Culture and Organization

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‘Selling themselves’: conceptualising key features

of freelance work experience

Casper Hoedemaekers

To cite this article: Casper Hoedemaekers (2021) ‘Selling themselves’: conceptualising

key features of freelance work experience, Culture and Organization, 27:5, 345-364, DOI:
10.1080/14759551.2020.1833206

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CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION
2021, VOL. 27, NO. 5, 345–364
https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2020.1833206

‘Selling themselves’: conceptualising key features of freelance

work experience
Casper Hoedemaekers
Organisation Studies and HRM group, Essex Business School, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Existing research on freelance workers has highlighted its distinctiveness in Received 11 February 2018
terms of vocation, precariousness, work-life boundaries, professional Accepted 2 October 2020
autonomy and co-working. However, there is a need to better
KEYWORDS
understand the lived experience of freelance working and its impact on Freelance; precarious work;
practitioners compared to traditional employment. Using Arendt’s (1958. Arendt; self; sociality
The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
conceptualisation of human activities, I analyse a case study of
freelancers through notions of work, labour and action in order to
conceptualise distinctive features of freelance work experience. This
analysis brings into focus how freelance workers manufacture social
arrangements and represent their output and work persona within their
respective marketplace, whilst involved in and reliant on non-
instrumental forms of sociality. Arendt’s concepts make it possible to
conceptualise tensions and contradictions within the underlying ends of
everyday freelance activities, and how this affects freelancers on an
experiential level.

Introduction
In 1935, Bertrand Russell was convinced that the problem of work would be resolved within a gen-
eration, given rapid technological advances taking place at the time. Three generations later, we are
no closer to achieving Russell’s aspirations. Neoliberalism has instead intensified work, driven down
wages and injected further insecurity into the lives of workers. The post-war social compact of insti-
tutionalised industrial relations, inflation-linked wages, collective bargaining, full employment and
long-term job security now seems like a golden age of waged labour.
Much of our thinking about work, organisation and its wider effects on selves and society has
been implicitly based on this relatively recent history, in which we unwittingly assume the existence
of traditional employment relations, organisations as the main locus of labour, and work effort as
fundamentally tied to salaried employment contracts. However, increasingly such taken-for-
granted assumptions are being overturned by emerging realities of work where declining job secur-
ity, low and intermittent income and the disintegration of labour markets are impacting the work-
force (Fleming 2017; De Peuter 2014; Standing 2011). In discussing such questions, economic aspects
are often understandably in the foreground. Commentators point to how insecure work and low pay
permeate the lives of precarious workers, affecting anything from housing (Zukin 2010; Harvey
2013), career prospects and educational development (Standing 2011) to psychological well-being
(Ertel et al. 2005; Berardi 2009).

CONTACT Casper Hoedemaekers [email protected] Organisation Studies and HRM group, Essex Business School,
University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex C04 3SQ, UK
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
346 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

Other research has examined major changes in work and social relations. Commentators have
highlighted the increasing blurring of work and non-work (Virno 2004; Hardt and Negri 2001;
Vallas and Cummins 2015; Gregg 2011), in a wider attempt to demonstrate the commodification
of social spaces and relations. Such research, often undertaken from an autonomist Marxist stand-
point, demonstrates how productive efforts often take place within the social realm, outside of
paid work. Indeed, research on self-employed creative workers shows how central identity and
immediate social context are to work itself (McRobbie 1998; Storey, Salaman, and Platman 2005;
Loacker 2013; Grugulis and Stoyanova 2012; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2012). This importance of
highly specific social constructs to increasingly prevalent forms of self-employed work deserves
more attention, especially concerning the lived experience of practitioners.
This highlights the importance of understanding how shifts in work towards self-employment,
contracting and precarity impact on individuals and communities. Given the rise of the ‘gig
economy’ and self-employed work, we need to further understand how such work is embedded
within social relations, which specific social arrangements it relies on and how these are produced,
and what the effects are on lived experience of practitioners. This is especially important given that
social relations, goods and community are increasingly sites of capitalist expropriation (Virno 2004;
De Peuter 2014; Arvidsson 2007).
Recent research has highlighted distinctive difference in the lives of freelancers and the self-
employed, as reflected the centrality of networking (Grugulis and Stoyanova 2012), the importance
of co-working spaces and arrangements (Merkel 2015), the close linkage of personal identity and
one’s work activity and output (McRobbie 1998), and alternative conceptions of value in terms of
the process, such as those informed by aesthetics or craft (Banks 2010; Blair 2001; Bell and Vachhani
2020). However, we lack an integrated way of conceptualising these aspects of freelance working,
and how freelance work activity is socially embedded and sustained.
In this paper I argue there is a marked difference not only in the institutional embedding and econ-
omic repercussions of freelance work, but also in the way it is experienced. To remedy this, I undertake
an in-depth analysis of the lived experience of freelance workers. Using Arendt’s (1958) phenomen-
ology of human activity, I analyse interview accounts of freelancers through categories of work, labour
and action in order to conceptualise the distinctive features of freelance work experience.
This is particularly important because many concepts for understanding work still assume the tra-
ditional employment relationship in some form or another. Using the work of Arendt, which devel-
ops a historical contrast between modern full-time salaried work and work in antiquity and medieval
history, we can reflect on some of these assumptions and rethink the conceptual basis of work using
the perspective of freelancers themselves, and develop understanding of the social embeddedness
of freelance working. In doing so, this paper connects with research on the appropriation of social
commons and the immaterial labour through which they are produced (Hardt and Negri 2001; Virno
2004; De Peuter 2014). It also provides insight into the ‘work-for-labour’ that self-employed, freelance
and precarious workers use to operate within the labour markets, extending research on contingent
work and its social context (McRobbie 1998; Sennett 1998; Storey, Salaman, and Platman 2005).
This paper also provides additional theoretical depth to analysis of experience at work by using
Arendt’s notion of human activities as a lens. While there is an established basis for using Arendt’s
work in relation to business ethics and management (Spoelstra 2010; Paulsen 2018; Van Diest and
Dankbaar 2008; Henning 2011), it has not been used as a primary basis for the empirical analysis
of work. Doing so allows us to interpret the experiences of freelance workers through the
different modalities of work in Arendt’s framework, and thereby to discern underlying and some-
times contradictory ends in freelance working life such as fabrication, the reproduction of life, and
the inhabiting and manufacturing of social spaces. The conceptualisation of these differing ends
elaborates and extends commonly acknowledged features of freelance working, such as networking,
co-working and identity work, and sheds crucial light on the role of meaning and experience within
this. By reading freelance work experience through Arendt’s conceptualisation of work, a more
complex insight into the challenges and ramifications of self-employment is obtained.
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 347

