Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics 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 …

In recent years, there has been growing recognition in the entrepreneurship literature that many

entrepreneurs operate in the informal economy and that not all these informal entrepreneurs are doing

so out of economic necessity and because of a lack of choice. Instead, it has been asserted that some of

these informal entrepreneurs choose to exit the formal economy and trade on an off-the-books basis

more as a matter of choice. However, until now most research displaying this has been conducted in

advanced western and post-socialist economies. Little has been written on whether this is also the case

in third (majority) …

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 …

This paper evaluates critically the assumption that entrepreneurs

who start-up their business ventures operating wholly or partially

off-the-books are engaged in commercial entrepreneurship. Reporting evidence

from a 2005–2006 survey involving face-to-face interviews with

298 informal entrepreneurs in Ukraine, the finding is that they are not all

commercially-driven. Instead, these informal entrepreneurs range from purely

rational economic actors who pursue for-profit logics through to purely social

entrepreneurs who pursue solely social logics, with the majority somewhere

in the middle of this spectrum combining both for-profit and social rationales.

The result is a call for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneous …