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This article examines whether the Syrian refugee inflow to Jordan has displaced other immigrant workers in the Jordanian Labor Market. Using data from Jordan, before and after the Syrian refugee influx (in 2010 and 2016), we investigate whether male immigrants' labor market outcomes, compared to male Jordanian nationals, were affected by Syrian refugees. We control for the geographic sorting of refugees within Jordan using an instrumental variable approach. We find that male immigrants were more likely to be underemployed (i.e., work in the informal sector, work fewer hours, and earn lower monthly wages) in areas with high concentration of Syrian refugees. These findings suggest that the main competition that occurred in the Jordanian Labor Market, between 2010 and 2016, was not between refugees and male Jordanian nationals, but between refugees and male immigrants. These results suggest that studies examining the impact of refugees on the labor market should consider the effects on immigrants who are likely to be more vulnerable than natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an immanent discussion of the paper presented by Professor Jessica Gordon-Nembhard for the 2023 David Gordon Memorial Lecture given at the Allied Social Science Association annual meeting, Union of Radical Political Economy session. The discussion is organized around eight references (excluding Gordon-Nembhard) cited in the paper. These references represent specific theoretical perspectives and practical experiences in the fields of political economy, Black political economy, and Black feminist political economy, as well as psychology and cultural studies. The goal is to place this article and the work of Gordon-Nembhard within a variety of political economy and interdisciplinary traditions, and highlight its importance. JEL Classifications: B40, B55, P51 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining Black political economy and solidarity economy theories and practices provides alternative models for group development based on recognizing and developing internal (to the individual and to the community) capacities and creating mechanisms that equitably produce, distribute, recycle, and multiply local expertise and capital within communities of color, especially Black, communities—creating a solidarity economy of caring community for survival (successful social reproduction), sustainability, and liberation. The history of mutual aid, cooperative ownership, and economic democracy among African Americans demonstrates how economic cooperation and solidarity economics have enabled Blacks to address human needs, generate income, and at the same time be family and community friendly, in reaction to anti-Blackness and racial economic inequality. Cooperatives enable low-income residents, women, immigrants, and people of color (who often are without any avenue to gain income or assets) to provide affordable, quality goods and services in ecologically sustainable ways and generate jobs, stabilize their communities, and accumulate some assets. The history of African American cooperative ownership demonstrates that Black Americans have been successful in creating and maintaining collective and cooperatively owned enterprises that often provided not only economic stability for members and their communities but also developed many types of human and social capital and developed community-wide well-being. I discuss how this helps us to define an economics of abundance and explore possibilities for achieving economic liberation in the twenty-first century. JEL Classification : J15, B54, P13 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deepening levels of poverty in Zimbabwe have resulted in high numbers of Zimbabwean women migrating to South Africa in the hopes of securing better wages and job security. Most of these migrants end up working in the informal sector with limited income, high levels of insecurity, and a lack of protection against gender-based violence and xenophobia. Regardless of the adversities that these women encounter, they often display resilience and adaptability. Based on semi-structured interviews with 22 Zimbabwean migrant women, this article documents how these migrant women navigated some of the vulnerabilities and challenges they encountered. Instead of always being constrained by different structures of violence, this article unpacks the women's strategies to ensure their survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that in many sociological theorizing on gender, work, and employment, relatively little is known about how men who engage in female dominated informal works make sense of their gendered identities. Drawing from qualitative research in a rapidly urbanizing Ghanaian city, we examine the meanings and implications of men's involvement in gender atypical informal works. An unpacking of the constructions of gendered identity reveals the situative strategies that men may deploy to maintain, embolden, and/or adjust their masculinities congruent with dominant cultural scripts. In the end, we argue that men who engage in traditionally feminine work are accused of failing to herald the mainstreaming of the fulfillment of hegemonic masculinity which is a necessary cultural milestone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid renewed debates and theorizing about informality and the role of informal workers in Africa and across the globe, there remains little in the way of class-based understandings of Africa's informal workers and of informal worker politics. Marxists, especially Analytical Marxists, have been slow to study