https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/285804
Monday, 20 March 2017
Entrepreneurship VS Freelancing
In today's society, as entrepreneurship has becoming increasingly popular, the line between freelancing and entrepreneurship has been blurred. According to Daniel Dipiazza in his article "Entrepreneurship VS Freelancing: What is the difference", freelancers exchange time for money. On the other hand, entrepreneurs depend on systems, employees, and an innovation catered environment. At first glance, many people confuse freelancing with entrepreneurship as they both have similarities. Dipiazza in his article brings up an excellent question when one is deciding whether they are an entrepreneur or a freelancer. Dipiazza asks "If I take myself out of the equation, does the business still work? If they answer is yes, then you are an entrepreneur". This is an interesting question that stood out to me as I have never thought about entrepreneurship from this perspective.
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This is a very compelling article and analysis. I would definitely agree with you in saying that the definition of freelancer and entrepreneur have been blurred in some aspects. When I read the artical and your analysis I immediately thought of my former boss who has myself and 5 other students working for him a few summers ago. He would come in the morning and talk to us for about 10 minutes, tell us what to do for the day and then leave. He would then call us at lunch time to see where our progress was. The other students and I were making minimum wage at the time and my boss was being paid double minimum wage for every hour that we spent there (he disclosed this to me a few months after I stopped working for him. This seems like a very entrepreneurial situation as we were making him lots of money. But, it was also sort of freelance because if he was taken away I don't think the business would still work. This is my real life experience of how the definition of freelancer and entrepreneur are blurred.
ReplyDeleteIn another Communications Studies class I'm in this semester (Globalization and Communication), one of the topics we covered was the sharing economy. This is are article we analyzed: https://www.thenation.com/article/what-sharing-economy-takes/. Henwood, the author argues that the sharing economy appears as market-driven and individualized and sees the working labour involved within the sharing economy as micro-entrepreneurs fending for themselves in this antagonistic world.
ReplyDeleteFor example Airbnb hosts are technically working for Airbnb, but they are not actual Airbnb employees, same with Uber drivers. They do not go into the office everyday and they do not get the same benefits as a company employee working in their head office. The workers (like freelancers). Although in the article, the author is pretty critical and provides a lot of insights in terms of the negative backlash that Uber and Airbnb has faced from their drivers and hosts (low wages, getting fired based off low ratings, etc.)
To go against Henwood’s arguments, there are many C-suite executives of these tech giants/tech entrepreneurs were a part of the working class before they started these companies. They had jobs prior, but then came up with a new idea that disrupted the industry, creating many new jobs
With commodification of labour, many think of themselves as owners of their own labour, which I thought related to workers within the sharing economy (such as freelancers on Fiverr or Elance). In a way, they own their own labour and are entrepreneurs within a large company. There was a video on YouTube about the sharing economy, but they referred to it as the collaborative economy. This diagram I found outlines it well and features familiar tech companies such as Breather, Bitcoin, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Etsy, Craigslist, TaskRabbit, and more
https://blogs-images.forbes.com/jacobmorgan/files/2014/10/Honeycomb-1940x1212.jpg