Sociology of Self-Employment: On Determination of a Subject

Abstract

Structural changes in demand and supply sectors within the Ukrainian labor market in late 1990s caused a phenomenon of reconsideration of an usual career of wage or salaried worker as the only one possible and acceptable. In search of work with satisfactory reward almost 10% of Ukrainians turned to self-employ ment — a new working activity with neither state nor research experience of dealing with. These people are neither considered as unemployed nor as entrepreneurs by themselves. The author is engaged in a problem of self-employment as a new labor market perspective, trying to fill the methodological gap within the Ukrainian social and economic sciences by means of conceptualization of self-employment and entrepreneurship. The author has presented a clarification of the pointed central concepts, their theoretical and empirical meanings based on a profound categorical analysis. The most appropriate, from the sociological point of view, definition of selfemployment suggested by author after generalization of Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign scientific resources would be important for consideration in further statistical and sociological survey of self-employment and its socio-economic interpretations.