High-skilled solo self-employment

Abstract

In many countries, and certainly throughout Europe, self-employment continues to play an increasingly important role in market dynamics (e.g., de Vries et al. 2019; Fritsch et al. 2019; Luber and Leicht 2000). Self-employed individuals working on their own account for the lion’s share of this emerging trend (e.g., Kitching 2015), as most individuals with self-employment experience are solo self-employed (e.g., Blanchflower 2000; Bögenhold 2019). Attesting to the growing interest in and research on the self-employment phenomenon (Koch et al. 2019), scholars have, for instance, investigated the attitudes and motivations of these individuals (e.g., Carter et al. 2003; Koch et al. 2019; Kolvereid 1996), their expressions of grief over career setbacks (e.g., Shepherd 2003), and their diverse individual profiles in terms of motivations (opportunity versus necessity; e.g., Block and Sandner 2009; de Vries et al. 2019; Parker 2018), types of entrepreneurs (e.g., serial entrepreneurs; e.g., Burton et al. 2016; Dobrev and Barnett 2005), and firm size (e.g., Van Stel and de Vries 2015).