Freelancing work: autonomy, sociality and precarity

There has been considerable research into self-employment, documenting changes in employment
relations. Many commentators have engaged critically with Handy’s (1984) concept of the portfolio
worker, which paints self-employed workers as proactive agents striving for increased work auton-
omy and personal freedom. This critical engagement follows what Smeaton (2003) argues is the
complacency by earlier commentators to question Handy’s assumptions (e.g. Cohen and Mallon
1999). Handy’s ‘portfolio model’ of self-employment views it as ‘a move away from alienating
bureaucratic control toward independence, and task and time sovereignty’ (Smeaton 2003, 380).
Warhurst and Thompson (1998) are prominent detractors of this model, viewing self-employment
largely as a refuge for those forcibly excluded from waged employment. Most accounts fall into
one of two camps, one examining the economic, social and institutional ‘sidetracking’ of those in
self-employment, and the other foregrounding the autonomy of self-employment and its cultural
resonance in terms of breaking with traditional employment structures (Barley and Kunda 2006;
Smeaton 2003).
These positions do not necessarily contradict each other, but rather point out the necessity of
evaluating the agency involved in becoming self-employed. Stanworth and Stanworth (1995) intro-
duce a typology of why people freelance. They argue that freelancers can be classified as refugees
(unable to find in-house jobs), missionaries (freelance by choice) and trade-offs (freelance by because
circumstances outside of work). Fraser and Gold (2001) add a fourth category to this: the convert,
referring to those who start freelancing out of necessity but remain there by choice. But much atten-
tion is given to the individual dynamics of freelancing. It is, for example, likely that the account given
by someone working as a freelancer will privilege an agential view of themselves rather than a more
passive one, given that they are self-managing their careers in a complex labour market. And prevail-
ing discourses on the primacy of markets, enterprise culture (DuGay 1996; Vallas and Cummins 2015)
and neoliberal governmentality (Rose 1999; Loacker 2013) likely influence how workers articulate
their personal and professional histories. Taking this idea further, Storey, Salaman, and Platman
(2005) carefully show how freelancers’ identities are constructed in relation to enterprise discourse.
Studies of precariousness in work have generally argued that self-employed status deeply affects
one’s personal life (Sennett 1998; Standing 2011; see also Collinson 2003). There is evidence that the
insecurity and unpredictability of freelance work influences health and well-being (Ertel et al. 2005;
D’Amours and Legault 2013). Dex, Willis, and Paterson (2000) argue using a large-scale survey of free-
lancers in broadcasting that uncertainty is a major concern for the workers. They respond to this in
various ways, such as by diversifying their sources of income, collecting useful information and build-
ing informal contacts. In their research, the respondents in their forties are hit hardest by uncertainty
and experience high stress levels as a result of this.
Surveying such contributions, we can say that there are a number of aspects that are distinctive to
freelancing compared to traditional salaried employment. One key aspect of freelancing is network-
ing by creating connections with peers and potential clients (Fraser and Gold 2001; Hesmondhalgh
and Baker 2012; Blair 2001). This is a way of building social capital that creates stable working
relationships and additional work commissions. However, in many professions, such as the cultural
industries, the necessary social and cultural capital is highly skewed towards white, male and middle-
class entrants (Randle, Forson, and Calveley 2015; Grugulis and Stoyanova 2012), and this substan-
tially affects job market opportunities. An important challenge concerning social capital in self-
employment is how it develops over the course of working life, and how it is related to social
milieu, market access and work opportunities.
Another aspect of freelancing is the importance of co-working for self-employed workers (Spi-
nuzzi 2012). Co-working is not the same as networking: networking refers to the building of relation-
ships with potential clients and peers. Co-working in existing research refers to self-employed
workers’ use of shared physical workspaces and their social function. Merkel (2015) argues that
co-working spaces increase the potential for collaboration, and function as ‘a sociomaterial
348 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

infrastructure that enables networks of communication across a diverse set of people within and
across cities, and a platform for new economic, political, and social action’ (135). However,
Gandini (2015) cautions against an overly positive view, and points out that co-working spaces
can be seen to embody many contradictions of the casualised and precarious labour market, such
as intercompetition between workers, or the ‘branding’ of co-working spaces themselves as exten-
sions of one’s reputation. A lingering question concerning co-working is whether such sites and prac-
tices are conducive to the development of collective forms of professional practice, sociality, or even
political organisation.
A third aspect of freelancing is that of autonomy and freedom (Banks 2010). Fraser and Gold
(2001) argue that freelancers obtain a higher degree of control over deadlines and remuneration
compared to full-time employment. In a subsequent study, Gold and Fraser (2002) outline success
factors such as membership of relevant professional bodies, connecting with fellow freelancers,
having a financial safety net, and perseverance in building a practice. However, these are strongly
related to social, cultural and economic capital, which is dependent on class, ethnicity and gender
(Randle, Forson, and Calveley 2015). The playing field, then, is certainly not level. But these elements
can be shaped by hard and tenacious work over time by those who survive in their profession. Never-
theless, the straightforward notion of autonomy as inherent in self-employment is problematic in
light of this, and warrants further elaboration.
There are therefore further questions that arise from existing research. Firstly, we should further
study the dynamics of social networks with peers and potential clients in freelance working, and how
they are built and maintained. Secondly, it is important to more fully understand what freelancers do
to become visible in the marketplace, and how this affects their wider social networks and relations.
And thirdly, as insecurity and precariousness are a pressing concern, it is important to understand
how the challenges of freelance working are experienced by practitioners, and how they relate to
social relations that arise as part of freelancing practice.
To more fully conceptualise these aspects of freelance work and its context, it is necessary to
focus specifically on the meaning of work as a human activity. For this, Arendt provides a key set
of theoretical insights because she formulates a theory of working life through a phenomenological
lens, accounting for the varying nature of tasks undertaken and their social embeddedness through
the lived experience of being. Arendt argues that what we understand as work breaks down into
different fundamental spheres of life activity, characterised by different ends. Since existing research
on freelance work signals the crucial role of social networks and context, visibility in the marketplace,
and insecurity and precariousness, Arendt’s layered conceptualisation of work as composed of
different fundamental activities allows us to interrogate and bring into focus how the realities of free-
lance working are accommodated in practitioners’ experience. This also allows us to reflect on the
ramifications of freelance work on a psychological and social level, in addition to its more widely
explored economic implications. To this end, I will discuss Arendt’s theory of human activity in
further detail below.

Arendt, social organisation and the world of work

Hannah Arendt’s work has had a broad-ranging influence within philosophy, political theory, and
sociology, but has not been widely used in the field of organisation and management studies,
with some notable exceptions (Van Diest and Dankbaar 2008; Henning 2011; Spoelstra 2010;
Paulsen 2018). Her book The Human Condition nevertheless holds great relevance for our under-
standing of work and organisation. Originally conceived as a critique of Marx, she develops an
insightful analysis of Western capitalist modernity by tracing its emergence from classical Greek phil-
osophy. As a phenomenologist, she strives to understand the nature of being through an inquiry into
experience. However, rather than following Heidegger’s primacy of thought over action, she argues
that our engagement with the world around us is what makes us quintessentially human. As such,
she investigates the fundamental human activities (‘vita activa’) of labour, work and action. These are
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 349

