INTERNAL SEGMENTATION, RESIDENTIAL PATTERNS AND JOB-RELATED SPATIAL MOBILITY FOR INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONALS. AN ORIGINAL ANALYSIS ON PRIMARY DATA.

This study challenges the traditions of the sociology of work and industrial relations by taking into consideration a new emergent category of workers: the Independent Professionals (IPros). Recent data (Labour Statistics) provide some hints on the relevance of the phenomenon: self-employed workers in advanced services (finance, counselling, producing-distributing information, auditing and so on) have increased their share in employment in most countries. As a recent survey (Edelman Berland 2014) pointed out, 53 million Americans are doing freelance work (53 percent of the entire workforce) Despite these figures, the phenomenon is still overlooked by the academic literature. The aim is to provide a first description of this phenomenon not only from a mere labour perspective, but considering spatial practices and lifestyles too. Indeed labour studies and economic sociology should not avoid considering space and time as two main dimensions shaping their object of study: workers are not abstract entities, they are fully part of the material environment they move in. Labour markets, Welfare regimes, and spatial processes play together. Mobility-related literature traditionally identifies two different forms of moving to get a job: mobility of less skilled people for whom becoming mobile is the only way to get a job, and mobility of highly qualified people, looking for career opportunities. What is missing in this binary analysis is a new intermediate workforce, the self-employed independent professionals (Ipros) who often experience long distance interregional commuting patterns. Among them there are young high-skilled people with low income who are likely to undergo phenomena of spatial exclusion at the regional level. Where do they live? Where do they work? What are the explaining micro and macro variables? These questions will be discussed in the contribution which has firstly a descriptive and investigative aim. The method of study is based on quantitative analysis mainly performed on web survey data, due to the lack of available offical data sources in Italy. Specifically we provide a detailed description of survey design and data collection process, with a focus on methodological strategies applied for data cleaning, coding and editing in order to better highlight first descriptive results related to research questions. GIS (Geographical Information System) tools have been applied to survey data in order to provide a full extensive spatial description of social phenomena investigated: the core analysis is based on GIS and spatial statistics techniques by using data collected at micro and macro levels.