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Record W4408674670 · doi:10.1177/00380385251320568

Corrosive Solo Self-Employment: The Qualitative and Quantitative Impact of Neo-Villeiny in the Fitness Industry

2025· article· en· W4408674670 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueSociology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicDigital Economy and Work Transformation
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociologyQualitative researchSocial science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Solo self-employment (SSE) is a heterogeneous category that requires further contextual analysis across different occupations and professions. Drawing on a multiple methods study, this article reveals the corrosive impact of a specific type of SSE, that of the self-employed personal trainer (SEPT) in the UK fitness industry. SEPTs pay rent in cash and in kind and carry out (unpaid) tasks that would otherwise be undertaken by contracted employees leading to a corrosive impact on employment. Despite a dramatic increase in gym membership in the UK between 2006 and 2021, Office for National Statistics data reveal a decrease in employment in both proximal fitness industry functions and for personal trainers, alongside an increase in self-employed fitness instructors of more than 400%. Our study shows that the nature of the work of this growing SEPT workforce has a direct and negative (corrosive) impact on those undertaking the work.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.311
Threshold uncertainty score0.431

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.041
GPT teacher head0.417
Teacher spread0.376 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it