and consider the role and potential role of informal workers in geopolitics and class struggle across the Global South, and Africa, in particular. Drawing on ethnographic field work and interviews conducted in Sierra Leone, and broader informal worker-led struggles and events across Africa and the Global South, this work argues for a renewed understanding of collective action and class formation among informal workers. JEL Classification: J0, J2, J6 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work interrogates the long-held assumption that captive Africans exited slavery exhibiting psychological damage that blocked their progress as free men, women and families. As a counter narrative to the deficit perspective on Black life, the literature on extreme poverty and fluctuating unemployment patterns are summarized to show how the importance of social class has too often been underestimated, and the assumed negative, psychological effects of slavery, overestimated. Post WWII economic trends of the 1940s and 1950s are highlighted. The contemporary political economy of Black people is shown to reveal a diunital, paradoxical pattern, with many educated Blacks having access to life among the elite or top 10%, while less educated Blacks are forced to live in extreme poverty that approximates a modern caste system. The Black experience with poverty, tracked from Emancipation up to the present, is best explained by economic rather than psychological causes and dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews three veins of contributions on contemporary petty commodity production in Marxian political economy, with reference to India. Through a comparative analysis of the works of Henry Bernstein, Kalyan Sanyal, and Barbara Harriss-White, the article maps areas of commonality and contestation between the three theoretical constructions and makes a case for the merits of Harriss-White's framework over others. JEL Classification: B510, O170 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how much of the potential tax revenue is actually obtained remains very critical in Ghana's efforts to improve domestic revenue mobilization. This paper computes and examines tax gap and compliance burden among micro and small businesses which constitute more than 90% of Ghana's informal economy. Using data on 485 businesses in Ghana, the study finds that while some businesses underpay their taxes, surprisingly others actually pay more than expected. The average tax gap is computed to be about GHC 109.2 (US$19.2). Small businesses are associated with a higher tax gap of 24.9% compared to their micro counterparts. Moreover, we find that as compliance burden increases, the tax gap also increases, albeit significant variation in the effect of compliance burden on tax gap across regions and different tax handles. JEL Classification: H25, H26, H27, H32 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal street vending is the most widespread activity in the global informal economy and a central part of citizens' everyday lives, both sellers and patrons, in the urban centres of the Global South. Recently, however, authorities have started to ban street vending and even buying from vendors, as they impose policies that seek to control access to and use of urban spaces in pursuit of urban modernisation. Despite this, street vending continues. We seek understanding of this policy failure, from the perspective of the patrons of street vendors, a largely-neglected focus. Adopting a neoinstitutionalist framework, we utilise the concept of institutional incongruence to frame our empirical research. We apply multinomial analysis to an in-depth survey of 529 individuals in Lagos, Nigeria, complemented by 10 interviews. We find patrons are motivated by multiple economic, social and spatial factors. Our results, as well as codifying and confirming existing understandings of patrons' motivations, introduce a distinct factor – necessity – into the literature. These results allow us to offer important policy insights. Gaps between citizens' behaviour impacted by the formal institutions of neoliberal urban policies, and the longstanding informal institutions shaping custom, and community, provide new insights into Lagosians' everyday lives as patrons of street vendors. Moreover, these urban policies are shown to drive people towards street vending, as sellers and patrons – the opposite of their intended outcome. For policies to be developed that can reduce institutional incongruence and improve, rather than worsen, Lagosians' lives, our results offer an important starting point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses legal archives from Liangshan 梁山 county, Shandong, to explore the ambiguous position of rural markets in China during the Great Leap Forward campaign (1958–1962). These testimonies, though sparse, show that negotiations at a local, indeed personal, level underpinned the symbiosis between the "second economy" of illicit trade and the party-state's putatively socialist political economy. Liangshan's gray market bridged the gap between the party-state's Sputnik promises and catastrophic realities, contributing twofold to the party-state's political survival. First, illicit commerce helped famine survivors, including local cadres, obtain desperately needed sustenance; these cadres' support of trading villagers despite top-down restrictions on such transactions likely helped them retain local moral authority after the Leap. Second, the intermittent formal prosecution of "profiteers" in the ritualized space of the county courtroom projected justice, stability, and coercive power, which also contributed to the