Labour,self-entrepreneurship in Brazil and paradoxes of social freedom

Introduction

The end of the Fordist employment regime – as a rule, what does not hinder the existence of jobs characterised as Fordist – encourages us to reflect on the various forms and distinctions pertaining to work and employment. So-called ‘self-entrepreneurship’ is emblematic of what we call the ‘grey zone’ of work and employment, where different combinations of the various traditional analytical categories of the sociology of work are reflected. It entails the institutionalisation of self-employment and personal responsibility for insertion through work. Self-entrepreneurs combine characteristics of the worker and the (very small) capitalist, and approximate employment and market relations, with substantial effects on protection systems associated with work (regulations governing work). Although self-entrepreneurship in itself is not new, its recent institutionalisation, both legal and symbolic, has given rise to a new employment regime. In this article, we draw on 25 semi-directed interviews with ‘self-entrepreneurs’ conducted in the south of Brazil from 2012 to 2015, within the scope of a wider research project. ¹ The overall aim is to explore the paradox between social freedom and precarisation that self-entrepreneurship entails.

The article is structured in four parts. In Section 1, in the context of ‘flexible capitalism’, emerging forms of social insertion through work outside the traditional framework of wage labour are presented, focusing on ‘self-entrepreneurship’. We will argue that self-entrepreneurship is emblematic of this phase of capitalism. In Section 2, we will look at the background of self-entrepreneurship in Brazil and propose a typology of self-entrepreneurship based on empirical exploration. The typology indicates that the various forms of insertion through work are undergoing something of a transformation. This forms the background of the ‘grey zone’ of work and employment. In Section 3, we propose that self-entrepreneurship may be viewed as a labour regime and a vehicle of moral learning; we also look at its impact on forms of collective representation. Finally, in Section 4, we reflect on the paradox of self-entrepreneurship: while being in charge – at least nominally – of one’s own destiny may represent some sort of liberation from subordination to wage labour, it is no model for the social aspects of life. In the analysis of self-entrepreneurship, the notion of social freedom as developed by Axel Honneth vacillates between its social dimension and its individual dimension.

Flexible capitalism and self-entrepreneurship

The sociology of work faces the huge challenge of rethinking labour and employment both within and outside the condition of dependent employment with wages. After the Second World War, the employment regime was based on the Fordist model: this was characterised by male workers in large industries, a clear distinction between workplace and home, one employer rather than multiple employers and stable and full-time jobs. Even though this was not the experience of the whole working population, it was the collective reference for how labour and employment were understood, even in Brazil, where a European-type social economy featuring waged labour never fully took root.

For the past few decades it has been apparent that this model has been shattering, with the emergence of several distinctions and new combinations. At present, employment and labour are characterised by a more pluralistic regime: home working, outsourcing, bogus self-employment, occasional labour and so on. These distinct forms of labour and employment are characterised by new relationships (described as a ‘grey zone’ in Azaïs et al., 2017; Azaïs, 2014). Once removed from the monolithic wage-based paradigm, labour needs to be treated as a larger social issue, ranging from social policies to emerging forms of insertion through work. The notion of a grey zone of work and employment is based on the cumulative effects of multiplying employment regimes strongly associated with globalisation and the rise of new ‘types’ or categories of actors, who seek alternative routes for insertion through work, some of which are more distant from the waged employment regime, while others form new combinations.

What is here called ‘flexible capitalism’, an expression used by Sennett (1999), involves making organisations more flexible and horizontal, with the replacement of hierarchy by network organisations. It is possible to perceive the emergence of a new spirit of capitalism, as claimed by Boltanski and Chiapello (1999), marked by volatility, mobility and constant renewal of projects. This transformation imposes on individuals the obligation of managing themselves, incorporating the logic of capital into their own lives.

