ABSTRACT
It has long since been the case that the firm has been the de facto unit of economic enquiry,
enjoying what Grabher (2004a, p. 105) describes as an “ontological and epistemological
advantage”. However, in his overview of “neoclassical” theory of the firm, Yeung
(2001, p. 293) cautions against viewing the firm as “a self-contained and homogeneous
“black-box” capable of producing economic outcomes”. As such it would be obdurate
to view the firm as either coherent or unproblematic, and uncritically privilege the
“black-box” that is the firm as a single or starting point for empirical enquiry (Leyshon,
2011). Accordingly, over the past decade, the almost universal acceptance of the firm
as the unit of calculation and analysis has come to be challenged within the literature
(see Taylor & Asheim, 2001; Ekinsmyth, 2002; Yeung, 2001, 2006; Glucker, 2006;
Jones, 2007; Weller, 2008). In contributing to this important strand of academic debate,
this paper further unpacks the black-box by focusing on freelancers as the unit of analysis.
