Work-family conflict in Europe. A focus on the heterogeneity of self-employment

ABSTRACT

This article aims at analysing how subjective work-family conflict is experienced by different self-employed men and women in comparison to employees and informal workers in Europe. Firstly, it focuses on how job-related resources and demands characterise traditional and emerging types of self-employment affecting the perception of work-family conflict. Secondly, it explores both gender-related institutional and societal dimensions, by analysing how the conflict is differently mediated by reconciliation policies and by the degree of gender equality in society. Based on the 6th European Working Condition Survey, findings show that self-employment is a hybrid area of work which, depending on its characteristics, can be more similar to entrepreneurial, dependent or informal work. As for the work-family conflict, the study indicates that self-employment can only mitigate it in the case of ‘dependent self-employment’, a work arrangement which, however, while facilitating the reconciliation of work and family, poses significant problems in terms of quality of the working conditions, especially in the case of women. Genuine forms of self-employment seem instead to represent a source of conflict, and to suffer the lack of gender equality in different European societies and labour markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-employment
• work-family conflict
• job-related demands and resources
• institutional and societal factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Rossella Bozzon is assistant professor in Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan, Italy. She is member of the ERC Project SHARE: Seizing the Hybrid Areas of Work by Re-presenting Self-Employment (2017–2022). Her research interests include welfare state and labour market transformations, non-standard employment relations, gender inequalities and quantitative methods. Her work has been published, among others, in Journal of European Social Policy, European Societies, European Educational Research Journal.

Annalisa Murgia is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan (Italy). She is the PI of the ERC project ‘SHARE – Seizing the Hybrid Areas of Work by Re-presenting self-Employment.’ Her research interests focus on precariousness, emerging forms of organising and gender differences in organisations. She recently (co)edited the volumes The Precarisation of Research Careers: A Comparative Gender Analysis (Routledge, 2018), with Barbara Poggio, and Mapping Precariousness, Labour Insecurity and Uncertain Livelihoods: Subjectivities and Resistance (Routledge, 2017), with Emiliana Armano and Arianna Bove. Email: [email protected]; https://www.unimi.it/en/ugov/person/annalisa-murgia

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the SHARE project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 715950).