party's continuing hold on authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though it has passed over 30 years, Korea's community-based health insurance (CBHI) expansion can provide useful policy implications to developing countries with similar conditions, that is, lack of fiscal resources, health infrastructure, and medical resources to expand coverage to the informal sector. We summarized three groups of success factors through in-depth interviews and narrative analysis: system design, system operation, and public perception of the system. Korean CBHI could expand to the informal sector with the same system design as the formal sector such as mandatory enrolment, compulsory designation of medical service providers along with the low-benefit, low-contribution, and a low-payment system. However, expansion to the informal sector was somewhat different, as the CBHI exercised and operated the scheme with flexibility, semi-autonomy and leadership to fit for local context in terms of operation. Moreover, cultural factors that encouraged public awareness and increased participation significantly contributed in appealing to the informal sector. Overall, the systemic, operational, and cultural factors interacted with each other and created a synergy effect that local members in the informal sector found attractive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: informal economy; labor; politics; poverty; privatization EN informal economy labor politics poverty privatization 60 68 9 01/04/22 20220101 NES 220101 Graph: Top: Chicago Crosby works as an informal recycler or "canner" in New York City, where she is also an organizer with Sure We Can, a non-profit redemption center and canning collective in Brooklyn. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 "There is No Recovery without Informal Workers Covid Recovery and Post-Covid Reforms: Demands of Informal Worker Organizations", available at https://www.wiego.org/sites/default/files/resources/file/Informal%20Worker%20Demands%20-%2012-City%20Study.pdf. In some cases, this threat was realized overnight, as abruptly imposed lockdowns forced informal workers - street vendors, domestic workers, moto taxi drivers, market porters, and others - to stay home and find ways to survive without their daily earnings. In cities where cash was provided and workers were able to gain access, many reported that the support was insufficient to meet their needs.[16] Indeed, those workers who received cash grants were not less likely to report adult or childhood hunger at home. [Extracted from the article]

A dominant strand of orthodoxy argues that the problem of the informal sector could be mitigated through the capitalistic growth process. But our observations on India are different—with an expansion of the capitalistic formal sector, as the economy grows, there is a proliferation of fissured informality. Using a structuralist macro-model, we provide certain explanations for this phenomenon, which are also tested empirically using Indian subnational-state and firm-level data. Thus, we explore both the short- and long-run effects of the expansion of the formal sector on the heterogeneous informal economy. While a section of the population is pulled into the advanced informal activities, a vast segment is pushed to petty production. Accordingly, the orthodox transition narrative is questioned and alternative policy and political possibilities are introduced. JEL Classification: O11, O13, O17, P48 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic facts of China's economic development have called into question Western transition economic theory, most famously presented in the works of János Kornai. On the other hand, the three most representative approaches to explaining China's development experience have variously emphasized the resource endowment structure, or the property rights system, or the incentive mechanism behind the behavior of local governments, as the key to China's economic development. Although they focus on different dimensions of China's economic practices, they ultimately converge on the logic of marketism as the explanation. The "social science of practice" approach proposed by Philip Huang is distinguished from these orthodox theories in that, first, it attends to the rise of the huge informal economy in China and reveals the historical roots of contemporary social inequality. This approach has three closely related characteristics: theoretical formulations based on analyses of paradoxical phenomena, a broad historical perspective on current problems, and the idea of substantive justice. The main significance of this approach lies not only in its insightful and practice-focused understanding of the key realities that have been ignored by mainstream theories, but, more importantly, in its multiple inspirations for constructing a social science theory that incorporates Chinese subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the struggle of a group of street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil – displaced in the run up to the 2014 World Cup – to claim back their traditionally occupied workspace. Their displacement dramatically ruptured their pursuit of dignified livelihoods in the city's informal economy. Using prolonged ethnography between 2014 and 2016, I describe how the workers engaged with an affective governance regime in which narrow avenues of negotiation are opened but promises are never kept, generating a constant state of unpredictability and possibility. This cycle of hope and frustration demobilises their resistance movement while their charismatic leader struggles to produce and maintain the hope that they