Both in liberalism and in neoliberalism, the entrepreneur is a capitalist. But it is important to note, with Lopez-Ruiz (2007), that ‘being a capitalist’ does not mean the same thing in the two cases. In liberalism the entrepreneur was, as a capitalist, a representative of capital, as Marx put it. In neoliberalism, the entrepreneur is a capitalist as a representative of him or herself. There is a stark difference between the two, which indicates a mutation. As the representative of capital the entrepreneur-capitalist was positioned over against the worker, who was the representative of the workforce. As the representative of him or herself, the entrepreneur-capitalist balances the tension between capital and labour within him or herself, interiorizing the counterpoint and thereby extinguishing the discrete existence of the worker (Santos, 2007: 14).

The process currently under way is the transformation of workers into self-entrepreneurs, supposedly in charge of their own destiny with regard to social insertion through work. Particularly since the 1970s we have seen an individuation of social processes, in which increasingly it falls to the individual to be ‘responsible’ for their own social welfare. This also expresses a simultaneous process of ‘decollectivisation’. Rosanvallon (2011) refers to it as a ‘capitalism of singularity’ (capitalisme de singularité) that leaves to – or imposes on – the individual the full management of their social insertion through work. However – and here the paradoxes that we shall later explore in more detail begin to take shape – this ‘singularity’ frames how individuals perceive their own experiences and needs, such that they demand recognition of their own uniqueness and the legitimacy of their personal options. In other words, we face a dual process: there is a search for uniqueness and individual differentiation, while at the same time the individual must be the manager of his or her destiny, which can entail a certain isolation and distance from collective projects. It should be noted – and this will also be explored further – that the paradox resides in the fact that individualisation has begun to be adopted as a collective norm; that is, the collective norm is shifting to valuing self-management.

Our study focuses on the figure of the self-entrepreneur, emblematic of this new phase of capitalism. Self-entrepreneurship as a strategy is clearly adapted to the present context, characterised by a fragmentation of traditional employment relationships. As we shall see, it adopts a number of creative, varied and innovative modes of insertion in the labour market. Self-entrepreneurship is emblematic of strong autonomy-building on the part of workers; it is coming to be defined as a work relationship rather than a job relationship, paving the way for various combinations of venue, space and action (Tripier, 1998).

Self-entrepreneurship is viewed here as a form of work that no longer coincides with a corresponding form of employment, although it can be defined as a type of self-employment. The contract associated with a formal waged job is replaced by a more limited contract for services rendered or for particular products, a contract that lacks the traditional protections for workers established in Brazil’s civil code and articulated through formal employment. This represents a nullification of the typical asymmetry between capital and labour that characterises waged work. ² Self-entrepreneurship transforms one of the most familiar polarities in the world of work, namely, autonomy/subordination, as well as, in the case of Brazil, formality and informality (Rosenfield and Almeida, 2014).

With regard to autonomy/subordination, the self-entrepreneur combines the status of worker (because subsistence depends on working) with that of entrepreneur (finding and maintaining clients, managing one’s own business and related projects, making decisions autonomously, performing activities shaped rather by commercial forces than by labour law).

The interpenetration of formal and informal economic activity in Brazil has been creative, flexible and diverse. A self-entrepreneur might be formal (registering a business in the National Register of Legal Entities (Cadastro Nacional de Pessoa Jurídica – CNPJ); spend periods in full formality and others in full informality; perform declared and not declared (informal) activities simultaneously; provide invoices occasionally, at the client’s request; or acquire invoices from others to meet such requests in the absence of formal registration (Giraud et al., 2014; Rosenfield et al., 2014; Rosenfield and Almeida, 2014). It is important to point out that Brazil was never entirely a wage-based economy, given the number of people who have always lived in the informal economy, lacking the possibility of a formal job. For many, it was never feasible to obtain a job as defined in terms of the standard employment relationship. Even so, the standard employment relationship became a collective reference for how work and jobs should be understood. It is noteworthy that the standard model has formed part of a broad pledge in the country since the 1940s, when labour legislation was instigated. In Brazil, registered (or formal) employment represented a normative reference point to structure individual and collective expectations in relation to desirable standards. However, it never became established in the labour market; nor did it entail employment stability. In other words, although over 50 per cent of the active population has historically been employed in the informal sector, the standard employment relationship continued to be the desirable model pursued in Brazil, even though not accessible to all. ³

