Organizations, Occupations and Decentral Work: On Hybridity and Ambiguity of Own-Account Workers

Conventional perceptions of the labor force say that occupational dichotomy includes just the majority of wage or salary dependent and the minority of entrepreneurs. This notion is over-simplified and not adequate to grasp the dynamic and multidimensional system of social and economic stratification and mobility. Our study dealt with one-person-enterprises, which are the vast majority of all business owners in Europe (Burke 2015). Nearly 30 percent of our sample in Austria proved to have either more than one source of income from self-employment or they were hybrids combining income from self-employment and dependent work. It shows that these circumstances disturb the clear perception of society as based upon two major categories, it multiplies theoretical challenges.