might achieve relocation. This labour of hope keeps their association alive but also generates frustration and further demobilisation. The article foregrounds the ambiguous role played by hope in the life of political movements and their everyday relationships with states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study asks whether there is utility in knowing who sources soybean seed within the household and why when explaining variation in seed obtained from the formal versus informal sector. Survey data collected in Malawi in 2018 were used to explore the question. Results suggest that the identity of the person who sources seed has little to do with whether the seed was obtained from the formal sector. Instead, why the person sources soybean seed is the better predictor. As formal seed system actors mobilize to persuade more smallholder farmers to adopt improved varieties, understanding why people source seed may be key for targeting and when designing agricultural development interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explain the prevalence and persistence of informal economic activity globally, scholars have recently advanced an institutional incongruence perspective. Institutional incongruence exists where there is a misalignment between what is considered legitimate by a society's formal institutions (e.g. its laws and regulations) and its informal institutions (e.g. norms, values and beliefs). Reporting findings from a series of qualitative focus groups in Bulgaria, Croatia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, this article explores relationships between such institutional incongruence and informal economic activity. In particular, it sheds light on how informality and institutional incongruence are experienced by individuals in South-East Europe. It furthermore provides insights on the causes of such incongruence, and how it can lead to informal economic activity. Finally, it reports on individuals' perceptions towards different measures to tackle institutional incongruence and informal economic activity, with implications for policymakers in South-East Europe and more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although recent scholarship has provided rich accounts of waste management privatization in urban India, the origins of the policy models that informed privatization remain unexplored. Further, the place of informal workers in the history of waste management policy and programs is more complicated than that provided by linear accounts of a transition from informal to formal in the existing scholarship. In contrast to existing explanations of these shifts, this paper draws attention to the rise of efficiency as a core municipal concern that explains the shifting relationship arrangements between the state, the informal private sector, and the formal private sector in waste collection markets. To address their concerns with cost of service delivery, Indian policy-makers justified privatization by indirectly drawing upon the influential work of E.S. Savas, the American economist credited with empirically substantiating the theory of efficiency gains from privatization in waste collection markets. Yet, informal systems are in practice not only more efficient than formal ones, they also conform well to Savas' policy prescriptions for structuring waste collection markets. Efficiency could thus serve as a basis for securing informal workers' claims as legitimate market participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) is a global research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy. The members of this network are individual researchers, individual development practitioners, and organizations of informal workers, which total more than 175 affiliates in 85 countries. Social researchers involved in the network conducted qualitative fieldwork in these communities and monitor the social impact of research. The researchers created spaces for dialogue and collected workers' impact stories through diverse qualitative tools and in different contexts, especially narratives and focus groups. The aim was to increase the visibility of informal workers, their living and working conditions, and their personal experience with regard to the social impact of urban policies. Through communicative daily life stories to social researchers working at WIEGO, this article analyzes how they are socially impacting the lives of informal workers. Based on this connection, all information related to social impact is interpreted through a communicative approach, connecting the stories of the social researchers and the interpretation of informal workers' lives to evidence-based actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We take off from the recent critiques of precarity as an emerging global phenomenon to argue that the processes of precarity in the Global North and the Global South need to be analytically distinguished to bring forth their specificities. We further argue that such an analysis challenges the idea of development as transition, as is prevalent in much of the literature. We focus on the informal economy in India to show that the notion of precarity conceptually involves three distinct aspects of production and labor processes—"non-capitalist" petty commodity production (PCP), subcontracted PCP, and informal wage-labor. We argue that these dimensions have their own particularities that have distinct implications for the process of capitalist development in India. We contend that reproduction of these informal spaces during a period of high economic growth unsettles the imaginary of development as transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

