1. Introduction - further construction of the personal work nexus1
In this paper I am seeking to elaborate and build upon a set of ideas which I put forward in my article, 'From the Contract of Employment to the Personal Work Nexus' ('From CE to PWN')2, and I am also seeking views upon and further insights into the lines of development of those ideas which I am pursuing. So I begin by recapitulating briefly upon the themes of that article, and I then indicate the directions in which I am now seeking to take those themes. I should preface that exposition with an acknowledgment of writing on somewhat false pretences. It might appear from the title which I have given to this paper as if I intended to make a direct contribution to the very important and interesting debate about 'the personal scope of labour law' or 'the application ratione personae of employment laws'. In fact, although I hope that this paper may make a very small contribution to that discussion, it will be a rather indirect or tangential one.
That is because my purpose is not so much to present prescriptive arguments about those issues of the personal scope of labour or employment law, but rather to develop an analytical framework for the understanding of individual work or employment relations, and especially the contractual aspect of those relations, on a European comparative basis. One of the aims of the on-line Oxford Comparative Law Forum, in which this paper is now published, is that of encouraging exchanges between authors and readers. Much valuing the opportunity for such exchanges, I have appended a short questionnaire and would be most grateful to any readers who may be kind enough to respond to it.
In my article 'From CE to PWN' I presented two sets of arguments, or developed two themes, which I suggested might help to strengthen that analytical framework. The first theme concerned the family of personal work contracts; the argument was that it is useful to envisage a domain or broad category of personal work relations, and to analyse the work contracts within that domain not so much as centred upon the contract of employment, but rather as a family of contracts, within which the contract of employment was probably numerically much the most frequently occurring, but nevertheless not necessarily the supremely dominant paradigm which we have tended to treat it as being. It should, however, be stressed that the category of personal work contracts, albeit significantly larger than that of the contract of employment, is nevertheless still confined to contracts wholly or primarily for performance by the worker personally, that is to say by himself or herself. As such these contracts are contra-distinguished from commercial contracts for services which are not necessarily or even primarily for performance by the worker personally.
The second theme concerned the personal work nexus; the argument here was that, even in this form of the family of personal work contracts, an exclusively contractual analysis of this domain was likely to prove unsatisfactory, and that the contractual analysis needed to be supplemented by a recognition both that personal work relations might on occasion not take a contractual form, and that even where, more typically, a personal work relationship or arrangement is centred upon a personal work contract, it might nevertheless have complex legal ramifications which were not contained within that contractual framework - the notion of the 'personal work nexus' was invoked to characterise the looser framework which would be necessary to encompass those broader ramifications. The two arguments combine together to give rise to a notion of an expanded subject-matter or domain of employment law, including but also going beyond the sphere of the contract of employment, consisting of a group or family of personal work nexuses which are of various different types, and vary in the degree to which they are purely contractual in character. #p#分页标题#e#
Although this set of arguments and this theoretical construction of the domain of personal work nexuses have continued to seem to me to be potentially useful ones, I have come to feel that they need a more practical or empirical and contextual development than I was able to accord them in my article 'From CE to PWN'. That is the shortcoming which the present paper seeks to begin to remedy. The endeavour is to do so in a way which will be conducive to a European comparative analysis of personal work contracts ('PWCs') and personal work nexuses ('PWNs'). The method of proceeding with this development consists of the several steps, the first of which consists of the identification of a socio-economic notion of personal work relations ('PWRs') and of the enumeration of a number of leading types of personal work relations. The second step is an analysis of the personal work nexuses which are respectively associated with those leading types of personal work relations. Thirdly I attempt to establish a diagram or map of those types of personal work nexuses showing how they relate to each other; and I offer a suggestion as to how the legal binary analysis of personal work relations into the two categories of employment and self-employment fits on to that map. Finally I engage in a consideration of how these reflections relate to current debates about the scope of employment law and also about European contract law.

