Worker entrepreneur

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The term labor entrepreneur comes from the Chemnitz sociologist G. Günter Voss and the Munich sociologist Hans J. Pongratz . You use this term to designate an assumed type of worker who is compelled to deal with his own workforce like an entrepreneur. In their view, the labor entrepreneur could become a new leading social type of global capitalism . This assumption is derived from the delimitation processes in the field of labor, which industrial sociology has observed and intensively discussed in recent years under the term new independence .

features

The workforce entrepreneur is characterized by increased self-control, expanded self- economization , self- rationalization and management of the lifestyle .

Increased self-control

Because companies are increasingly setting results- and market-oriented goals for their employees instead of regulating their work in detail ("How you do the work doesn't matter, the main thing is that the result is right"), employees are forced to do their work themselves within the framework of the Organize and control corporate goals. So you transfer a classic management function to yourself. This development is of course accompanied by increased pressure to perform and new types of indirect control of work.

  • The labor entrepreneur operates more independent planning, control and monitoring of his own activities, i.e. active self-control instead of passive fulfillment of externally set and well-structured requirements. Direct control is largely eliminated and is replaced by indirect control (target specifications, corporate philosophy, etc.).
  • The labor entrepreneur controls and monitors the process of transforming the skill potential into concrete work performance.
  • For this new form of self-regulation, skills in dealing with technical aids for work planning (calendar, cell phone, notebook, palm, etc.) are becoming increasingly important.
  • In contrast to other concepts that deal with the organization of labor, the context of domination in the labor entrepreneur is subjective. This means that the worker has learned to think and act in the interests of the company that controls him, and through self-control he fulfills the expectations placed on him (or anticipated by him).
Extended self-economization

Employees are forced to deal strategically with their own labor - just as if they were entrepreneurs of their own labor. They have to develop and consciously produce their workforce independently and carry out self-marketing as planned .

  • The relationship of the employee to his own labor (as a commodity) changes. The labor entrepreneur is now involved as a strategically acting actor on the internal and external labor market. He is increasingly engaged in an economic use of his own work capacity and an active purpose-oriented “production” and “marketing” of his own skills and services - both on the labor market and within companies.
  • This new quality of the economization of labor takes place on two levels. (1) Your own skills must be specifically built up and further developed and (2) your own workforce must be actively offered and its benefits marketed (read: advertised).
Self-rationalization and management of the lifestyle

Employees are forced to increasingly consciously plan and shape not only their work but also their entire life context, since the boundaries between work and life have become porous.

  • In addition to self-control and self-economization, the labor entrepreneur pursues a growing conscious organization of everyday life and the course of life. This results in an increased tendency towards corporate management of the lifestyle.
  • This goes hand in hand with a formation of individual resources, and consequently an alignment of the entire context of life towards profitability. Associated with this are spatial and temporal frictions in the demarcation between work and private life that is characteristic of classic industrial societies (delimitation of work).

Employee entrepreneurs are therefore highly individualized employees whose employment relationships are only slightly regulated socially and institutionally . Voss and Pongratz assess this type very ambiguously: He has a relatively high degree of freedom from direct external control, but is at the same time forced to replace this external control with strong self-discipline in the sense of the usability of his labor.

The concept of the worker entrepreneur has had a steep career since it was first published in 1998 and is now constantly quoted in discussions about the development and delimitation of work. The tendencies that Voss and Pongratz describe are indisputable; However, the extent to which this type of worker can actually be found empirically as a definable group is disputed . According to Pongratz, employees who correspond to the type of labor entrepreneur are most likely to be among the highly qualified self-employed in the field of media , education and consulting as well as culture , but also among the usually employed software developers and the like. Ä. According to him, employees in low-skilled service work show similar traits, but who have to struggle with far less favorable conditions.

The theoretical development of the labor entrepreneur is currently being expanded with research on the change in consumption and privacy under the heading of “ working customer ”. In doing so, a type of consumer that is complementary to the worker entrepreneur is developed, who can be viewed as the reproductive 'backside' of the entrepreneurial worker.

Criticism of the model of the labor entrepreneur
  • In the empirical study by Pongratz and Voss (2003) it was found that performance optimization (self-control) usually conforms to a security mentality. This contradicts the thesis of self-economization and raises a theoretical problem to explain the workforce entrepreneur concept.
  • Being able to fall back on professionally qualified employees reduces the expenditures of professional organizations in the qualification of their staff. Professionally qualified employees have more options in marketing their workforce, since corporate careers play a structuring role.
  • Released from operational recognition relationships - without orientation options based on organizational career patterns and at the same time without orientation through inter-company institutionalized patterns of qualification development and careers - the labor entrepreneur can only take the risky path of following the changing business cycles, fashions and trends, which are the future industries at ever shorter intervals and make them disappear again.
  • The more complex and qualified the work required, the more the entrepreneur is dependent on loyal self-control by the employees, which cannot be expressed in formal instructions. However, this loyalty cannot be taken for granted.
  • In the prime examples of labor entrepreneurship labor markets, there is a tendency towards professionalization. Employers are again increasingly relying on professionally qualified workers. The motley group of lateral entrants and the flexibly qualified (tending to be labor entrepreneurs) is most likely to be affected by layoffs and has the greatest problems getting back into work .
  • It is possible that the extended self-control occurs precisely when one has a job. It would then just not the ent vocational possible labor entrepreneur, but rather a ver professional lights employees.
  • The "transition" to becoming a labor entrepreneur is not a transition, but a concurrent development. Especially in those areas that are not suitable for mass production and that resist Taylorist rationalization measures, there are types of workers with extended self-control.

literature

  • GG Voss, HJ Pongratz: The worker entrepreneur. A new basic form of labor? In: Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology . H. 1, 1998, pp. 131-158.
  • HJ Pongratz, GG Voss: Employee entrepreneurs - employment orientations in unbounded forms of work. edition sigma, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89404-978-2 .
  • HJ Pongratz, GG Voß: From employee to 'entreployee': Towards a 'self-entrepreneurial' work force? In: Concepts and Transformation. Volume 8, Number 3, 2003, pp. 239-254.
  • HJ Pongratz, GG Voss (ed.): Typically worker entrepreneur? Findings of empirical labor research. edition sigma, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89404-987-1 .
  • Frank Elster: The worker entrepreneur and his education. On the (professional) pedagogical view of the paradoxes of subjectified work. transcript, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-89942-791-2 .
  • Uta Wilkens: Management of Worker Entrepreneurs. Psychological contractual relationships and perspectives for labor policy in knowledge-intensive organizations. Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-8244-0776-0 .

Literature for Criticism

  • Jürgen Strauss: The unfinished worker entrepreneur. In: Eva Kuda (Ed.): Employees as entrepreneurs? Challenges for trade unions and vocational training. Hamburg 2002.
  • Michael Faust: The >> worker entrepreneur << - a central idea on the uncertain path of realization. In: Eva Kuda (Ed.): Employees as entrepreneurs? Challenges for trade unions and vocational training. Hamburg 2002.

Further literature

  • Ulrich Bröckling: The entrepreneurial self. Sociology of a form of subjectivation. Frankfurt am Main 2007.
  • Reinhard Bader, Gerd Keizer, Tim Unger (eds.): Development of entrepreneurial competence in vocational training. Bielefeld 2007.
  • M. Arens, S. Ganguin, KP Treumann: Employee entrepreneurs as e-learners in vocational training. A comparison between adolescents and adults. In: J. Mansel, H. Kahlert (Ed.): Work and identity in adolescence. The effects of the social structural crisis on socialization. Juventa Verlag, Weinheim / Munich 2007, pp. 201–217.

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