Autonomy, insecurity, community: understanding affect in freelance work

This chapter considers freelance work in terms of the processes, conditions and specific activities that are needed to practise it successfully. It examine how freelancers approach the management of their professional lives. The analysis looks at how freelancers approach structuring their workday, balancing projects, acquiring client commissions, networking, co-working, building portfolios, and branding their practice through online platforms. This shows how instrumental and vocational elements are managed by freelancers within their practice, affecting their identity work, career strategies and participation in collective endeavours. The chapter explores the tensions that are generated between elements of craft, autonomy, social networks and employability in the process. This reflects a broader contradiction between the representation of one's work and identity for market purposes, and the experienced meaning of work. This chapter argues that this contradiction is inherent in self-employment, and generative of productive and unproductive elements with self-employed careers.