Self-Employment and Occupational Structure in an Industrializing City: Detroit, 1880

Abstract

Despite interest in the historically ambiguous position of small entrepreneurs in the occupational and class structure, there has been little investigation of the lives of smallscale self-employed workers during industrialization. Using data from the 1880 manuscript census, city directories, and R.G. Dun and Company credit reports for Detroit, Michigan, this study explores employment status self-employment versus wage employment as a basis of occupational stratiflcation. Self-employed workers in industrial Detroit were more likely than wage earners to have possessed social and labor market advantages. While self-employed workers were diverse in the occupations they held, they were more homogeneous than wage earners in their social characteristics and economic circumstances. The majority of self-employed workers were middle-class. Smallscale entrepreneurs formed a lower middle-class stratum in spite of similarities between their occupational experiences and those of manual wage earners. Self-employment as a basis of occupational stratification among workers reflects labor market advantages such as work autonomy based on property ownership (Form 1985). For many owners of small and petty business enterprises, however, the occupational and economic advantages of self-employment are not readily apparent. As a result, the occupational and class position of small-scale entrepreneurs have often been viewed as problematic, for example, as to whether self-employment necessarily confers middle-class status (Form 1982, 1985; Mills 1956; Wright 1979). The industrialization of the United States in the late nineteenth century has been regarded as a time of historical transition in the meaning of self-employment as a basis of occupational stratification (Kocka 1980; Mills 1956). Even so, there has been little direct empirical examination of the economic, social, and occupational circumstances of self-employed workers' lives during industrialization (Blumin 1980; Bruchey 1980; Steinmetz & Wright 1989; Thernstrom 1973). In this article I investigate the lives of self-employed workers in one historical *The National Science Foundation (SES8611999) and the department of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, provided supportfor this research. I thank Howard Aldrich, Judith Blau, Claude Fischer, Ken Hardy, Mike Hout, and three reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank Olivier Zunz for his assistance with the 1880 census data. Direct correspondence to Melanie Archer, Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27514 (Bitnet: melanie@uncvml). ? The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, March 1991, 69(3):785-809 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.102 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 04:09:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 786 / Social Forces 69:3, March 1991 context: the early industrial city of Detroit in 1880. I address two general issues: (1) who were the self-employed, and how were they different from wage earners? and (2) how was self-employment related to workers' occupational status and economic circumstances?