Freelance workers—experiencing a career outside an organization

Abstract

This article focuses on the issues of everyday work as a self-employed, professional freelancer in Poland. The appearance of this specific category of workers on the labor market is connected with certain major changes on the economic, technological, and socio-cultural levels. The career of a freelancer is sometimes considered to be an antithesis of a corporate career. The key points are: working on one’s own, functioning outside the traditional organizational structures, HR management and supervision, promotion procedures, corporate career paths, et cetera. For a freelancer, the organization is not “an employer,” but rather “a client” or “a business partner.” The manager of the organization is not “his boss” and the employees are not his “colleagues.” As we can observe, most of the typical boundaries of a career are blurred here and that is one of the reasons why it arouses curiosity as an unusual phenomenon. The article aims to present a sociological perspective regarding the career of a freelancer in Poland. A framework of symbolic interactionism and grounded theory were applied to the author’s research (conducted in 2009-14) on which the article is based. Its first part focuses on the theoretical background and the methods that were used to collect and analyze data. The second part includes some of the author’s findings and conclusions on a freelance career from the interactionist perspective, as well as a discussion about the possible agreement and discrepancies between the author’s understanding of freelance against the widely discussed concept of precarity.