The paradigm of waged work, by definition, limits us to the view that the only desirable work is a job with a minimum fixed wage, with the implication that self-employment is associated with precariousness and lack of qualifications. Actually, the situation is more complex, as individual insertion in the world of work can happen in various forms, challenging the argument that ‘autonomous’ work is a synonym for precarity. On the one hand, it can indeed be so, and in social terms individualised alternatives to waged employment can entail the undermining of collective bargaining. At the same time, independent work can be understood to mean conceiving people as free, autonomous individuals entering into contracts on an equal footing and presupposing the possibility of choice, self-responsibility and the unhindered mobilisation of administrative skills. It is, however, necessary to be clear about the various forms of dominance and subordination that can accompany independent work. We should also note the existence of a group of workers who actively seek alternatives to salaried employment, which itself should not always be identified as or assumed to be a socially protected condition. Ultimately, questions arise regarding societies whose socio-economic model is based on wage labour based on legislative protection, as well as regarding historical divisions between salaried and independent work (Abdelnour, 2012). Self-entrepreneurship may mean virtuous and creative forms of insertion through work, but also flexible and precarious forms that are no longer outside the labour market, but inside it.

Self-entrepreneurship in Brazil

Like many other countries, Brazil has recently been developing policies to support the creation of micro and small businesses through incentives for formalisation, social guarantees and fiscal exemptions directed at new entrepreneurs. ⁴ The relevant policies include objectives such as improving public finances (increasing economic activity and using self-employment to bring down unemployment); the formalisation of labour and businesses; and rises in workers’ income. Brazil’s government established a public policy encouraging self-entrepreneurship through the regulation of individual micro-entrepreneurs (microempreendedor individual – MEI) through Complementary Law No. 128 of 12/19/2008. The goals are to incentivise the creation of new formal businesses, as well as to formalise existing businesses with the creation of individual micro-businesses. Conditions include a ceiling on annual earnings (R$60,000, equal to €16,116.04 in September 2017) ⁵ and not being involved in another business as title-holder or partner. Formalisation entails entering the National Register of Legal Entities (CNPJ), which makes it possible to open a bank account, take out loans and issue invoices and receipts, as well as to contribute to social security, which makes one eligible for paid maternity leave, paid medical leave, retirement benefits and so on. Exemption from federal taxes means paying only a fixed monthly rate (between €11 and €12). ⁶ These amounts are adjusted every year, according to the value of the national minimum wage. The announced priority of the MEI regulating public policy is to get those traditionally involved in informal work to become entrepreneurs and enter the formal sector. In the same way, the tax regime Simples Nacional (Complementary Law No. 123/2006, popularly called Super Simples) simplifies taxation procedures and registration bureaucracy for small businesses that make more than the ceiling for the MEI, aimed at micro and small businesses. There is a significant difference between the individual micro-entrepreneur and the micro-entrepreneur. The former have to have maximum gross earnings of R$60,000 and have one single owner without partners, as well as only one employee, who should receive the official minimum wage or, if higher, the standard for the category of work. The latter refers to two larger small-business models (with maximum gross earnings of up to R$360,000 (approximately €98,000), or between R$360,000.01 (approximately €98,001) and R$3,600,000 (approximately €973,000)), enjoying simplified taxation and without ownership limitations.

Research conducted in Brazil in 2012 by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) ⁷ (covering a total of 68 countries), involved interviews with 10,000 people between the ages of 18 and 64 throughout the nation. It found that 30.2 per cent of Brazilians were involved in entrepreneurship (taxa total de empreendedorismo [TTE]). This is substantially higher than the average in the other 67 countries, which was 20.6 per cent. On this basis Brazil ranks 10th globally.

