Passionately or reluctantly independent? Artistic and non-artistic self-employment compared

Abstract

Abstract The stereotypical example of an intrinsically motivated person is an artist who creates art for art’s sake. In line with this, a frequently expressed argument is that many of these artists opt for self-employment to develop their artistic career and stay in control. Recently, in this journal, Feder and Woronkowicz in Journal of Cultural Economics 47 589–607, 2023, reported findings from a comprehensive study with US data in which they comparatively examine the motives of artistic versus non-artistic self-employed. Indeed, one of their key results is that artists are less likely to seek self-employment for economic compared to other reasons. We examine the generalizability of their findings by conducting a similar analysis on a sample of Dutch artistic and non-artistic self-employed. We add four further variables—two experience and two risk-related—to explore the extent to which these may provide further insight in artistic—non-artistic motivational overlap. Moreover, we examine a wider set of potential self-employment motives to explore finer-grained differences between artistic vis-à-vis non-artistic self-employed. Our main findings of this extended replication study are threefold. First, we generalize (Feder and Woronkowicz in Journal of Cultural Economics 47 589–607, 2023) main result regarding the lower importance of the economic motive for self-employed artists. Second, we show that the added experience and risk variables are more influential than (Feder and Woronkowicz in Journal of Cultural Economics 47 589–607, 2023) set of demographic variables. Third, we prompt serving the ‘community’ as a new and underrated motive that may fuel the passion of artists, specifically those who are female or lower educated.

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