts with the publishers. The conference publication from the ESPANET-conference is already free to download from the internet.

Publications

Berglund, V., Johansson Sevä, I., and Strandh, M. 2015. Subjective well-being and job satisfaction among self-employed and regular employees: Does personality matter differently? doi: 10.1080/08276331.2015.1115699 Forthcoming in Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship.

Edlund, J & Kulin, J. Why become self-employed? Work motivations among Swedish self-employed and employees. Re-submitted to Work, Employment & Society.

Johansson Sevä, I., Larsson, D., and Strandh, M. 2015. The prevalence, characteristics and well-being of ‘necessity’ self-employed and ‘latent’ entrepreneurs. Findings from Sweden. Forthcoming in International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business.

Johansson Sevä, I., Vinberg, S., Nordenmark, M., and Strandh, M. 2015. Subjective well-being among the self-employed in Europe – macroeconomy, gender and immigrant status. Small Business Economics. doi: 10.1007/s11187-015-9682-9

Johansson Sevä, I. and Larsson, D. 2015. Are the self-employed really that poor? Income poverty and living standard among self-employed in Sweden. Vulnerable Groups & Inclusion, 6. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/vgi.v6.26148

Johansson Sevä, I. and Öun, I. 2015. Self-Employment as a Strategy for Dealing with the Competing Demands of Work and Family? The Importance of Family/Lifestyle Motives. Gender, Work & Organization, 22, 256–272. doi: 10.1111/gwao.12076

Larsson, D., & Sevä, I. J. 2012. Income poverty and deprivation among self-employed in Sweden. In ESPAnet conference Edinburgh: Stream 5. Retrieved from http://www.stis.ed.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/89246/Larsson_-_Stream_5.pdf

Lindh, A. 2015. Public Support for Corporate Social Responsibility in the Welfare State: Evidence from Sweden. Scandinavian Political Studies, 38(1), 75-94.

Work in progress:
Larsson, D., Karlsson, L. & Johansson Sevä, I.” Class identity among the self-employed”.

Larsson, D., Johansson Sevä, I. & Strandh, M. “Material living conditions among necessity self-employed in Sweden”.


Daniel Larsson
http://www.soc.umu.se/om-institutionen/personal/?uid=dala0001&guiseId=126344&orgId=cf2c8c27071677417e711d8da163e2dbe94fa2e2&name=Daniel%20Larsson

Ingemar Johansson Sevä
http://www.soc.umu.se/om-institutionen/personal/?uid=inrjon01&guiseId=246757&orgId=cf2c8c27071677417e711d8da163e2dbe94fa2e2&name=Ingemar%20Johansson%20Sev%C3%A4

Jonas Edlund
http://www.soc.umu.se/om-institutionen/personal/?uid=joed0001&guiseId=126298&orgId=cf2c8c27071677417e711d8da163e2dbe94fa2e2&name=Jonas%20Edlund