The MEI policy is emblematic of the growth and dissemination of self-entrepreneurship, but it alone does not account for the phenomenon, given the substantial contingent of informal self-entrepreneurs and the longstanding interpenetration of formal and informal work in Brazil. Between 2009 and 2015, five million Brazilians working on their own were formalised as ‘individual micro-entrepreneurs’ (MEIs). In 2017, there were over seven million MEIs in the country ⁸ , of whom 150,000 have been transformed into micro-businesses (earnings above the ceiling specified by MEI regulations).

Colbari (2015) presents the MEI profile in Brazil. ⁹ Before entering the MEI programme, 40.6 per cent were formally employed in some capacity; 30.6 per cent were informal micro-entrepreneurs (not registered as a legal entity); 16.3 per cent were informally employed; 6.5 per cent were housewives; 2.0 per cent were public servants; 1.8 per cent were students; 1.1 per cent were unemployed; 0.8 were formal micro-entrepreneurs (registered as a legal entity); and 0.3 per cent were retired. On the one hand, these data show that the MEI offers an alternative to informal work; on the other, the proportion of those who had earlier been employed formally might indicate that losing a salaried job could be driving people into self-entrepreneurship. Most participants had a fixed workplace: 48.6 per cent operated out of their homes, indicating the importance of home working; 30.2 per cent worked in an office or other commercial establishment; 10.7 per cent worked in the client’s home or company; 8.9 per cent worked in the street; and 1.5 per cent worked in markets or shopping centres.

Asked why they had joined the MEI initiative, 78.5 per cent of the interviewees highlighted the benefits for their business (having a formal business, being able to issue invoices, ease of starting the business, possibility of obtaining loans and carrying out legitimate transactions with other businesses and the government). The author concludes that:

The MEI project reflects a movement to do more to legalise economic segments that historically have been informal, but its strategies have been shaped by the proliferation of modes of work outside wage employment and under the aegis of flexible capitalism. It is part of an initiative to extend social rights in a different direction than traditional efforts to do so on the basis of wage employment. The aim is to provide a corrective to various distortions that affect how such businesses are incorporated into the market economy. However, the possible connections between the regulation of self-employment and the deregulation of the wage model are still far from being understood. (Colbari, 2015: 185; translation from the Portuguese)

In an earlier work (Rosenfield and Almeida, 2014) we sought to describe the diverse circumstances in which people join the labour force through self-entrepreneurship by using a typology adapted from Vivant (2016) to Brazilian circumstances. By interviewing MEIs and small individual entrepreneurs, we have been able to draw a picture demonstrating the range of combinations of social insertion via self-entrepreneurship:

Genuine self-entrepreneurs: those who stand to gain the most from self-entrepreneurship in two senses. First, freeing themselves from waged jobs and being successful in their own terms. Here we find small entrepreneurs looking to initiate social insertion on their own terms, together with consultants and IT workers. One example is a 26-year-old MEI who starts a business as a financial broker (loan granted by the National Institute of Social Security [INSS] to retired people and pension recipients) and uses this as a step toward becoming an ‘actual’ micro-entrepreneur; that is, without any fiscal incentive and no limit on earnings. In a second category there are those who were able to leave informality behind. The example here is a 58-year-old bricklayer who becomes an individual micro-entrepreneur after 30 years in the informal market. Having already retired, he created the business to move up to the symbolic status of citizen with rights. This is about obtaining social recognition and citizenship in a world from which he stood apart for his whole professional life as an informal worker.

We shall now present an example that clearly shows the novel, creative combinations this can entail.

