Business Commons^™

Drawing upon the results of 26,659 face-to-face interviews in the 27 member states of the

European Union (EU-27), the aim of this paper is to evaluate its varying magnitude and

whether such work is mostly wage-based (of an envelope wage or undeclared variety) or

own-account work (of a market-oriented or solidarity-oriented variety). The finding is

that in ‘welfare capitalist’ work and welfare regimes, which are more equal (measured by

the gini coefficient) pursue more extensive labour market interventions, have higher

levels of social protection and greater state redistribution, undeclared economies are

smaller and are composed mostly of solidarity-oriented own-account work. …

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 …

This paper contributes to a small but growing body of thought that

has questioned the hegemony of capitalism by revealing the

persistence of multifarious economic practices in everyday community

economies. To further advance this school of thought, first, a

conceptual framework is developed to map the diverse economic

practices used by communities and second, this is applied through a

survey of 600 households in Ukraine. The outcome is to reveal that

just as multifarious economic practices prevailed under state

socialism, the same applies in societies in transition to capitalism,

suggesting that there are alternative futures for community economies

beyond market …

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 …