not empirical behaviours, but rather represent ontological horizons of being in relation to the world.
From the perspective of organisation and management studies, it is remarkable that Arendt makes a
philosophical distinction between work and labour. This allows for a fundamental interrogation into
what constitutes productive effort. She argues that human endeavour can be distinguished by its
process and by what it engenders.
Labour describes activity aimed at the reproduction of life. In ancient Greece, such activity was
confined to the household, through cultivating the soil and harvesting its produce, hunting,
tending livestock, preparing food, caring and nursing, and other activity largely considered part of
domesticity. These activities follow biological rhythms of nature and the human body, responding
to needs that make themselves felt affectively. The production here is cyclical, serving to maintain
the human body (Arendt 1958, 110). Labour tends to necessity and subsistence, and does not
leave a meaningful trace within the world, with its output immediately consumed. As such, the
figure of labour is that of the animal laborans, the labouring animal, because we share this toil for
our survival with animals. As such, it is the least human of the vita activa. Its cyclical, biologically
bound cycle can only strive to produce comfort and abundance (or what we might call happiness),
but remains fundamentally removed from social, worldly life.
This can be contrasted with work, the activity that aims at world building. Work describes the
process of making objects that are durable, and useful for a role within the world of things. Work
produces the environment in which life is lived. This is not strictly about the world of material
things, for Arendt acknowledges too that writing for example largely belongs to the category of
work. Work’s manufactured artifice underlies the world of appearances (Bowring 2011, 18), even
though work itself does not belong to the public world of appearances. Work can be associated
with craft, with the mastery of skills that can turn a pre-conceived notion into a finished object,
‘an independent entity […] added to the human artifice’ (Arendt 1958, 143). Therefore, in contrast
with the cyclical nature of labour, work is characterised by a linear process. This involves applying
given means to a pre-conceived end, and because of this Arendt is keen to point out the instrumen-
tal character of work:
man, in so far as he is homo faber, instrumentalises, and his instrumentalisation implies a degradation of all
things into means, their loss of intrinsic and independent value, so that eventually not only objects of fabrication
but also ‘the earth in general and all forces of nature’ [quoting Marx, Capital vol III] which clearly came into being
without the help of man and have an existence independent of the human world, lose their ‘value because [they]
do not present the reification which comes from work’. (Arendt 1958, 156)

But within work’s ideal of usefulness also lies a central contradiction, which Arendt calls ‘perplex-
ity’. Namely, much of the justification of work resides in its later use to serve as a tool or half-
product for further construction of things. The permanency that characterises the finished
product of work is then only ever conditional, in case the object at hand converts to further
means for the ends of the work process. As such, the activity of work then only carries the
meaning of the end to which it is applied in terms of the logic of utility, and this meaning
ceases when the task in question is accomplished (Arendt 1958, 154). It is for this reason that
Arendt argues that work tends towards meaninglessness, and it is exactly at this point that
work is reliant on action (Arendt 1958, 236).
Work and labour have strongly differing relationships to the public nature of life. In their capacity
as labourers, people may occupy the public realm, but rather than being truly public these are
‘private activities displayed in the open’ (Arendt 1958, 134). Work, on the other hand, does have a
definite connection with public life.
Unlike the animal laborans, whose social life is worldless and herdlike and who therefore is incapable of
building or inhabiting a public, worldly realm, homo faber is fully capable of having a public realm of
his own, even though it may not be a political realm, properly speaking. His public realm is the exchange
market, where he can show the products of his hand and receive the esteem which is due him. (Arendt
1958, 160)
350 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

However, this public role of the activity of work is circumscribed by the narrow rules of the market
and the instrumentality of work itself. It is instead the realm of action that for Arendt embodies the
most important aspects of sociality.
The third and final of the vita activa of action holds a special status for Arendt to work and labour,
in that it describes the most quintessentially human of endeavours. Its natural expression is in the
public sphere, within the polis, which ‘is not the city–state in its physical location: it is the organis-
ation of people as it arises out of acting and speaking together’ (Arendt 1958, 198). Action describes
the social relations that enable and reproduce human exchange, and the collective engagement in
sense making. As dissenting views are aired, countered and debated, a process of inclusive meaning-
making is underway. Out of the vita activa, action is the one that can generate truly new phenomena
(Arendt 1958, 9). Labour is bound by its cyclicality and work by its linearity, but action has the
capacity for natality, giving birth to new forms of life. It is also the realm in which human beings
can generate a sense of being together, outside of the binding strictures of consumption or pro-
duction, given that what defines action is its abandonment of utilitarianism in favour of a search
for meaning. Henning (2011) provides a very useful extension of Arendtian theory by pointing to
the concept of ‘habit’. Whereas habit embodies human endeavour that is repeated and sedimented
into regular behaviour patterns, action points to those activities that embody natality, extend the
horizon of possibility and that build a basis for collectivity. In this sense, sociality itself is not necess-
arily of the realm of action, but only when it succeeds in moving beyond the ontic to glimpse the
ontological.
By analysing the meaning that these activities had for the philosophers of ancient Greece, Arendt
is able to contrast them with their manifestation in her own historical timeframe. She concludes
these enduring human activities are influenced substantially by the political and economic
context in which they take place. Ultimately, this is a critique of how people work and live in
Fordist capitalism. She takes aim at the individualism and commodification as they emerged in
what she calls (typical of the period) mass culture. Rather than a sphere of human action, mass
culture for Arendt is a short-circuit of alienated labour and meaningless consumerism (Swift 2009,
64–66). On employment, Arendt argues that work in modernity tends to turn into an alienated
mode of production in which skill-based craft is degraded into mere subsistence labour, severing
the link to the end of fabrication (of useful objects):
[M]ost work in the modern world is performed in the mode of labor, so that the worker, even if he wanted to,
could not ‘labor for his work rather than for himself’, and frequently is instrumental in the production of objects
of whose ultimate shape he has not the slightest notion. (Arendt 1958, 140–141)

In Fordism then, labour comes to supplant both work and action. For Arendt, this reduces the
working life of people to the base reproduction of labour power. Her concepts of labour, work
and action are formulated to capture what is enduring to being human within productive society.
As such, these categories can further help us to trace the implications of the shift from Fordist
employment to post-Fordist working life. Contemporary employment has greatly diversified, and
self-employment, precariousness and flexibilisation are increasingly important. Reading freelance
workers’ experiences through an Arendtian lens provides specific insight into how emergent work
patterns rely on the creation and maintenance of professional tools and objects (through the
concept of work), as well as the embeddedness in specific social relations (through the concept of
action).
To understand the specificity of the lived experience of freelance work, we have to look beyond
notions such as the employment relationship, work organisation and control strategies. In freelan-
cing, work manifests itself as a market transaction rather than an employment relationship.
However, such market encounters rely on complex social arrangements and relations which
require social labour. The demands of work are also experienced in far more individualised ways,
and equally work will be structured along the needs and the abilities of the individual.
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 351

Existing literature draws attention to the ways in which freelance work is linked with precarious-
ness, a desire for autonomy, the centrality of social production and the blurring of work-life bound-
aries, among other things. To assess how freelancers experience such issues, negotiate them and
how their working lives are structured to accommodate them, we need a concept of how precarious-
ness is accommodated, how market reputations are built and maintained, and how social relations
are developed and relied upon by freelancers. Arendt’s concepts of labour, work and action help us to
make sense of the ways in which ends of subsistence, fabrication and community respectively are
woven into the fabric of working life. To this end, I will use Arendt’s vita activa as way of analysing
everyday accounts of freelance working. Below, I will discuss the data collection and analysis that
preceded this case study.

