Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations 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 …

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) …

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 …

Recently, it has become increasingly recognized that the reach of the market

economy is shallower than previously assumed and that other livelihood

practices persist, such as self-provisioning. However, neither the prevalence of

nor the rationales underpinning engagement in these non-market work

practices have been widely evaluated. To start to bridge this gap, this article

evaluates the extent of self-provisioning in post-Soviet Ukraine and the reasons

for engaging in such subsistence production. Until now, participants in selfprovisioning

have been portrayed either as rational economic actors, dupes,

seekers of self-identity, or simply doing so out of necessity or choice. Analyzing

face-to-face interviews …