A 52-year-old male worker employs relatives in his five leather-working shops that provide materials for a single shoe company that itself receives outsourcing contracts from a larger company (thus working in ‘complete informality’ or as a ‘fourth-party’ or quarteirização). He, his son and his brother-in-law work in the small workshop at the back of the house for a single third-party company in the shoe industry, in a situation of total dependency. Shoe industry companies today only really concern themselves with management and design; the rest is outsourced. The industry company contacts the third party, which gets workers to cut the shoes and others to sew them and has them delivered in a box, ready to be sold with the company brand. The business is fully informal, with the self-entrepreneur paying for social security autonomously, which will provide him with his retirement benefits. His son and his brother-in-law are informal workers. His son also pays social security contributions as an autonomous worker. The man’s 49-year-old wife, who stitches shoes, is also a leaser (of both space and equipment) and an informal worker in the ‘fourth-party’ business located in a part of her house. At the front of their property there is a sewing area or ‘factory space’, in which space and machinery are rented to her niece, who herself commands three informal workers. Again, this provides a portrait of total dependence on demand from outsourced businesses working in the shoe industry, in this case, the production of tennis shoes (Rosenfield and Almeida, 2014: 262).

There are seemingly endless combinations of the forms of insertion through work, characterised by different modes of independence and subordination, formality and informality, stability and mobility, forming what we call the ‘grey zone’ of work and employment. The strategies of insertion through work are built from a combination of a need to work and particular possibilities of insertion in the labour market. The actors make available their personal resources and capabilities, which can be both objective (competences, skills, labour market context, job offers, identification of work and service provision niches and fringes, income opportunities) and subjective (desires, prospects, personal plans, insights, evaluations).

Self-entrepreneurship as a new work and employment regime

A major shift seems to be under way with regard to paid work. However, there are many open questions concerning both the designation and the meaning of this transformation. Our hypothesis is that it all points to contract-based work relationships not as linear, but with continual back and forth and variable combinations, in a complex and paradoxical movement. Contract-based work relationships lead workers to the condition of self-entrepreneur and to self-responsibility for social insertion and working careers, and this is becoming a new ethos of capitalism, a kind of moral learning, establishing a new work and employment regime.

The phenomenon of contractualisation thus never involves law giving way to contract or a retreat from dirigisme in favour of laissez-faire. Far from signifying a return to the contractual origins of labour law it finds expression in the emergence of new concepts and new legal methods aimed at overcoming the opposition between heteronomy and autonomy. (Supiot, 2003: 62, translated from the French)

Self-entrepreneurship policies function, in social terms, as employment policy, either for the self-employed (as ‘entrepreneurs’) or to substitute employment contracts. From an individual perspective, self-entrepreneurship may represent an indeterminate zone of labour relationships, in which people are required to try to use their own objective and subjective resources to enter the labour market as worker-entrepreneurs. However, in institutional terms, this is employment policy. When transforming potential workers into self-entrepreneurs, the institutionalisation of this form of work insertion distorts the labour market by reducing official unemployment numbers and improving the incomes of the working population. Thus, public and business policies aimed at encouraging the mobilisation and regulation of work, associated with moral entreaties in favour of and social recognition of self-entrepreneurship, point to the development of a new employment regime.

Thus, for Duncan Gallie, employment standards are important above all because they reflect, ‘at least for a given period, the political compromise inherent in a set of cultural practices and cognitive frameworks of social interaction’ (Gallie, 2008: 17). If one takes such a standpoint seriously, these standards are not mainly the result of objective and tangible regulatory practices, but rather of a ‘political compromise’ that one could characterise as a representation that is temporarily dominant, explicitly or implicitly accepted and structures actors’ attitudes and expectations in the labour market (Giraud et al., 2014: 36, translated from the French).

The self-entrepreneurship regime might turn out to be an instrument for internalising the values needed to affirm self-management. It is not merely a change in the rules or forms of entry to the world of work, but also a cultural transformation of interiorised values and ‘moral learning’, encompassing the notion of autonomy and self-management; justifications for the social impositions of the present historical moment (economic crisis and the supposed impossibility for businesses to retain and pay their employees); the weakening of social support; and a business ethos. Values such as self-esteem and self-confidence, personal merit, self-control and autonomy are supposed to provide the underpinnings for a new social norm, changing how individuals conceive their insertion in society and achieve it in practice.

The diffusion of self-entrepreneurship and its moral learning imply the promotion of independence, posing new questions as to how to defend individual and collective interests. When self-entrepreneurship is combined with salaried work, a hybridisation of statutes occurs that the traditional collective organisations will have to tackle by organising around such categories as worker or entrepreneur.