Methodology and data analysis

Data collection
Empirical material for this paper was collected in 2014, in a qualitative study aimed at the nature,
context and experience of freelance work. Research took place in three countries: the UK,
Germany and the Netherlands. To gain preliminary insight into specific contextual factors such as
housing costs and prevalent industry sectors, contrasting research sites were used. The scale of
this study is not sufficient for comparative research design, and was not part of the analysis.
Thirty interviews were done in total with initial contacts collected through networks, and snow-
ball sampling used for generating further research participants. In order to access freelancers rather
than portfolio workers, contractors or entrepreneurs (Stanworth and Stanworth 1995), all those who
were interviewed were working in a self-employed capacity, selling their labour to three or more
clients. Twenty-two can be considered to work in the cultural industries and eight are outside of
these. Cultural industry sectors were comprised by advertising, fashion, music, film, publishing
and graphic design. Other interviewees worked in the building trade, IT, healthcare, childcare and
education. There were 18 female interviewees and 12 male interviewees. The majority of participants
were in the age range of 30–45. Three participants were in their twenties, one in his fifties and two in
their sixties. Interviews were 45 min to an hour in length and manually analysed in terms of their
content. The interviews were aimed at letting participants voice an account of their typical
working day. Accounts included daily activities, acquisition of work, networks and contacts, ambi-
tions, portfolio (past work) and challenges, allowing participants to unpack experiential and material
aspects of everyday work routines.

Thematic data analysis

Initial analysis involved coding prevalent narrative elements and tracing how answers were struc-
tured. The subsequent analysis was structured around three dominant themes taken from prevalent
literature on self-employment, as discussed above. These three themes of networking, market pres-
entation and co-working were used as a coding heuristic to allow the data analysis to develop a
direct contribution to existing literature.
Networking, market presentation, and co-working can be seen as necessary aspects of freelancing
that allow for continuity and stability in work flow and income. While these aspects can be con-
sidered constitutive to freelance labour power, we need to understand their effect on practitioners’
lived experience. To achieve this, interviews were then coded based on Arendt’s categories. As
argued in the previous section, Arendt’s framework comprises a socio-historical analysis of the phe-
nomenology of work, and it argues that what we commonly call work consists of various activities
that tend towards different life goals: subsistence, fabrication and community.
In analysing the empirical material through Arendt’s categories, this study is able to trace how
enduring meanings and ends are recombined into typical freelance work activities, and how
352 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

these meanings and ends are refracted into distinctive features of freelance work experience. By
doing so, this study elaborates on and extends widely acknowledged features of freelance
working, such as networking, co-working and self-presentation within the marketplace, by revealing
complex dynamics, tensions and contradictions in the lived experience of freelancers. In order to
operationalise Arendt’s categories, interviews were coded for relevant symbolism and narratives
to categorise specific elements of everyday work experience into the vita activa. These symbolic
and narrative aspects appear in the right-most column of Table 1, showing how parts of interview
accounts were linked to Arendt’s categories of human activity.

Case study analysis: understanding the experience of freelance working

In this section, I explore prominent themes within freelancers’ interview accounts: networking,
market representation, and co-working. To further interpret their significance, I will read these
through Arendt’s notions of labour, work and action,1 and thereby to conceptualise what is distinc-
tive about the lived experience of freelance work.

Networking
It is important not to overlook the efforts that precede paid freelance jobs. A prominent aspect of
freelancers’ activity is building a social and professional network, to generate opportunities for
further paid work, among other things. We can regard such networking as ‘work-for-labour’ (Stand-
ing 2011), where substantial effort goes into finding opportunities for paid work. But for freelancers
networking is also a way of establishing their place within a community of practice. Such a commu-
nity of peers often has an implicit hierarchy (Arvidsson 2007; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2012; Barley
and Kunda 2006), providing access to different tiers of commissioned jobs. Networks might also
regulate one’s share in community resources. Apart from a pragmatic economic rationale, it
might also affects the social imagination, one’s sense of self and relating to others. Examining net-
working activity through the lens of Arendt’s vita activa help us to contextualise its role within free-
lance experience.
In this research, freelancers demonstrated a strong internalised pressure for continuous inter-
action with existing and new clients, and wider social engagement within their field. Often this man-
ifested itself through social events and shared social circles. A freelance illustrator and designer
expressed the pressure she feels to network with her peers and potential new clients.
I feel I really should always be networking, just like I am supposed to be doing that with other illustrators, I
should be doing it with new clients, and also maintaining [existing ones]. It’s not my favourite thing to do!

In this quote, the interviewee expresses a strongly felt imperative to maintain a social profile among
potential clients and peers, which can be seen in ‘I really should always be networking’ and ‘I am
supposed to … ’. This is typical for many of the interviewees. Often this involved going to industry
social events, gallery openings, conferences, media events, launches, etc. Interviewees also indicated

Table 1. Translation of Arendt’s concepts to empirical analysis.

Arendt’s categories of
human activity Purpose of activity Codes: rationales, aims, ends
Labour Privacy, necessity Making a living, acquiring jobs, sustaining constancy of income, and
comfort, happiness, housing
Work Fabrication, instrumentality, Building professional reputation, maintaining CVs and portfolios of
tool-building existing work, accessing the labour market, branding, investing in
professional resources and skills
Action Public life, community, Collaborating on elective and non-commissioned activities,
politics organising and representing peers, skill and resource sharing
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 353

that specific public places (restaurants, bars) could be good venues to network due to the likelihood
of running into fellow professionals.
For many of those working in non-standard work arrangements, the boundaries between work
and non-work are being blurred (Virno 2004; McRobbie 1998). With respect to the lived experience
of freelancers, this can be read through Arendt’s notion of work, highlighting how logics of linearity
and means-end optimisation pervade activities aimed at fabrication of a professional presence. Here,
we can see how such work-based instrumentality seeps into socialising and peer connections
through an internalised demand to be seen to be professional, available and eager to build pro-
fessional networks.
This also extends to online social activity. Interviewees talked about how an online presence on
social media or a work blog can assist this process. Here is a designer speaking:
[A blog] works well because clients can see that you are keeping busy, and that there is a real person behind the
work. I am not the kind of person who is networking at every chance I get, going to all the after-work drinks. It’s a
bit of a risk not to be showing your face at such things. You definitely get more opportunities if they know you
personally. There is also a chance it can go against you, but mostly personal contact really works in your favour.
And I don’t … , I am not that good at that. So in that sense, I think it’s a good thing to have a blog on the side.

This quote again indicates how networking is a deeply experienced expectation for freelancers,
evident here from how she describes it as a risk to not engage in it sufficiently. We see this intervie-
wee express what she sees as a deficiency in herself (‘not very good at it’). To be personally recog-
nised is important here, then – and this interview argues that social media and blogs can play a role
in this. While interviewees stress the professional importance of networking, this mostly relies on
making a genuine social connection. Freelancers need to build social bonds with peers that are
experienced by both parties as meaningful. The imperative to network then embodies both work
and action, activities traditionally purged from the Fordist labour process. Here, they appear as a
vital pre-condition for procuring paid jobs as a freelancer.
The notion of personal networks as something that connects one to the wider marketplace is
further supported by the theme of exchange that comes up in relation to it. A lighting engineer
for TV and film talks below about how his network provides ongoing work for him.
People find me through my network. You know, you start somewhere. A favour to a friend will get you in. ‘he’s a
good guy, he’ll put his best foot forward, here’s his number.’ The next time you’ll get a bit more money, then
some more, then some more still, and before you know it, it’s running. As long as it’s running and you put
the effort in, it’ll keep running. Unless you have a lie-in a couple of times or you shoot your mouth off.

