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Chapter 1 contextualizes self-employment in a comparative perspective, explaining the reasons—economic and technological—that support in particular the growth of self-employed professionals, who offer highly qualified and specialized skills that perfectly respond to the needs of contemporary capitalism. The proliferation of these occupations, functional to the services economy, which deviate from traditional employment relationships, pose challenges to the systems of institutional regulation of labour, welfare and collective representation. The chapter deals with the topic of the individual dimensions of autonomy at work (legal status, work content and working conditions), and addresses the issue of how work autonomy is governed in different European national contexts. It emphasizes the importance of understanding in which institutional settings professionals develop their activities and where they may find policy responses to emerging needs for social protection and collective representation. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to describing the structure of the book, presenting a summary of the content of each of the chapters.

Since the introduction of the System of National Accounts, gross domestic product (GDP) has become a synonym for growth and development. However, this indicator offers a rather narrow view of economic progress, neglecting to represent social aspects as well as the environmental consequences of economic growth. This chapter presents a review of the debate around the need to go ‘beyond GDP’, stressing aspects such as multidimensionality, basic needs, utilitarianism, subjective well-being, capabilities, and the methodological issues related to the aggregation of measures of well-being. Inequalities and sustainability are addressed separately, together with the specific challenges set by their measurement. The chapter stresses the importance of the involvement of stakeholders to guarantee democratic legitimacy for the indicators used to overcome the narrowness of GDP. The chapter ends with a discussion on how multidimensional approaches to well-being are increasingly setting in, as epitomized by the indicators of the 2030 Strategy with the Sustainable Development Goals.