Renaissance of entrepreneurship? Some remarks and empirical evidence for Germany

The paper deals with margins of entrepreneurship where small business owners are almost working on their own having no or just a few employees and where one can find also people working with low returns and having firms without stability or prosperous dynamics. However, even the area of entrepreneurship at the margins seems to be a wide field. It highlights not only the broad margins of entrepreneurship but also the fluent boarders between entrepreneurship and the informal sector on the one side and the system of the labour market on the other. New firms - even those which are very successful at a later point of career - are almost created in an experimental period of testing market and product ideas in which business founders are still employed or registered as unemployed people. The practical starting-point of an entrepreneurial existence falls into a fluent continuum of different activities being closely connected to spheres of dependent work as employees or periods of seeking a new job during unemployment. With growing solo self-employment a new social phenomenon in the structure of the labour market and the division of occupations has emerged in which different social developments are overlapping each other. The question for the landscape of solo self-employment and related driving forces of their emergence is of crucial research interest: Must they be regarded primarily as a result of pushes by labour market deficiencies or are they a response to new life-styles and working demands which act as pulling factors into self-employment? In other words, does solo self-employment serve as a valve of a pressing labour market or must it be regarded more positively as a new option of the classic division of labour by which an increasing number of people find new self-reliant and also stable jobs? The idea of the paper is to discuss this particular issue of margins of entrepreneurship not only within the conventional scope of entrepreneurship discussion but within an integrated framework which combines entrepreneurship analysis with labour market research and studies on social stratification and social mobility. The paper will not come about with definite last answers but hopes to contribute to that debate by presenting better information.