Within this account, the interviewee emphasises how social and professional ties rely on the
exchange of favours. Between peers, jobs can be exchanged as favours later to be returned, and
offering these reinforces personal relationships, mutual recognition of craft, and trustworthiness.
In such gestures, sociality becomes deeply entwined with instrumentality. Read through Arendt’s
concepts of work and action, this dynamic of favour exchange reflects how the logics of instrumental
fabrication and social community-building intersect within the lived experience of freelance workers.
Not all freelancers interviewed for this research experienced networking as a deliberate activity. In
the quote below, a designer for fashion and sports companies describes how he has found himself in
a ‘world of hook-ups’.
What I see now, at this age, […] that many skateboarders I know from my early days all ended up in creative
professions. You know. You’ve still got that connection from skating, and a shared attitude, but everyone is
also older and more sensible, more balanced and they’ve got their shit together. And then suddenly you’ve
got a network around you made up of cool people who make cool things that you can do things with. And
then, without having thought about making contacts with this or that person, to achieve this or that, suddenly
the moment is there. You find yourself in a world of hook-ups.

Within this quote, the term ‘network’ implies interconnectivity and exchange, while the term ‘cool’
carries connotations of peer evaluation and professional hierarchies among fellow practitioners. The
interviewee intimates that networking for him is not planned, but relies on swapping mutual favours
354 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

and opportunities. The term ‘cool’ is significant as it introduces to the notion of exchange a sense of
ranking the quality, desirability of the output and reputation of people one connects with. While
emphasising the non-intentionality of his own approach, the interviewee’s account nevertheless
stresses the crucial usefulness of a network, and also suggests very significant overlap between
the personal and professional. This further emphasises how social bonds may be instrumentalised
within freelance work experience.
In Arendt’s theory, the activity of associating with others and establishing durable relations
belongs to the realm of action, since organising is not inherent in work organisation but always
the province of action (1958, 123). In interviewees’ accounts of networking, activity that would
have traditionally belonged to the realm of action becomes subject to a means-end rationality
that enlists it in the fabrication of professional networks and the optimisation of one’s reputation.
A network of human relations is pursued, built and maintained in a way that cannot be separated
strictly from the instrumental linearity of work, which tends towards reducing matters to a means-
ends relation. The exchange-based nature of such networking extends the logic of work into a
realm that is traditionally more closely associated with action, and makes this entanglement a key
part of freelance experience. Work, in the form of repeated and reliable generation of paid jobs,
here builds upon deeper social bonds that are embodied within professional communities, and
meaningful social interaction that allows mutual trust and professional recognition to emerge.
Arendt’s categories of work and action therefore allow us to see freelancers’ networking activity
as a key site of the blurring of the boundary between work and non-work for many contemporary
workers (Virno 2004; Hardt and Negri 2001). This is visually represented in Figure 1.
Figure 1 shows how we can understand the distinctive aspects of freelance working experience
when understood through Arendt’s notions of work and action. How does this change our existing
understanding of freelance work? While research shows that networking is central to the realities of
freelance working, this study demonstrates how networking is a key site of the blurring of the work/
life boundary, and how this impacts on the lived reality of working. The isolation of freelance work

Figure 1. Experiencing networking.

 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 355

ensures that networking serves a real social need in terms of socialising and for obtaining recog-
nition of peers. However, such deep social bonds are inflected with logics of exchange and instru-
mentalism through their role in the need to build up a functioning artifice of repeat business, and
the exchange of favours key to maintaining contact with peers. Arendt’s framework allows us to
see how social activity becomes instrumentalised. But this interrelation between work and action
in the activity of networking also has a parallel implication: for networking to be effective, it relies
on a meaningful social connection and a network built on sincerity and collegial recognition.

Market representation
In the previous section, we saw how social networking for freelancers can become infused with
instrumental concerns over one’s position, and generating more paid jobs. Arendt’s categories of
work and action show how social activity not only forms a key part of the fabric of working life
within freelancers’ experience, but also how such networks come to be a precondition of the produc-
tiveness of freelance working itself. Through Arendt, we see why for networks to be productive in
generating work, a social connection needs to be perceived as sincere.
We can extend this insight by noting that for freelance workers the distinctiveness of one’s pro-
fessional profile is a crucial concern. How a freelancer’s labour power is represented in the market
involves a great deal of socially and symbolically skilled effort. A key part of this market represen-
tation is the portfolio, which most of the interviewees brought up. Freelancers face the need to
build up a body of work that represents them to potential clients. Viewed through the Arendtian
concept of work, a portfolio is a carefully constructed artifice that reflects the quality and aesthetics
of performed work, but it is often also meant to represent that worker’s specific approach, skills or
image. In this sense, a portfolio is a profoundly embodied document, which reflects the deep invest-
ment of the individual in their output.
In close conjunction to the notion of the portfolio, then, is the question of reputation within the
marketplace for freelancers. In the interviews, we can see that various freelance workers are looking
for ways to articulate and exhibit aspects of their personal market presence with reference to their
work. In response to a question on whether she was making an adequate living in her career, a film
and video editor said the following:
it’s difficult. But there are people who are much better at selling themselves. Before, I never used to introduce
myself as a filmmaker, but now I do do that. That’s to do with your concept of yourself, how you conceive of
yourself. I guess I am a late bloomer in that sense, you know.

In this quote we see a very striking use of the phrase ‘selling themselves’. Rather than selling their
work or asking after client needs, the interviewee here presents the performativity of her pro-
fessional self as an important precondition to developing a successful career as a freelancer. She
references the notion of self-concept in this, styling this to resonate with those being addressed.
This is also reflected in the statement by another freelancer (DJ/decorator/stage designer), who
stated that ‘[y]ou have to really present yourself very clearly and convincingly to other people. If
you can’t do that, nothing will happen.’ Such self-presentation also has to adapt to the changeable
conditions that freelancers work in, and use a deep knowledge of market context, client communi-
cation and product demand. Viewed through Arendt’s notion of work, this shows how for freelan-
cers, one’s carefully crafted reputation and portfolio represents an artifice of work that curates,
historicises and narrates previous professional endeavours and links it to a corresponding presen-
tation of the self. This reflects the instrumental and market-oriented logics of work. Below, I focus
on the ways in freelancers go beyond this dimension of work within their market presentation.
Viewed through the concept of action, we can see how the effective construction of reputation
and portfolio relies on a deep investment in one’s work that transcends the instrumentality of
work and the bare reproduction of life of labour. Combining different types of professional tasks
takes planning and strategising with respect to how portfolio and reputation are presented,
356 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

when, and to whom. This draws out the performative aspects of the self, and how they matter in
generating opportunities for paid jobs.
There were instances where freelancers went beyond an externalised sense of self-presentation,
and gave an account of themselves as deeply invested in their professional endeavours. The follow-
ing quote came from the fashion and sports illustrator already cited above.
Q: Do you have clients where you are happy to work for less because of the nature of the job you are being
offered?