America's underground economy has grown strikingly since the 1970s, reflecting consumer demand for cheap prices, workers' search for alternative sources of income, and government intervention. Far from unregulated, this economy has been managed in crucial ways, revealing a fundamental paradox in free market rhetoric. This was particularly striking in New York City in the latter decades of the twentieth century, where a set of uneven responses to the underground economy expanded its boundaries through new licensing, zoning, and permitting requirements that many businesses could not conform to. A tragic fire at an immigrant social club in March 1990 revealed the problematic turns in municipal policy taken in the aftermath of the city's fiscal crisis. The lead up and response to the Happy Land Social Club fire by city officials demonstrated a rise in punitive regulation aimed at New York's marginalized residents in an era of alleged deregulation and small government fetish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a small area of the South West of Bangladesh, thousands of landless farmers cross the border with their family in order to work in the informal sector, mostly in Delhi and Bangalore: as waster pickers for the men, as maids for the women. Based on two ethnographic fieldworks in the villages of origin, this article intends to highlight the reasons leading to this migratory movement, the way this migration is organized and its consequences for the families. In a context where, in India, Bangladeshi migration is mostly felt as a threat, it also analyses the process of hypervisibility/invisibility to which these migrants are subjected to and the effects that deportability – or actual deportation – have on their life. At last, it examines how migrants experience the discrepancy between the way they see themselves and the way they are largely considered by the Indian authorities and broaden society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, most research on the consequences of sanctions has explored how foreign economic pressure influences the formal sector of targeted economies. This study instead focuses on explaining the ways in which economic sanctions might affect the size and growth of informal economies. We assert that the sanctions-induced economic disruptions and hardships in target economies distort the normal incentive structure that affected firms and individuals have for doing business in the formal economy, leading them to increase their participation in the shadow sector. To assess our theory, we conduct a global quantitative analysis of sanctions' effects on size and growth of their targets' informal economies from 1971 to 2005. Employing a wide variety of estimators and robustness checks to evaluate the direction of causality, we find strong evidence that economic sanctions increase their targets' informal economies. This suggests that economic sanctions do not just harm their targets' economies; they actually alter how their constituents participate in them. This has significant implications for efforts to understand the broader economic consequences of sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's status as the world's leading milk producer is significantly sustained by cow slaughter, a criminal act in most Indian states. The paper argues that jugaad, a complex Indian sociological phenomenon of corruption and innovation, is vital in enabling the illegal slaughter of cows on an industrial scale in the informal economy. Jugaad is enacted through ingenious alterations to social processes and material products in two 'grey' and informal spaces that are rendered exceptional to formal governance: (1) illicit transportation to slaughterhouses; and (2) intricate social contracts between stakeholders along this production line. Through these processes in informal spaces, the bovine body itself is transformed by way of jugaad from protected dairy cow to contraband beef cow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the case of informal car parkers in Mexico City, to whom drivers regularly entrust the keys to their vehicles. In contrast to literature on social trust that expects institutional trust and interpersonal trust to support one another, the article shows that interpersonal trust improbably arises in the context of corrupt and inefficient institutions. Coercive and market dynamics undergird the interactions among car parkers, police officers, and drivers, making possible the emergence of an informal market and noncontractual agreements. The exchange between car parkers and drivers depends on the performance of class—a performance that becomes legible and formulaic enough to appear safe, precisely because it coalesces classist tropes that are clearly distinct and recognizable. Interpersonal trust becomes possible not only despite class cleavages and institutional shortcomings but, paradoxically, because of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the power dynamics that shape the wastescape of Sri Lanka. Using theories of power and hegemony, we investigate how the discourses of expert knowledge and formal waste management processes marginalize the discourses and practices of the informal waste sector. By analyzing these discourses and practices, we demonstrate how legitimate and authoritative knowledge is constructed. The analysis uncovered five themes that frame the dominant model of waste management in Sri Lanka: (a) the discourse of development, (b) expert systems, (c) political decision-making, (d) coercion and alienation, and (e) removal of waste. We demonstrate that small-scale informal waste management can be both a