The fragmentation and individualisation of working and employment conditions are weakening collective dynamics and solidarity among workers. Since salaried work ceased to be the rule, unions and other social movements have faced the tough challenge of rethinking forms of security and protection for workers who are subject to a new employment regime, characterised by contract-based work and individual and novel forms of insertion through work.

The worker becomes an entrepreneur of himself when thrown back on his own competences and emotional resources in the service of individualised projects. If the self-entrepreneur is a worker with the characteristics of a capitalist, responsible for management and insertion in the market, the possibility of trade union representation is clearly weakened and perhaps even legally unfeasible.

Research by SEBRAE (2012 – with data collected until April 2012) shows that the introduction of the Individual Micro-Entrepreneur (MEI) tends to be characterised by a low level of association and interest in trade union activities, which could signal a weakening of collective action. In the research, the interviewees also stated whether their relations with their labour association or union had changed following the formalisation of Individual Micro-Entrepreneur status. A total of 72 per cent said that the question did not apply to them; 10 per cent claimed that it had improved; and 18 per cent answered that there had been no change at all. The high percentage of ‘does not apply’ indicates a low level of association and union activity among Individual Micro-Entrepreneurs; in other words, it is possible that Individual Micro-Entrepreneurs have little or no contact with workers’ associations and unions.

Trade unions that predominantly continue to practise traditional workers’ representation need to review their approach to action and representation. Among other things, they need to seek some sort of rapprochement with social movements not directly linked to the issue of work, cooperative workers (collective ownership), autonomous workers and self-entrepreneurs who are workers with the controversial characteristic of being ‘almost’ a capitalist. The social role of the unions is undeniable, both concerning democratic achievements and the legitimation of workers’ rights. Both in Brazil and in the Western world in general, enormous challenges have been imposed on unions since the large-scale restructuring of production got under way. These challenges include technological innovation, deregulation of workers’ rights and ‘flexibilisation’ of the labour market, the growth of different types of employment contract and forms of insertion through work (such as self-entrepreneurship), increasing informality, subcontracting, and numerous combinations and modes of employment and/or work relationships. This bewildering array of factors makes it more and more difficult to fit work and employment into the traditional models used by Brazilian unions, like unions everywhere.

Thus, it is becoming evident that we need new concepts and new legal techniques (to cope with changes affecting every area of the law, such as the state, trade unions, salaried workers, management and so on) to enable us to overcome the traditional opposition between heteronomy and subordination. The boundaries that would make sense of such an opposition, however, are inappropriate for trying to make sense of the kind of intermediate, hybrid and diversified situation envisaged by the notion of the ‘grey zone’.

In the face of this complex and paradoxical picture, which entails a permanent tension between autonomy and subordination, how can we approach social justice within the framework of self-management? This last point will be developed in Section 4 and may serve as a basis on which we can reflect on the relationship between work and social freedom in the sense developed by Axel Honneth.

Self-entrepreneurship and social freedom

In theoretical and analytical terms, self-entrepreneurship has emerged from a socio-historical conjuncture characterised by the fragmentation of the Fordist model, as well as by criticisms of the subordination inherent in salaried-work relationships. Public policy aimed at encouraging self-entrepreneurship is framed as not intended to weaken employment relationships, but it cannot be denied that it has emerged hand in hand with increasing socio-economic precarity, falling wages and an employment crisis.

As self-entrepreneurship progressively replaces wage-based employment relations, a new capitalist ethos seems to be emerging based on the values of individualism and self-management. Autonomous workers are paid by clients who need their labour. The boundaries between autonomy and subordination, between insertion by means of ‘proper’ or precarious work are shifting and becoming more imprecise.

I am interested here in how Honneth’s (2014) discussion of justice, with reference to the ethical aspects of the labour market, might help us to understand what is just against the backdrop of the present multiplicity of jobs and work relationships. Self-entrepreneurship serves as an empirical basis that enables us to reflect on the paradox of freedom and precarity in relation to labour and justice. The author’s development of the concept of social freedom within the framework of the labour market represents a major contribution.

