The central issue for those analyzing the informal sector has been its relationship to deprivation. Drawing upon empirical evidence from across the EU, the validity of such assumptions and debates ...about the informal sector is examined.
The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically the gender variations in informal sector entrepreneurship. Until now, a widely-held belief has been that entrepreneurs operating in the informal sector ...in developing nations are lowly paid, poorly educated, marginalized populations doing so out of necessity as a survival strategy in the absence of alternatives. Reporting an extensive 2003 survey conducted in urban Brazil of informal sector entrepreneurs operating micro-enterprises with five or less employees, the finding is that although less than half of these entrepreneurs are driven out of necessity into entrepreneurial endeavor in the informal economy, women are more commonly necessity-driven entrepreneurs and receive lower incomes from their entrepreneurial endeavor than men despite being better educated. The outcome is a call to recognize how the gender disparities in the wider labor market are mirrored and reinforced by the participation of men and women in the realm of informal sector entrepreneurship. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is draw out some policy lessons from a study of self-help activity amongst 200 households in deprived urban neighbourhoods of Southampton. Commencing with a critique of the ...popular prejudice that promoting self-help should be opposed in case it leads to a demise of formal welfare provision, the paper then interrogates the empirical evidence to understand and explain the nature and extent of such work in deprived neighbourhoods.
The aim of this article is to show that despite the growth in service employment, the formalisation of services is neither as all-pervasive as such growth .suggests nor is it a natural and inevitable ...process. Through case study of a deprived neighbourhood, this article finds that the vast majority of service remain informally provided, that it is not the poorest households who acquire the largest proportion o f their services informally and that informal services are not used purely out of economic necessity. Therefore, the predominace of informality is unlikely to be confined to deprived neighbourhoods. The problem, however; given that those who purchase fewest fornal services also acquire fewest informal services, is that iformal modes of provision seem to reinforce rerther than reduce the socio-economic inequalities produrced by employment.
Reporting a 2007 Eurobarometer survey involving 26,659 face-to-face interviews, this paper has revealed that 1 in 28 of the EU population surveyed had undertaken informal self-employment during the ...previous year. However, this overarching figure masks significant socio-spatial variations. Participation in informal selfemployment, for example, is much higher in Nordic nations where 9% had engaged in such endeavour during the previous year, whilst just 2% had done so in Southern Europe. Given that a significantly smaller proportion of this informal selfemployment is conducted for closer social relations in Southern Europe, this lower propensity towards informal self-employment has been here tentatively explained by the non-monetisation of kinship and community exchange in Southern Europe. The groups most likely to engage in such work, meanwhile, are those working in construction and household services, men, younger age groups, those with higher levels of education, the lowest- and middle-income groups, the self-employed, manual workers unemployed and students along with those living in rural areas.
In recent decades, the field of entrepreneurship studies has become increasingly permeated by a virtuous ideal-type depiction of entrepreneurs as wholesome and legitimate heroes. This paper evaluates ...critically this predominant portrayal of entrepreneurs as always conducting their business affairs wholly by the rulebook. To do this, the objective is to assess whether it is common for entrepreneurs to conduct some or all of their transactions on an off-the-books basis in the underground economy. Reporting case study evidence from face-to-face interviews with 91 entrepreneurs in England, 331 in Ukraine and 81 in Russia, the finding is that 77 per cent, 90 per cent and 100 per cent of these entrepreneurs respectively assert that they participate in underground transactions. The outcome is a call to transcend the marked discrepancy between the virtuous ideal-type depiction of entrepreneurs as wholesome and legitimate heroes and the lived practices of entrepreneurship. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article evaluates critically the meta-narrative that there is no alternative to capitalism. Building upon an emerging corpus of post-structuralist thought that has begun deconstructing this ...discourse in relation to western economies and the majority (third) world, this paper further extends this critique to Central and Eastern Europe by investigating the degree to which people in post-Soviet Ukraine rely on the capitalist market economy for their livelihood. Reporting the results of 600 face-to-face interviews, the finding is that only a small minority of households in this post-socialist society relies on the formal market economy alone to secure their livelihood and that the vast majority depend on a plurality of market and non-market economic practices. The outcome is a call to re-think the lived practice of economic transition in post-Soviet societies more widely in order to open up the feasibility of, and possibilities for, alternative economic futures beyond capitalist hegemony.
Despite the existence of a fervent opposition to regional shopping centres (RSCs) in Britain, this article argues that there is little evidence to support the view that they have negative economic, ...social and environmental impacts. Instead, the vehement rejection of RSCs is asserted to be at least as much due to their cultural impacts as their economic, social and environmental impacts. In examining their cultural impacts, this paper explores a dimension that has so far remained unconsidered in the retail literature but which may well help to explain more fully the strength of the opposition to RSCs in contemporary Britain.
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