solution to Sri Lanka's waste problem and a much needed income source for the poor. Thus, instead of alienation, coercion, and exclusion, informal waste workers should be recognized as valuable contributors of the urban wastescape to create a sustainable wastescape in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is widely held that working conditions in the informal economy are worse than in the formal economy, little evidence has been so far provided. The aim of this article is to fill this lacuna by comparing the working conditions of informal employees with formal employees using the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. Multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression analysis provides a nuanced and variegated appreciation of which working conditions are worse for informal employees, which are no different, and which are better for informal than formal employees. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical and policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify a basic dualism between capitalist and noncapitalist spaces within the vast informal sector in India, and show that this dualism has been reproduced and reinforced during the past decade of high economic growth. This calls into question the idea of capitalist transition that informs much of the discourse on economic development. We provide some preliminary arguments about the nature of this dualism and the process of reproduction of the noncapitalist economic space.JEL Classifications: O14, O17, J46 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon research in the state of Bihar, India, this article argues that informal access to medicines in Northern India is a core element of the government of healthcare. Informal providers such as unlicensed village doctors and unlicensed drug sellers play a major role in access to medicines in Bihar, in the particular context of the dismantling of public procurement services. Building on recent works in the socio-anthropology of pharmaceuticals, the article shows the importance of taking into account the political economy of drugs in India, in order to understand local problems of access more fully. If informal providers occupy such an important position in the government of healthcare in India, this is partly due to the shaping of healthcare as access to drugs on health markets. Elaborating the argument from interviews with health professionals and patients, the article first shows the situation of public healthcare and public procurement in Bihar; then it presents the role of informal medicine providers; lastly, it shows how patients deal with the fact that they live in a ‘pharmaceutical world’ where access to health equates with access to medicines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sociology of street children has emerged defined by its rejection of the dominant narratives of child welfare organisations that identify the street as the root cause of children’s immiseration and improper socialisation. In its place, sociological analysis has undermined the value of conceptualising street children as a coherent group on the street and in a parallel move has looked to conceptually reposition street children away from assumptions of passivity and neglect, towards a foundational insistence that the starting place for analysis is the positioning of street children as active and strategic social agents. It is the adequacy of this latter concern that is the focus of this article. By reintroducing the location of children within the social relations of the informal street economy, this article draws upon extensive and long-term qualitative research examining the lives of street children in Accra, Ghana. The argument here is that sociological notions of strategic action and efficacious agency seem ill-suited to accounting for the dilemmas and difficulties that street children’s quests for paid work inevitably involve. Rather, it is relative good fortune within the radical uncertainty of the social relations of the informal street economy that seems much more appropriate to accounting for how these children are integrated into work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an approach that helps geographers and others to carefully and critically reexamine prospects for diverse economies. We propose an interpretative institutionalist perspective is useful for elucidating overlooked opportunities for creating alternative economic visions and practices by revealing the process of ‘meaning making’ undertaken by actors in the process of developing policy responses to various dilemmas. We explore this notion in the context of de-growth or post-growth. De-growth is a way of thinking about the economy in ways that are not growth oriented, or fixated on GDP, but on the redistribution of wealth and living within the Earth’s ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deploys the conceptual frame of hustle to examine the everyday dealings associated with uncertainty and accepted informalities that pervade realms of everyday life amongst youth in precarious urban geographies. In doing so, the discussion advances the theoretical linkages between prolonged periods of ‘waithood’, alternative interpretations of work, and experiments within the everyday city more broadly. The article argues that the hustle economy is a localized but globally resonant condition of contemporary urbanism, coupling generative possibilities that emerge from everyday experiences of uncertainty and management of insecurities associated with ‘life work’ outside the bounds of normative social institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cities across