The paper combines conceptual thoughts on the development of self-employment within stratified modern societies with empirical reflections based on public census data for Germany. Talk about the rise and future of self-employment must be linked to the discussion about changes in the structure of...

Topic of the paper is the development of professional self-employment during the last decades in Germany. The discussion is divided into a theoretical and an empirical section. The first theoretical part deals with the term entrepreneurship and asks for its overlapping with categories of...

In literature, a rise in the number of self-employed people is basically stated. The results are based on cross-section data from one year and for the most part the analyses are not very detailed. But in an analysis one also has to pay attention to the development over time, because a structural...

Expenditures and their patterns over time are expressions of the standard of living of individuals, households, and the society they live in. Nevertheless social and economic analysis focused rather on the analysis of production than on consumption, and income was widely used as a main indicator...

Most of previous empirical analyses concerning the consumption of private households mainly took specific goods or groups of goods into consideration yielding rather a rag rug than a consistent picture. The aim of the analysis is to sort out some of the partially dispa-rate results and to draw...

During the last two decades the evolution of self-employment in Germany has been characterized by a slow increase after the numbers had declined over a period of several decades. Analysing portraits and conditions of this increase in greater detail, a more differentiated picture emerges. It...

It is not clear, whether changes in self-employment are primarily driven by the necessity to take part in the labour market, or if those activities reflect new modes of labour market integration revealing new opportunities and markets, which are especially due in wide parts to the service and...

The discussion on entrepreneurship often treats entrepreneurs as agents of ideas of economic change and growth. Entrepreneurs are considered to serve as potential multipliers delivering individual and social wealth and prosperity. In that context entrepreneurship has been treated as a rather...