Golenkova Z.T., Goliusova Yu.V., Gorina T.I. Contemporary Society: The Urgent Issues and Prospects for Development. RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2020, 20 (4), 821—836

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: http://journals.rudn.ru/sociology/article/view/25213 (дата обращения 22.12.2020)

Abstract

The article considers the development of self-employment in the contemporary society: the history of its representation in legal norms and practices; the scope of informal employment according to statistical and sociological data; definitions of self-employment in the scientific literature. The self-employed are usually defined as not employed in organizations but independently selling goods and services produced by themselves. The global number of the self-employed grows. The authors present an algorithm for calculating the indicator ‘potential self-employed’ based on the secondary analysis of the 27th wave of the RLMS (2018), and stress the lack of a unified methodology for calculating informal employment. According to the official data, the number of the self-employed in Russia ranges from several thousands to several millions, which confuses researchers who study this phenomenon. The article focuses on the results of the study “Self-Employed: Who Are They?” (Moscow, 2019), whose object were not potential but real selfemployed selected on the basis of online advertisements of their services in Moscow. The authors collected information with the method of semi-formalized telephone interview. Based on the collected data, the authors make conclusions about motivating and demotivating factors of self-employment: independence, freedom in planning time and activity, distrust in the state, lack of social guarantees, unpredictable legislation, and imperfect tax system. Today, the status of the self-employed in Russia is still unclear and often substitutes the individual entrepreneur status in order to apply for tax preferences.