ABSTRACT
Amongst the innumerable contributions which Jim Coleman has made to sociology are his early and pioneering works on the use of stochastic flow models (Coleman, 1964a, 1964b) and, more recently, his promotion of rational choice or action theory (Coleman, 1990a). In this essay in honour of Coleman—surely the outstanding sociologist of his generation—I shall bring together certain aspects of the two, by analyzing the entry to and exit from self-employment. In so doing, I shall make use of Coleman's well known diagram (Figure 13.1) which provides him with an organizing framework for his monumental work on rational choice theory—RCT (Coleman, 1990a).
