Business Commons^™

The need to integrate work beyond employment into discussions of labor practices is widely recognized. This has been so far largely achieved by adopting a dual economies perspective, which is criticized for depicting the formal and informal sectors as separate hostile worlds. To resolve this, an alternative “total social organization of labor” approach is here proposed that maintains the terms formal and informal as useful broad descriptors of different work relations, but recognizes a spectrum from purely formal to purely informal labor practices cross-cut by another spectrum from wholly monetized to wholly non-monetized labor practices. Reporting evidence from 861 face-to-face …

Drawing inspiration from a burgeoning corpus of scholars who have begun to question

the narrative of impending market hegemony, this paper seeks to further advance this

emergent ‘diverse economies’ literature by constructing a conceptual framework for

representing the multiple labour practices in economies. Transcending the simplistic

market/non-market dichotomy, this conceptualises multiple kinds of labour existing along

a spectrum from market-oriented to non-market oriented practices, which is cross-cut by

another spectrum ranging from wholly monetised to wholly non-monetised practices. The

resultant portrayal of a plurality of labour practices that seamlessly merge into each other

is then applied to understanding the types …

For much of the previous century, the informal sector was largely represented as a residue of a

previous mode of production confined to marginal populations and gradually disappearing due to

the inevitable and natural shift towards the formal economy across the globe. Over the past quarter

of a century, however, articles published in Work, Employment and Society have been at the forefront

of re-reading the informal sector. This article reveals how this body of literature has shown informal

economic activities to be a persistent and ubiquitous feature of the economic landscape, mapped

the complex and variable dynamics of formal and …

Recent research has revealed that a large proportion of entrepreneurs startup

their ventures operating on a wholly or partially off-the-books basis. Until now, it

has been commonly assumed that those who operate in the informal economy are

exclusively commercial entrepreneurs. They are assumed to be rational economic

actors who weigh up the benefits of operating off-the-books against the costs of

being caught and decide to operate in this manner. The aim of this paper is to

evaluate critically this a priori assumption. Reporting evidence from a 2005/6 survey

involving face-to-face interviews with 102 informal entrepreneurs in Moscow in

Russia, the …