Happy Free Willies? Investigating the relationship between freelancing and subjective well-being
Small Business Economics
pp 1–17 | Cite as
Happy Free Willies? Investigating the relationship between freelancing and subjective well-being
AuthorsAuthors and affiliations
Peter van der ZwanJolanda HesselsMartijn Burger
Open Access
Article
First Online: 22 August 2019
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Abstract
In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of own-account workers (the self-employed without employees), including freelancers, in many developed economies. Despite the importance of the group of freelancers for modern economies, little is known about the perceived benefits of freelancing. We use six waves of the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (“Understanding Society”, 2009–2015) to investigate subjective well-being levels of freelancers in terms of satisfaction with life, work, leisure time, income and health. Although freelancing jobs are uncertain and temporary, our cross-sectional (pooled ordinary least squares (OLS)) and longitudinal (fixed-effects) analyses reveal that freelancers are on par regarding life satisfaction with other own-account workers, employers (self-employed workers with employees) and wage workers. The most striking result is that freelancers are significantly more satisfied with their leisure time than other own-account workers, employers and wage workers. Also, freelancers score significantly higher in terms of work satisfaction than wage workers, but do not exceed other own-account workers and employers in terms of work satisfaction. Freelancers are equally satisfied with their health as other own-account workers and employers. In sum, the analysis of several subdomains of life reveals much how different groups of self-employed workers score regarding their overall subjective well-being.
KeywordsFreelancers Independent professionals Own-account workers Solo self-employment Subjective well-being Satisfaction
JEL classificationI31 J28 L24 L26
1 Introduction
Many European economies have experienced substantial increases in own-account workers (self-employed individuals without employees; also known as solo self-employed workers) over the recent decades. Freelancers, or independent professionals, are an important subgroup among the heterogeneous group of own-account workers (Van den Born and Van Witteloostuijn 2013). The freelance workforce has expanded to about 2 million workers in 2015 in the UK and represents about 40% of the own-account workers and 30% of all self-employed workers (Kitching 2015). In some sectors, such as media, the majority of workers are freelancers (Storey et al. 2005). Freelancers work for their own risk while being hired by companies and selling their intangible knowledge. In other words, they are a hybrid between entrepreneurs and wage workers (Van den Born and Van Witteloostuijn 2013). Freelancers differentiate from other own-account workers by their (preference for) temporary work and the knowledge/skill-intensive services they provide (Kitching and Smallbone 2012).
Despite the widespread phenomenon of own-account workers and freelancers in modern economies, there is hardly any insight in the drivers of freelancers to engage in such behaviour. Although their jobs are characterised by uncertainty and their temporary character, there is not much known about whether there are any (perceived) gains of freelancing compared with other self-employed work. Unsurprisingly, researchers have started to inquire the quality of the jobs of own-account workers (Van Stel and Van der Zwan 2019) and freelancers (Meager 2015), for example in terms of work satisfaction (Meager 2015). In the present paper, we add to this research lacuna by analysing the subjective well-being levels of freelancers to retrieve more knowledge about their drivers to engage in freelancing activities, and the benefits they perceive of engaging in such activities. We compare their subjective well-being levels with other own-account workers, with employers (self-employed workers who have employees) and with wage workers.
Subjective well-being refers to how people think and feel about their lives (Dolan et al. 2008). An important component of subjective well-being is life satisfaction (Diener et al. 1999). Much research has analysed people’s cognitive evaluations of their lives using large-scale surveys and has associated these evaluations with various (individual-level) characteristics (for an overview, see Dolan et al. 2008). In the work domain, for example, there has been an increased interest in the topic of subjective well-being, not the least because of the positive link between satisfaction and productivity (Oswald et al. 2015). Subjective well-being within the domain of self-employment, and freelancing or own-account work more specifically, has been an under-researched theme until now.
The present paper has three contributions. The first contribution is that it is the first to empirically address the relationship between freelancing and su (...truncated)