He highlights the notion of freedom as the central value underpinning a modern, capitalist and democratic society. Social justice is built on the ethical value of liberty, which, in turn, depends on individual autonomy, so that justice, freedom and individual autonomy are deeply interdependent in modern societies. The search for individual autonomy is interpreted in terms of demands for reciprocal recognition, and can be fully attained only under favourable social conditions. The labour market, he argues, would be taking a wrong turn if it sacrificed cooperation and solidarity for individualised forms of insertion. This is where our empirical object, self-entrepreneurship, comes in, symbolising a form of autonomy (no longer wage-based and independent of social insertion through work) that may or may not give rise to more freedom.

Honneth considers different interpretations of the concept of freedom, which can be summarised in terms of three perspectives: negative, reflexive and social. ¹⁰ Our main point of interest here, social freedom, would appear to be linked to cooperation and interdependence; in other words, through it, different actors’ self-established goals enable one another to grow. This form of freedom is the most complex and represents the real value of social life. It can be realised by means of institutions (understood as sets of customs and practices) in which one becomes aware of mutual dependence in the socialisation process (Rosenfield et al., 2015).

In Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Honneth (2014) describes three institutional spaces that are important to modernity because they guarantee forms of mutual recognition: personal relationships (friendships, family, intimate partnerships); market economy (sphere of consumption and the labour market); and the public-political sphere (public life and the rule of law). Concerning our particular interest here, Honneth claims that self-responsibility in the labour market has become a value in and of itself. This undermines the ability to conduct a common, shared struggle and instead promotes individualising strategies, which ultimately threaten the very possibility of social freedom. If the wage-based employment model has hitherto meant – and it means the same thing in Brazil, although it has never been a general norm – security, stability and constant, predictable remuneration, this new phase of capitalism is characterised by new work structures that are intrinsically less standardised, secure and well defined. Individuals enter the market through labour in many different ways, in various combinations of legal and one-off practical forms, as was already mentioned. Honneth asserts that in the market competition crowds out cooperation and promotes political apathy; its social effects include atomisation and social anomie, undermining social freedom.

The author illustrates current adverse social developments in terms of the relationship characteristic of wage-based society between the working class and the capitalist class. This relationship paves the way for the socialisation and regulation of the labour market. By contrast, the present atomisation that characterises entry to the world of work tends to weaken the social character of the labour market, and induces the scrambling of wage employment relations and the constitution of new work and employment relationships.

To illustrate a moral understanding of the market as it actually exists Honneth takes up the history of labour struggle and its links to the values of a democratic society. He refers to workers’ rights (guaranteeing stability and security), education reforms (to facilitate equal opportunity in the labour market) and demands for the humanisation of work (with regard to the elimination of repetitive tasks and the need for workers’ participation in management to moderate the drive to maximise profit at all costs), all hallmarks of a progressive approach to the market as a social project. (Rosenfield et al., 2015)

This state of affairs began to fail from the 1970s, with the crisis of the wage-based society and the encroachment of new forms of injustice in the labour market. By taking the wage-based system as the baseline in terms of measuring losses, flexibilisation and atomisation, Honneth avoids having to address the wage-based society as an object of criticism in its own right. Nevertheless, he does make an important contribution to highlighting the consequences of the flexibilisation of wage-based employment, which offered more protection and less volatility. The paradigm of a wage-based society gives rise to the notion of waged work as desirable and self-entrepreneurship as precarious. The challenge is to escape the idealisation of both waged work and ‘independent work’. Reality has proven to be far more complex. Freedom is characterised by paradoxes whether achieved through waged or autonomous work.

Thus, it is important to call attention to the paradoxes of freedom (Honneth, 2006). In a previous publication the author tried to show that individualism in modern societies is not threatened by the functional demands of capitalism; on the contrary, it became an ally in the promotion of new values in the course of the passage from Taylorism to neoliberalism, such as individual initiative, flexibility, multi-skilling and mobility.