A: That happens – and sometimes it is also the case that as a freelancer you don’t have the luxury of turning it
down. Because every 100 euro you can make, is just that, another 100 euros. Sure, I could say ‘I am not going to
make you a design for 100 euro’, but if I don’t have any work at that time, I’d just be sitting in front of my com-
puter, without anything to do. In that timeframe I could just be doing that job, it is fun to do, so it would be a
productive way of making do with the situation. It works both ways. The way I see it, my work is simply what I do.
It’s not even just my work – I would be drawing anyway. It’s what I would be doing anyway on an everyday basis.
I just want to make t-shirt designs, and skateboard designs, that’s what I want to do. So I was going to be doing it
anyway [laughs]. But, I would be waiting for an excuse, and that’s [what] the commission [is].

In this quote, the notion of work as something that one identifies deeply with comes across
strongly. The interviewee argues that he ‘would be drawing anyway’ even when not commissioned
to do so, even if it were not his living. He casts it as a central activity in his life: ‘it’s what I want to do’,
what ‘I was going to do be doing anyway’. At the same time, this comes up by way of justifying why
he does not turn down low paid work, which he ‘[doesn’t] have the luxury of turning […] down’.
There are two notable themes here: firstly, an assertion of the deep personal investment in one’s
craft, and secondly, that of subsistence and necessity (evoking labour). The latter is justified by
means of the former – the pressing need of accepting underpaid work is reframed as a side-
benefit of this illustrator’s self-professed deep investment in his work, which he presents as ‘not
even just my work’ – but an authentic form of self-expression. Freelancing is cast, here and in
other interviews, as beyond the instrumentality of portfolio and reputation (work) and not driven
by the need to make a basic living (labour). The implicit notion of authenticity here is closer to
the realm of action because it invokes a notion of human activity as a form of self-realisation,
based in aesthetic and social value. This interrelated articulation of autonomy, self-marketing and
subsistence also appears in other interviews.
Below, a book cover designer articulates the difficulty in realising the promise of autonomy within
freelance working.
[Books] are a nice meeting point of what I like in terms of aesthetics. But I am really wanting to branch out into
other areas. My work has been quite quiet the last month and a half. And I was really seriously thinking about
going back into fulltime employment again. Looking on the job websites, you know, just to see. But I keep think-
ing, there is so much that I want to do, creatively, that I wouldn’t be able to do if I was not freelance. And being
freelance is a bit of a … a bit of a deceptive career, because you think you will have more time, you know, to do X,
Y and Z, but actually much of the time is caught up with earning a living, and trying to bring the money in, you
know, and marketing yourself, and all that stuff that keeps you [busy]. So the idea of doing other things, and
building up to other things can often seem like a faraway dream, but it is the dream that keeps you going in
a sense. Well, for me, personally.

On the surface, the interviewee here describes the professional autonomy within freelance working
as more of an aspirational goal than a reality. He presents this autonomy as a ‘faraway dream’, a
remote ideal that draws people into a freelance career. But throughout, he wavers between defend-
ing this ideal and the pragmatic realities.
Within the existing literature on freelance work, there is little acknowledgement of such ambiva-
lence over freelance working. While there are useful reflections on the complexity of autonomy in an
institutional sense (Banks 2010), the decision to freelance is often slotted into one of several cat-
egories (Fraser and Gold 2001). What we encounter in the quote above is real ambivalence in the
way freelancing is experienced and enacted in everyday life. Arendt’s framework here allows us to
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 357

explore enduring categories of human activity within this account of ambivalence, and this helps us
to shed light on unique challenges and distinguishing features of freelance working.
In the narrative, themes of labour are reflected in terms of ‘earning a living, and trying to bring the
money in’, emphasising the basic reproduction of labour power. But this interviewee presents this
need for subsistence as something that actually curtails (rather than being a trade-off) professional
autonomy and creative expression. At the same time, he acknowledges that the ideal is something
that sustains everyday practice: ‘it is the dream that keeps you going’. And by referencing ‘building
up to things’ the interviewee here touches on creating professional recognition and connections,
which relate to work but rely on action.
Even when precarity throws up worries of finding adequately paid work, freelancers may equally
be concerned with using jobs to further build their work profile, portfolio and reputation. Here,
issues such as the unpredictability of the job market and fee/wage levels, reflecting labour, were
de-emphasised by interviewees in order to foreground the autonomy inherent in freelancing, and
the passion they have for their craft. This shows how concerns of economic security, subsistence
and precariousness can be experienced by freelancers as private issues, unproductive to one’s
self-marketing at best, and at worst harmful.
Within market presentation, we can see how labour, work and action represent different efforts,
and strive for different ends – work towards legacy and fabrication, action towards politics and
encountering the new, while labour strives for comfort and abundance. Arendt’s framework illumi-
nates how these different elements of freelance working are recombined differently in freelancing to
traditional employment. In using Arendt’s concepts, this section shows how the individual market
presentation of freelance workers can be understood to deeply impact their experience: by focusing
their efforts on an artifice of work in which previous output and one’s professional image are
reflected, by stimulating a deep personal investment in their work, and by fostering an ambivalent
response to the precarious realities of making a living (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Experiencing market presentation.

358 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

Figure 2 shows how the lens of Arendt’s categories leads us to discern different aspects of the
experience of freelance work. To present their labour power in the marketplace, freelance workers
rely on having and maintaining both a strong portfolio and a good reputation. To obtain these,
they navigate different fundamental human activities with contrasting underlying ends. Presenting
oneself clearly in the market involves deeper underlying ends of subsistence, fabrication and com-
munity. The ways in which labour, work and action intersect in concrete working activities provides
important insight into the distinguishing characteristics of the experience of freelance working.
Viewed through the prism of market representation, and using Arendt’s categories, freelancers’
accounts demonstrate how freelancers may mask the precarious reality of their working life with
the need for building an attractive portfolio, and a celebration of the autonomy and authenticity
of their professional life.
Above, we saw how a freelancer explained away the necessity of taking underpaid jobs by pro-
fessing his passion for his chosen profession, and downplaying the precariousness of his career. In
this way, the harsher realities were masked by an account of pursuing his true calling as an illustrator.
In another interviewee’s account, we saw ambivalence about the autonomy inherent in freelance
working, the interviewee arguing on one hand that autonomy is something he strives for, but on
the other hand that the constant need for asserting a market presence limits the freedom he
would expect to have.
In Arendt’s terms, market representation most obviously aligns with the notion of work, because it
relies an artifice of completed efforts. This thing-like body of work is what stands in for identity within
the marketplace – it is what represents the individual. The work artifice comes to stand in for the
subject in the marketplace. Identity at work here is not a montage of intimate and public personae,
but an embodied display of past professional efforts. But in freelancers’ responses, we can see a real
desire to complement this artifice with self-expression. Here, the interplay between notions of auth-
enticity and notions of precarity is striking. Beyond the psychological ambivalence in everyday life,
this has real effects in terms of market presentation: to be precarious in not to be in demand. And the
themes of authenticity and autonomy provide an agential narrative that embellish the body of work
that represents the freelancer in the marketplace.

