(3) Personal work relations in liberal professions. The logic of the binary legal conception of personal work relations would suggest that these particular work relations would fall squarely within the category of personal contracts for services - indeed, that they would represent the very archetype of this legal category, since professions have historically been described as 'liberal' precisely because those engaged in them are seen as operating on an autonomous basis rather than as subordinate 'servants'. However, the legal construction of these personal work relations is in reality much less straightforward. There is considerable divergence between European systems as to the regulatory regimes which have been devised for the practice of various different liberal professions - law, medicine, architecture and accountancy for example - but one can generalise by saying that those practicing these professions often do so within highly complex personal work nexuses involving, as legal actors in various ways, public authorities or publicly accountable professional bodies, and, in another sense, professional colleagues who work together in various forms of partnership or collegiality.
The dynamics of movement from those kinds of personal work nexuses are also very complex and interesting. Historically, those dynamics have often tended to be towards a greater involvement of the public state - especially in the work of lawyers and doctors - so that those engaged in these professions came more to resemble public officials or functionaries. However, a more recent and quite pervasive dynamic has seemed to be towards a further 'liberalisation' or even 'privatisation' of these professional roles, identifying these work relations more squarely within the domain of private law. One might expect that this would involve a clearer characterisation of these work relations as those of personal contracts for services. The reality is a more complex one, in which the relations of professional partnership or collegiality of individual practitioners tend to be transformed into professional enterprises often resembling commercial enterprises. This is comparable with a dynamic situation which exists within the sphere of individual entrepreneurial work relations, to which we now turn our attention.
(4) Individual entrepreneurial work relations. A picture is emerging in which none of the types of personal work relations which we have identified is as simple or as stable, either in its practical existence or in its legal construction, as one might have imagined. This fourth typology, that of individual entrepreneurial work relations, is a no less deceptive one in that sense. Although the terminology is admittedly one which I have coined, it seems to identify a well-established form of personal work relations - those of the autonomous individual or personal provider of services - with a clearly corresponding legal construction - that of the personal contract for services. These personal work relations, those of the self-employed or independent contractor, seem to occupy a well-defined space in the labour market historically reserved for the commercial and artisanal counterparts of the liberal professional. #p#分页标题#e#
That is a deceptive simplicity, because contemporary European labour markets and the regulatory regimes in which they operate, although they seem on the face of it to encourage and favour this type of personal work relations, also impose powerful dynamics of movement away from these relations and transform their practical mechanics and legal construction. There are in a sense pressures in several directions away from this type of personal work relations and away from their stereotypical legal form of the personal contract for services. In labour markets and regulatory regimes which exact organisational competence and competitiveness, it is hard for an individual to sustain an entrepreneurial role as a sole operator. He or she may be impelled by those forces towards the greater security of 'standard employee' work relations, or forced to settle for casual or temporary work relations. At the level of legal construction, the worker may be under pressure to move from work relations characterised by personal contracts for services to those represented by the contract of employment.
There is also another dynamic in a very different direction, indeed an almost diametrically opposed one. If the less successful individual entrepreneurial worker is driven by the adversities of sole operation towards fully dependent or semi-dependent employment relations, the more successful one seems to come under an equally strong set of pressures to extend and elaborate the organisational structure of his or her personal work relations. A number of observers have usefully identified this phenomenon in terms of the evolution of 'networked' employment arrangements involving 'networks' or teams of workers, and in my article, 'From the CE to the PWN', I remarked upon this as providing a good example of the evolution of complex personal work nexuses. However, I am now of the view that very often, the evolution of individual entrepreneurial work relations is not so much towards the elaboration of networks of workers but rather towards the transformation of the sole operator into a multi-personal small employing enterprise.
This might occur, for example, where an individual entrepreneurial worker in, let us say, the plumbing trade (whether or not from Eastern Europe!) takes on assistants and begins to function as a very small-scale employer. The institutional forms for this kind of functioning as a very small enterprise vary considerably between European countries; but I think they would have this in common, that the work relations of the individual entrepreneur with the purchasers or users of his or her services cease to be personal work relations; in legal terms, such relations move from the primary form of personal contracts for services to the primary form of non-personal contracts for services, that is to say in other words ordinary commercial or business contracts; and the work relations therefore fall outside even the enlarged domain of employment law which I have identified for the purposes of my arguments in this paper and the earlier article upon which it builds. #p#分页标题#e#