Honneth observes that the entire life of the individual can be seen as preparation for fulfilling economic and other productive functions that demand a capacity for significant change, love of risk-taking and [willingness to] renounce the security of stable work and a reliable pay check. The paradox is that all this is required in the name of individual self-realisation. (Pinzani, 2013: 296; translation from the Portuguese)

The notion of paradox harbours great potential for comprehending losses and gains in the same, legitimised normative vocabulary. Flexibility, constant adaptation, increased individual autonomy, limited margin of choice, individual insertion combined with the weakening of the notion of social class mobilisation, individualisation and eroding networks of social protection can all be regarded at the same time as gains or losses. However, they may also constitute value-based promises pointing in the direction of the values of self-realisation and freedom. These values confer legitimacy on capitalism’s current orientation, since (paradoxically) they involve the combination and intertwining of losses and gains. Waged work is not necessarily always desirable, but it is taken as the model to follow, while independence, associated with freedom, can lead to subordination and precarisation.

On the one hand, the various forms of self-entrepreneurship constitute individual alternatives of autonomy, authenticity and rupture with the subordination that typically characterises waged employment. On the other, such forms of insertion into the market cannot be regarded as a project of social freedom for everyone. The contemporary dilemma is how to conceive of freedom and equality in a society in which individuals are far more preoccupied with registering differences and singularities than with affirming similarities and collective ties (Castel, 2012). Self-management points to a form of independence and autonomy (which can represent gains in terms of social freedom), but at the same time to a weakening of cooperation and solidarity in society as a collective project, which entails losses of social freedom. If social freedom forms the ethical foundation for social justice, simultaneous gains and losses in terms of social freedom highlight the paradox of self-entrepreneurship in the social construction of justice in the world of work.

Final remarks

All the evidence indicates that we stand before a process of social change characterised by increasing contract-based employment. The mobilisation of self-entrepreneurial labour seems to be becoming a new employment norm, bringing into being specific forms of work, as well as applying new values to insertion through work. The self-entrepreneurship system is an instrument for internalising the values required for self-management and, simultaneously, whereby a normative rule of insertion through work is formed. Self-entrepreneurship, understood as emblematic of the present phase of capitalism, represents the institutionalisation of self-employment and self-responsibility for insertion through work by the actors themselves.

Based on the exploration of self-entrepreneurship in the Brazilian context, myriad forms of insertion through work by means of self-entrepreneurship emerge (see the proposed typology). The paradoxical forms of the combination of autonomy and precarisation are obvious. Self-management leads to managing oneself and new ways of thinking about the collective project come to the fore. The self-entrepreneur is simultaneously a worker and a very small capitalist who must manage his business and seek his own corner of the market. The established trade union logic faces a huge challenge to achieve the representation of this sui generis worker, who unites work and capital in a single actor.

The logic of entrepreneurship favours the individualisation of social insertion through work and thus poses a challenge to the traditional forms of collective participation. While working autonomously and being a self-manager represents more individual freedom, at the same time it weakens collective support and cooperation. Can such autonomy be a source of social freedom in the sense developed by Honneth (2014)? There is individual freedom in being one’s own boss, but this is not sufficient to serve as a model for society as a whole. Freedom risks losing its social dimension while in pursuit of more individualised forms of social insertion. Self-responsibility cannot be spun into a collective project of social justice. But at the same time, wage-based employment no longer seems to offer universal solutions, whether practical or ideal. The paradoxes that emerge from the analysis of employment relations under self-entrepreneurship – autonomy versus subordination, individual freedom versus collective cooperation, wage-based job versus independence, formal versus informal modes of work – point to a multiplicity of relationships outside standard models of the working world and reveal the porosity of many of the conceptual boundaries on which such models are built. This is the ‘grey zone’ of work and employment. The nature of work has to be rethought if we hope to create the kind of society we desire to live in.