Une perspective critique des discours sur l’entreprise de soi au prisme des changements de statut d’emploi

The injunction to self-entrepreneurship seems to have resonated for more than thirty years in our contemporary society, promoting the autonomy and the individualization of professional paths in their most successful modality. Critically, the study that supports this article consists of a comparison between, on the one hand, discourses promoting professional transitions through autonomy (i.e. business creation and self-employment) and, on the other hand, the actual trajectories of individuals passing through independent statutes (SARL, EURL, SASU, micro-enterprise, portage salarial, etc.). From a conceptual mix between a process-based approach to organizations (related to the field of entrepreneurship) and management sciences, this article proposes to compare an analysis of discourse on the injunction to self-entrepreneurship (business creation and self-employment) on the basis of some fifty web contents dedicated to the phenomenon and of around one hundred press articles, with a quantitative study covering more than 300 career paths passing through independent statuses. The main results highlight a significant gap between discursive, media and commercial content, supporting self-entrepreneurship, and the pragmatics of the effective trajectories of workers, leading to the invisibility of new forms of social and financial precariousness, but also of self-responsibility for the professional risks of these employment statuses.