Co-working
A striking thing about freelance workers is their desire for communal working, despite their pro-
fessed autonomy. In traditional employment, allegiances, affect and identities can be crafted
within interpersonal and group relations. Freelancers do not usually benefit from such arrangements,
either spatially or institutionally. While some of them work ‘on-site’, most will either work from home
or share a dedicated workspace with others. Given that Arendt’s main critique of employment under
modernity is its isolation from sociality and politics, the specific social space freelancers work in is
worth examining.
Most freelancers in this study worked in co-working spaces with other self-employed people.
These generally resembled open plan offices, with personalised units and some specialist working
equipment like additional monitors, drawing tables or specialist printers. Freelancers argued that
it is ‘important to feel that you have colleagues’. Working solitarily was expressed as ‘unsociable’
by another interviewee. An advertising freelancer expressed that ‘when you have an in-house job,
you suddenly notice how nice it is to have colleagues’. Prompted to suggest key aspects of freelan-
cing, another interviewee expressed the importance of being around other working people, whom
she could exchange views and sometimes tasks with, and who motivated her to stay focused.
Yes, maybe it is interesting to talk about what kind of workspace people have, whether you are sharing or some-
thing. How you work, you know. I really appreciate having a shared workspace, to have the idea that I am going
to work each morning. I also find it motivating to have other people around me who are working. And that I can
just ask my neighbour, hey what would you do with this invoice, or how would you handle such and such a
client. Not necessarily things to do with illustration, but stuff like client contact and admin, things like invoices.
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 359

In the past I have also asked someone in my studio to help me with a piece of text, which is something I am not
very good at. So when I had to give a presentation, well present my work to a client, I asked someone to write an
accompanying text on the basis of an interview with me. That was an important realisation for me, that you don’t
have to do everything yourself.

Here, we see the interviewee, a designer and illustrator, express a common view of co-working
spaces, as a spatially separate place where ‘work’ happens. Being present among others is con-
sidered important, in two senses. Firstly, the interviewee expresses the need to be passively
among others who are also involved in the activity of working. But secondly, there is also a more
active sense of encountering others, through knowledge sharing and through more involved collab-
orations. This quote suggests quite clearly how co-working spaces create potential for collective
endeavour and weaving a social fabric. In doing so, co-working spaces enable the social production
of shared community and imagination that Arendt refers to as action.
But shared social space was not necessarily confined to co-working spaces. For example, a free-
lance nanny described how she regularly met with other nannies, allowing her to discuss and reflect
on work issues:
I’d say we … I do meet up with other nannies every day. And we organise play groups, or go to music groups
together. So we sort of talk then, and exchange our experiences, and answer each other’s questions as to what’s
acceptable and what isn’t, and what our job entices [sic].

Here, the interviewee indicates that she very regularly reflects on her work with others who do the
same. While their work is individual to them, they create shared social spaces to speak to colleagues,
make sense of daily working life, and negotiate boundaries and standards. In doing so, they co-con-
struct understandings of their own conduct and that of clients. While such encounters would not be
out of the ordinary in organisations, here they are developed between independent contractors to
develop a shared basis for of one’s work and labour, and to create a network of peers that transcends
professional courtesy or exchange of favours.
I did not encounter the intercompetition between freelancers or the self-branding on the basis of
co-working spaces that Gandini (2015) signals as potentially problematic. In this research, Merkel’s
(2015) notion of co-working spaces as sites of socialisation and organisation is more representative.
Co-working spaces played a central role of freelance experience as hubs where crucial socialisation
and organising happened. Viewed through the vita activa, such socialisation and organisation reflect
the realm of action. Whilst freelance working is often painted as independent and solitary, intervie-
wees considered co-working and collaboration central to sustaining its practice. This is reflected in
the following quote, where a film lighting engineer explains how the collective production process,
with varying conditions and personnel, is a major draw for him.
But the people who do this work, they will generally keep doing it. Because in the end, it’s a lot of fun. You’re not
really making money; you are making a product together. That’s the most important thing to me. The gear is
interesting to me, as is providing good lighting, but every day is different because you are never in the same
location with the same people. Every day has variables that will put you on edge, like a difficult balcony that
doesn’t allow for placement of the lights, or dealing with residents on location who now have to deal with a
generator in front of their house. These are challenges that keep you engaged.

This quote shows how work as a process of fabrication (‘good lighting’) and its attendant craft and
skills are valued alongside a form of collectivity. The interviewee’s account of communicating with
residents shows how that he values navigating social complexity in his work, as well as the collective
nature of producing work’s end result (‘making a product together’). We can also see here how the
emergence of unexpected or novel experiences is something that people value about co-working
and collaboration. We can relate this to Arendt’s notions of natality, a central condition of the
realm of action.
For freelancers, co-working is not just a way of facilitating action. Through the natality and plur-
ality that come with such social action, freelancers are able to occupy the public sphere in ways that
transcend the instrumentality and transactionality of the marketplace, of competing for work and
360 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

Figure 3. Experiencing co-working.

self-branding to advertise their services. The sociality captured under co-working allows freelancers
to act on what Henning (2011, 292) understands as habit, and unsettle and reinvent social patterns in
collective ways that embody action (Figure 3). Henning’s notion of habit here refers to a set of recur-
ring practices that establish social relationships and structure, but at the same time provide a collec-
tive basis for the emergence of genuine action that reinvents such sociality, or creates new surfaces
for collaboration and possibility.
Figure 3 reflects the way Arendt’s concept of action allows us to understand how freelancers’ par-
ticipation in co-working is not just mere socialising to break up the isolation of individualised prac-
tice, but represents the renewal and reinvention of social patterns. This has implications for how
work and labour unfold, and must be seen as more than an immediate sociality. It also concerns
the social basis for the productivity of freelance labour as such. Arendt’s notion of action allows
us to see how co-working practices create a social fabric among individual freelancers, a platform
of collective sensemaking of experiences and negotiation of professional standards and boundaries,
and in specific cases also the opening up of possibilities for collective work. Figure 3 shows how in
this way, we can recognise in the practice of co-working attempts at renewal and reinvention of
social habit.

