Deconstructing Labour Statistics by Reconstructing the Concepts of Autonomy and Dependency

This chapter analyses how the increasingly blurred boundaries between self-employment and employment are challenging definitions and measures used in labour force surveys. It critically assesses debates and emerging methodologies to identify new categories (e.g., dependent contractors, dependent self-employment, involuntary self-employment, and hybrid entrepreneurship) that are (re-)defining the representation of the borders between independent and dependent work. The chapter problematises how emerging definitions and measures are torn between the need to rely on stable and comparable measures in space and time and the urgency of capturing the transformations that are (re)shaping the boundaries of labour relations, proposing possible ways of addressing these two opposing tensions.