Ver artículo

Drawing on the ideas of related areas, an informed design for the study of self-employment is developed. The study uses retrospective career life-history data from West Germany to model the process by which individuals move into and out of episodes of self-employment. The analysis focuses on (1) the process of entry into self-employment at various stages of the career; and (2) the career differences between the self-employed and the conventionally employed. In general terms, the findings show that those factors that account for one stage of the self-employment experience do not necessarily account for others. More substantively, the findings of this study point to the strong effects of social structural variables, especially those related to the family, as well as to the effects of previous self-employment experience.