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The rise and rise of self-employment – at 15% of the UK workforce it is now at its highest level since records began – is invariably a good sign if you’re a Conservative. It means millions of people immersing themselves in the enterprise of “enterprise”, showing initiative and embracing the risks (and rewards) of the market.
On the one hand, the government credits welfare cuts for spurring people into taking initiative. On the other, free market enthusiasts credit the new business model made possible by new technologies. As the Telegraph reports: “The growth of professional services, advances in technology and the focus on the digital economy has lowered start-up costs. Often all that is needed to run a company is a telephone and a laptop with a good internet connection.” The next stage, inevitably, is the transformation of manufacturing by 3D printing, which will call into being a new generation of do-it-yourself entrepreneurs, and thus restore dynamism to a stagnant capitalism.
This owes itself in large measure to the sort of techno-utopias that were churned out during the 1990s when Wall Street was still buzzing off the dotcom bubble. Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation prophesied the spread of independent contracting, freelancing and home-based enterprise as an alternative to full-time employment. And linked to this purview was a growing self-help literature of an entrepreneurial bent, encouraging everyone to outsource as much of their lives as possible, freeing up their time and human capital to invest in new income-generating activities. At the foundation of this was a neoliberal conception of the social and the self, according to which human beings are essentially entrepreneurial and only need to realise this to become more effective and get more of life’s rewards.
So is this the utopia we are headed for? The facts behind the self-employment surge are a little less august. In reality, the rise in the numbers of self-employed individuals is correlated to a lacklustre labour market. In most of the UK, figures show that the rise in self-employment is offsetting a fall in other forms of employment. Moreover, a great deal of what is classed as self-employment is fictitious. There are many workers who are taken on by firms as independent contractors and thus denied access to employment rights, sick pay and pensions, saving employers a bundle. These workers are in no real sense autonomous enterprises. They have little control over the work process or its aims and are, like the majority of workers, paid employees.
Furthermore, there is a sense in which Iain Duncan Smith may be right to credit welfare cuts for some of the statistical spike in self-employment. As the research analyst Alex Harrowell blogged, there are considerable incentives for many people on benefits to stop claiming jobseeker’s allowance and instead take working tax credit as a self-employed worker.
Together, this looks a great deal like what Michel Foucault described as a mode of “discipline”. After all, what appear here are forms of knowledge (the structures of academic and bureaucratic expertise that justify welfare cuts on the pretext of encouraging work), a system of surveillance (the regular oversight of benefit claimants and their activities to seek employment) and the regulation of activity through an institutional structure with incentives and benefits favouring the option of enterprise. So even if humans are in no way essentially enterprising creatures, there is a series of government techniques linked to changes in the labour market that encourage people to identify as entrepreneurs, gambling on the market.
The rise in officially counted self-employment, far from representing a surge in individual initiative, is to a large degree the outcome of a disciplinary process. To this extent, enterprise is not being freed so much as it is being forced.
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