2. Some leading types of personal work relations.
The crucial first step of my present argument therefore consists in establishing a practical or empirical typology of personal work relations as a basis for a European comparative analysis of the treatment of those relations in different employment law systems. This, it must be admitted from the outset, is a decidedly hazardous undertaking for several reasons. The notion of a practical or empirical typology - as opposed to a legal taxonomy - of personal work relations is essentially a socio-economic one; so an employment lawyer proposing such a typology is operating outside his or her own immediate expertise, and is encroaching upon that of labour economists or sociologists. This would not be too grave a matter in itself, for these areas of expertise overlap with that of the employment lawyer, and legal ordering is important among the factors which inform and shape the practical or empirical typology of personal work relations. A greater problem is that an employment lawyer when suggesting such a typology, rather than straying too far from his or her own legal discipline, will not stray far enough - that is to say, will remain entrapped within the legal frame of reference, and will propose a typology which simply reflects the legal categories from which the very aim of the exercise is to break free.
To propose a typology which had that character, and to purport to use it as a basis of evaluation and criticism of the corresponding legal categories would of course be to engage in autopoiesis or self-referential argument. That, I dare to suggest, is what employment lawyers very often do when seeking to sustain and to apply the binary division of personal work relations and of personal work contracts into those of 'employment' on the one hand and 'self-employment' on the other hand, since that binary division is one very largely invented and imposed by legal systems of labour market administration. But I am very aware of the risk of falling into more complex and apparently sophisticated forms of the very same analytical error. #p#分页标题#e#
There is yet a further and even more dangerous set of rocks upon which this analytical enterprise might all too easily founder; its aim is to establish a non-system-specific basis for European comparative reflection, yet it would be all too easy for me to propose a typology which is reflexive of the practice of the British labour market rather than of European labour markets in general. It would require a much deeper immersion in comparative labour market sociology than I have achieved, in order to be confident of avoiding that trap, so I do not imagine that I will have done so. For all these reasons, the ensuing catalogue of leading types of personal work relations is a preliminary one, entirely subject to revision which it is intended will follow from the discussion which I hope this paper may provoke.

Very conscious, therefore, of all these hazards, I suggest that it may be useful to identify the following six leading types of personal work relations, the ordering of which will be explained later in this paper:

(1) 'standard employee' work relations;
(2) the personal work relations of 'public officials';
(3) the personal work relations of those engaged in 'liberal professions';
(4) the personal work relations of individual entrepreneurial workers, such as 'freelance workers' and 'consultants';
(5) the personal work relations of marginal workers such as 'casual', 'temporary', 'part-time' workers and 'volunteers'; and
(6) the personal work relations of labour market entrants, such as 'trainees' or 'apprentices'.

One or two points of detail may usefully be made about this scheme. It is not intended to be a comprehensive typology covering all possible personal work relations. The categories are not only therefore incomplete but also not mutually exclusive, so that they are overlapping and intersecting ones; this is a point to which we revert later. I have enclosed terminologies in quotation marks where I believe that they emerge from, or at least are identifiable within, a reasonably pan-European discourse of practical or empirical personal work relations which is authentically distinguishable from the legal analysis of those personal work relations, though necessarily inter-connected with that legal analysis for the reasons which I have previously given. I think this is true even of the 'standard employee' type, though I acknowledge that this category is the one which is most open to the suspicion of being simply a back-formation or reflection of a legal typology.

Rather differently, the notion of 'individual entrepreneurial workers' which I have invoked as category (4) is one which I have invented in order to group together a number of existing practical or empirical types such as 'freelancers' and 'consultants'. This represents a deliberate resisting of the temptation to use the terminology of 'the self-employed' or 'independent contractors' to identify this category, because they are so obviously reflections of legal categories; but I am conscious that my argument becomes difficult here. Equally open to debate is my invoking of the notion of 'marginal personal work relations' in order to assemble, in category (5), a number of practical typologies; here the difficulty is not so much that it steers either towards or away from a legal category, as that it alludes to a very imprecise socio-economic characterisation. #p#分页标题#e#

There are on the other hand other genuinely practical or empirical typologies which could be invoked, but which I believe to be cross-cutting ones rather than additional ones; the most important of those are 'agency workers' (meaning workers employed through employment agencies) and 'contract workers'(meaning workers employed on a 'contracted-out' basis through sub-contractors); personal work relations of these kinds are to be found to a greater or lesser extent within categories (3) to (6) of the system outlined above; we revert to this issue later in this paper. It is hoped by means of these various caveats and explanations to have established a sufficiently robust typology of personal work relations to act as the foundation of the legal superstructure of 'personal work nexuses' which the succeeding sections of this paper seek to build up.