Welfare Dependency,the Enterprise Culture and Self-Employed Survival

New right discourses about a welfare underclass advance the idea that a significant proportion of the long-term unemployed prefer benefit dependency to working for a living. The alternative to this `dependency culture' is the `enterprise culture', the most tangible manifestation of which is the rapid growth in self-employment and the number of new, small firms in the UK over the past fifteen years. Whilst sociologists have engaged with debates abut the `underclass', surprisingly few studies have examined the motivations, values and experiences of those who appear to have moved out of `benefit dependency' into self-employed enterprise. Qualitative research explored the experiences of working-class people in Teesside who attempted to `become their own boss'. It follows the progress of `young entrepreneurs' over several years into the mid-1990s and complements this with an investigation of adults in business. The realities of survival self-employment developed in the face of permanently high rates of local unemployment do not accord with notions of an `enterprise culture', nor of a `dependency culture', but are better understood as part of a growing culture of informal and risky work.