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"Why Informal Workers Organize: Contentious Politics, Enforcement, and the State" by Calla Hummel explores the reasons why some informal workers organize while others do not. The book focuses on the relationship between street vendors and the state in La Paz and El Alto in Bolivia, and São Paulo in Brazil. Hummel argues that states sometimes encourage informal workers to form organizations to police themselves and avoid constant battles over public spaces. The book combines formal modeling, analysis of survey data, and ethnographic research to support this argument. It also raises important questions for future research, such as the varying capacity of workers to organize and the role of actors besides the state in regulating informal workers. [Extracted from the article]

In chapter 7, Stark examines life in Dar es Salaam through the lens of mobile phone theft. I Power and Informality in Urban Africa i is a compilation of varied and fascinating ethnographic essays that document life in the urban periphery. The book has an introductory chapter and is then divided into three parts, which are comprised of two to four chapters. [Extracted from the article]

The Historical Archaeology of Shadow and Intimate Economies: James A. Nyman, Kevin R. Fogle, and Mary C. Beaudry (editors), University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2019. If by intimate economies the editors of this volume mean economic relationships that are basically local in nature ("outside of formal, organized markets"), they have admirably achieved their goal. Jade Luiz's study of a 19th-century Boston brothel emphasizes the material remains and practices that benefitted the brothel economy. [Extracted from the article]

Reviewed here are contrasting approaches to the same locus of marginalisation: the precariat in the informal sector. In developed and underdeveloped countries alike, neo-liberal economic growth is increasingly dependent on insecure, temporary and low-paid employment. Such laissez faire capitalism demonstrates additionally that – contrary to earlier views about the capitalism/unfreedom link – bonded labour is not an obstacle to accumulation, since the free market currently thrives on an unfree workforce. Because, with the exception of Marxist theory, no opposition to this pattern of economic growth argues for transcending the capitalist system, critiques of its labour regime are unable to formulate an adequate political solution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The shadow economy, Konove deftly argues as he traces the history of the Baratillo from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, is anything but a shadow. Focusing that argument on a particular economic and social space of exchange such as the Baratillo demonstrates, to good effect, the power of this kind of local history. Andrew Konove's history of the Baratillo, Mexico City's black market where used, stolen, and counterfeit goods have been traded since early colonial times, exemplifies the complex nature of these relationships and the ways that people, goods, and processes often thought to be outside of state control or counter to state interests use the mechanisms of the state to reify their place in society. [Extracted from the article]