One of the most documented consequences of self-employment is loneliness at work. Some self-employed workers join or build a collective. An ethnographic approach was conducted with two self-employed collectives located in third places. This article reports on the corpus analysis, composed of biographical interviews and observation traces, that outlines the biographies of these collectives. This research offers the opportunity to shed light on the links between personal life stories and the history of a collective. The essential contribution of this exploratory study is to reveal the experiential and emancipatory resources of individuals who wish to reinvent their profession in an autonomous way while “forming a collective.”
Keywords
- Self-employment
- biographical approach
- ethnography
- work collective