Discussion
Above, I explored freelancers’ accounts using Arendt’s vita activa to conceptualise key features of the
freelance working experience. This study highlights how freelance workers experience the pursuit of
their professional efforts in ways that differ substantially from traditional salaried employment. The
findings are summed up in Figure 4, with insights from each empirical sub-section displayed.
Arendt’s concepts here show us how common and frequently essential freelance activities (in the
left-hand column) have specific implications in terms of the experience of freelance working
(right hand column). The colour scheme used shows how Arendt’s enduring phenomenological
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 361

Figure 4. Distinctive features of freelance work experience.

categories of human activity allow us to discern distinctive features of freelance experience. Viewed
through this lens, freelancers’ typical activities engender diverse and at times contradictory features
of experience, involving social and spatial connectedness to peers and potential clients, meaningful
sociality, the fabrication of a ‘work artifice’, self-investment in one’s output, and co-working to build
and reinvent freelancers’ social embeddedness.
Examining the typical freelance activity of networking provided very useful insights that under-
line the central place of ‘work-for-labour’ (Standing 2011). Looked at through Arendt’s notion of
work, we can understand this as consciously crafting an artifice of previous works as a key piece
of ‘design’ that is necessary in the freelance job market. Developing this artifice is as important as
carrying out one’s primary work tasks. Networking, while it carries the appearance of social activity,
is focused on the reproduction and acquisition of one’s paid jobs.
Through Arendt’s concept of action, we can see that building such an artifice of previous works
also relies on creating a sincere and meaningful connection with others. Such sensitive and highly
skilled social labour is essential for freelancers in ways that differ sharply from conventional employ-
ment. This work takes place alongside overtly instrumental concerns of generating further paid work
opportunities. The uneasy co-existence of opposite underlying ends of fabrication and community
has the potential for ambiguity and contradiction in freelancers’ lived experience, and this represents
one of the key challenges in freelance working.
There is a further tension that we can see in the analysis, one between acknowledgement of pre-
cariousness and maintenance of a narrative of autonomous self-actualisation. Previous research has
sought to understand how, given the flexibilisation and casualisation of work, individuals are
affected by issues such as the contingency of work frequency and the attendant cash flow problems
(Barley and Kunda 2006), the reliance on path-dependent networks (Grugulis and Stoyanova 2012;
Blair 2001) or the receding support of local communities (Sennett 1998). To make sense of how free-
lancers experience precariousness, it is important to understand the uniqueness of their
predicament.
362 C. HOEDEMAEKERS

Many freelancers in this study seem hesitant to identify as precarious, treating the need to survive
economically as a private concern rather than a structural problem. Arendt’s categories help us to
analyse this. Her notion of labour historicises how specific human efforts can become styled as
private concerns, which explains how in freelancers’ experiences, issues around subsistence and
economic security come to be pushed towards the private sphere. This also suggests that the poten-
tial of precarity as a political rallying point may be limited in certain cases.
‘Precariousness as a private problem’ may be exacerbated by a deep personal investment in one’s
work output. The data analysis showed how this can lead to a short circuit, where seeing oneself as
precarious is to admit to not being in demand. In this way, rhetoric of autonomy and authenticity
creates an agential narrative that exists to animate and amplify one’s portfolio for the benefit of gen-
erating paid jobs. Arendt’s categories here help us to trace how daily activities relate to deeper levels
of experience, and shows how they may be aimed at opposing ends, generating conflicting mean-
ings and outcomes.
This study more generally shows how everyday activities undertaken by freelancers are vital to
positioning their labour in the market. Arendt’s notion of work shows how selling one’s labour
power in the market requires a distinctive character from other commodities, which is also reliant
on the self-presentation of the worker (see also Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2012). The analysis also
suggests that in order to generate new work, freelancers need to read social situations and convin-
cingly enact this personal/professional interpretive repertoire. Through Arendt’s notion of work, we
can see how market presentation is bound up with fabricating a representation of one’s work
through reputation, a portfolio of past work, and a carefully crafted persona (such as on social
media). At the same time, such fabrications may sit alongside the private nature of precarious
working life, compared above to the notion of labour. The concepts of work, action and labour
here make it possible to understand the ambivalent position that freelancers have towards precar-
iousness. They experience its effects, but the importance of networks and a clear professional image
mean that they favour self-presentation that downplays hardship in favour of agency, passionate
attachment to work, and enterprise.
The tension between strategic self-presentation and the privations of precariousness can be
linked to recent research on identity and subjectivity in management and organisation studies
(Kenny and Fotaki 2014; Ekman 2013), drawing on concepts of desire and affect in understanding
identification, disidentification and the structuring role of language and images. Such research
posits that ideal images within dominant discourse can serve to mask a fractured or imperfect
reality. In this study, through careful curation of portfolios and the performative presentation of
their reputation, freelancers construct idealised images of their work practice. In interview accounts,
freelancers appeared to short-circuit specific issues around insecurity and precarity by referring back
to the potential, if not the reality, of high professional autonomy and freedom within their chosen
career path. What Arendt adds to this is a clear account of how imperatives of necessity, fabrication
and community can structure different elements of freelance work experience, and what its unique
pitfalls and challenges are.
Freelancers strive to assert ownership, identity and autonomy through their work, and that this
can be seen as a major part of its appeal, in spite of its many drawbacks in terms of precariousness
and insecurity. Within a wider sense, this reflects communicative and affective labour as part of com-
municative capitalism (Mumby 2016), where we can see freelancers’ self-presentation as a way of
creating a durable legacy closely tied a specific self-image, which allows them to position their
labour power within the marketplace. In a more immediate social sense, freelancers practice co-
working to allow for collaboration, social interaction, mutual support and resource sharing. The
natality and plurality afforded by such collective practice allows workers not only to do their work
in a more sustained and dedicated way, but it can also allow for important bonds and a shared nar-
rative to be shaped within a chaotic, dispersed and often harsh marketplace.
In such a way, this study also connects with debates on the appropriation of the social within con-
temporary capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2001; Harvey 2013; Virno 2004; Lazzarato 1996; Mumby 2016).
 CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 363

As capital seeks to appropriate immaterial value, the affective and symbolic skills that people
develop in everyday life become integrated into the capitalist labour process, and valuable
commons created in communities, groups and spaces become increasingly privatised. This study
shows how parts of social life can become instrumentalised (as we saw in the case of networking)
but we also see a re-building of social commons elsewhere, such as through co-working (Merkel
2015). There are also indications in the analysis that the desire to tie one’s self-concept to work
output could be understood as a way of resisting capitalist appropriation of work in ways that go
beyond this ‘social factory’ argument. Here, Arendt’s notion of action provides a notion of sociality
that also encapsulates politics (Van Diest and Dankbaar 2008), and how it relies on public space. Hen-
ning’s (2011) notion of habit is instructive here. Action can be read into specific efforts that freelan-
cers undertake, but that are at times routinised and instrumentalised as part of their work process. As
such, freelancers through their collective praxis are manufacturing possibilities for changes in social
habit, thereby widening and evolving the social basis upon which production occurs in their daily
labour.
Some studies have overstated the individual freedom of self-employed workers in a kind of free
market optimism that Barley and Kunda (2006) have called ‘free agent’ thinking (e.g. Gold and Fraser
2002). This study highlights how the working life of freelancers provides intersubjective, collective
possibilities for what Henning (2011) following Arendt (1958) calls freedom, although there is a con-
stant pressure for such action to be enlisted repeatedly and instrumentally within everyday work
activity. This can be seen in the way social encounters with peers can become overt attempts at net-
working, co-working spaces can become vehicles for generating further jobs, and self-developmen-
tal projects can be overtaken by self-branding for the purpose of one’s portfolio or CV. This paper has
posited a number of distinguishing features of freelance work experience, showing how its social
embedding, productive capacity and subjective impact are markedly different from conventional
employment. Our understanding of the wider effects of these distinguishing features will benefit
from further study of lived experience. Understanding the challenges, appeal and potential of
self-employment will be key in years to come, as we can expect to see its prevalence growing further.

Note
1. From this point, whenever the terms labour, work or action are used in Arendt’s sense, they will be italicised.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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