the United States, groups of mostly men congregate in public and semipublic spaces in hopes of being hired for short-term work. The particular spaces where laborers congregate each day are crucial to their economic and social fortunes, yet to date, there is limited research examining the spatial organization of these sites. In this article, I draw on relational perspectives on the production of space and governmentality practices to examine day-labor hiring spaces in the San Diego Metropolitan Area. Drawing on more than seven years of mixed-methods research, I argue that laborers collectively employ strategic visibility: a set of spatial practices that reduces the potential for conflict and ensures laborers’ continued access to the particular spaces on which their survival depends. This analysis suggests that laborers’ site-selection and spatial practices are driven by pragmatic, economic concerns, rather than fear of interactions with policing agencies and/or anti-immigrant residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marginalized young men are a familiar presence in the areas surrounding Philippine ports, selling food and refreshments to the thousands of passengers who come through daily. A closer look, however, reveals that they engage in many other activities as they participate in an informal economy where income opportunities skirt the boundaries between licit and illicit. One job many of them engage in is sex work: as "call boys," they offer their sexual services to male clients. Many of them also use drugs, particularly shabu (methamphetamine). This article examines the relationship between sex work and drug use and situates it in the everyday lives of young men. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews and focus group discussions among 20 males aged 18-25 years old, and over a period of 12 months, "hung out" with them, observing their activities, and listening to their conversations. This ethnographic study, conducted 3 years before a violent "war on drugs" began to waged in the country, argues that the young men view drug use and sex work as pragmatic choices in their everyday economic lives. Drug use and sex work are also linked to their notions of masculinity and are fraught with risks and unintended consequences that they often overlook--even as they have their own notions of safety and risk. Understanding the intersections between sex work and drug use in relation to young people's "local moral worlds" and gender ideologies can help craft more effective drug policies in the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informality is both produced by and an inherent characteristic of state practices. It thus requires close scrutiny of the structures, nature and uneven distribution of power between state and society. Using a focus on three different parks in Berlin, this article demonstrates how informality is appropriated and institutionalized in the planning regimes of pioneer urbanism at Tempelhofer Freiheit; how in everyday law enforcement, legality is stretched by policing illegitimate activities in zones of exceptions at Görlitzer Park; and why, in Preußenpark (aka Thai Park), the state embodies a theatricality of polyvalent performances, turning a blind eye to certain activities which are not tolerated in other settings. This analysis reveals the Janus-faced governance of social practices even as it exposes the inherent ambiguities in everyday statehood, in which the state is regulating activities that are beyond its rules and, at the same time, violating its own internal rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anybody wishing to position Bafatá (Guinea-Bissau), Berlin (Germany) and Tallinn (Estonia) side by side would encounter a number of reasons why these cities should not be compared. To unmake such hesitations, this article offers a conceptual and methodological exploration of the ways in which these cities might be analysed comparatively through a methodological strategy termed multi-sited individualising comparison. This exploratory approach allows to talk across individual research projects in different sites. In applying this methodology to Bafatá, Berlin and Tallinn, the authors demonstrate how case studies in these different cities can be compared around a common interest, namely informal processes and their relations to states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses formalization processes in the context of urban conflict, focusing on the ways adversarial power relations dictate methods and outcomes of formalization. Based on analysis of the formalization of public transport in ethno-nationally contested Jerusalem, the article demonstrates the production of a mode of formalization, which the author terms sub-formalization. This mode is characterized by severe deviation from professional and administrative norms, both in methods and outcomes, and usually results in inferior solutions and irregular arrangements for challenging informality. In sub-formalization, modern rationality -- which constructs planners' professional authority -- is eroded by powers from above and below. Therefore sub-formality represents a mutation of modern, rational, West-oriented planning, coming as a result of the encounter with informality and resistance in a way that blurs dichotomization between the formal and informal. In the context of an ongoing urban conflict, as in the case of East Jerusalem, sub-formality is also utilized by the state to maintain urban marginality and secure existing power hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents original research on relations between middle-class residents and informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. It shows how middle-class associations used their consumption preferences as well as relationships with local authorities to legitimize the work of street hawkers and waste workers. These findings suggest that the toleration of informality can be traced to governance regimes comprised of both state and non-state powerbrokers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The informal economy is typically understood as being outside the law. However, this article develops the concept 'social uses of the law' to interrogate how informal workers understand, engage and deploy the law, facilitating the development of more nuanced theorizations of both the informal economy and the law. The article explores how a legal victory over the Johannesburg Council by reclaimers of reusable and recyclable materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa shaped their subjectivities and became bound up in struggles between reclaimers at the dump. Engaging with critical legal theory, the author argues that in a social world where most people do not read, understand, or cite court rulings, the 'social uses of the law' can be of greater import than the actual judgement. This does not, however, render the state absent, as the assertion that the court sanctioned particular claims and rights is central to the reclaimers' social uses of the law. Through the social uses of the law, these reclaimers force us to consider how and why the law, one of the cornerstones of state formation, cannot be separated from the informal ways it is understood and deployed. The article concludes by sketching a research agenda that can assist in developing a more relational understanding of the law and the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wenan county in Hebei province was “North China’s plastic waste recycling capital,” home to around ten thousand informal enterprises that together processed millions of tons of waste plastic annually until they were finally shut down in 2011. Based on fieldwork in North China’s informal recycling sector and data from gazetteers, government documents, news articles, and Chinese blogs, this article sketches how the informal waste sector developed in Wenan since the 1980s and analyzes how local government approaches to the sector changed as the devastating pollution and health effects of the industry became increasingly apparent. While the 2011 crackdown finally eliminated the sector from Wenan county, it predictably resulted in scattering these polluting enterprises throughout the region to work in more covert conditions, contributing to a “race to the bottom” dynamic in the sector. The conclusion proposes an alternative policy approach to the problem and briefly evaluates a national-scale initiative against the sector being planned for 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article analyses the indistinct boundaries between formal and informal economic exchanges, with a focus on friendship and work relations. To illustrate these intersections, we present a study of Swedish lifestyle entrepreneurs who run small-scale horse-related enterprises. The specific characteristics of this form of business - in which the horse farm owners/operators, customers, employees and voluntary workers share a leisure interest in horses and participate in the everyday work on the farm - provide the foundation for an economic environment where personal favour exchanges and a gift economy are intertwined with a market economy. Drawing on Viviana Zelizer's notion of 'relational work', applied in a context where the gift economy is based on individual leisure interests and leisure-based friendship, the present analysis focuses on how relationships, transactions and forms of repayments are constantly negotiated along a continuum between work-oriented friendship and friendly work relations. The empirical illustrations demonstrate the limitations of the notion of boundary work often employed in studies of relational work - which emphasizes boundary definition. In contrast, it seems that relational work may also involve practices that maintain indistinct boundaries between different types of relationships, thus sustaining tension between a formal and informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Good Work Code (GWC) and forms of worker organizing in the U.S. It discusses Jay Youngdahl's three objections to the GWC such as the values framework articulated is aspirational and unenforceable, companies engaging in bad labor practices, and belief to mobilize good capitalism to solve problem of worker exploitation. Other topics include the function of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), labor movement, and vision of GWC.

This article argues that trust emerges as a key interactional mechanism through which vendors, artists, and performers that work in a public marketplace turn daily conditions of uncertainty into enduring stability. Drawing on four years of ethnographic data, I empirically illustrate a process of building, maintaining, and protecting trust. Following trust from the level of one-on-one interaction through to the level of a community, I expose the particular interactional work trust does for different people across different situations. In the end, the way a social psychological mechanism plays out over time has significant social and material consequences for people working under highly uncertain conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing inspiration from institutional theory, a small sub-stream of literature has proposed that participation in the informal economy arises from the lack of alignment of a society’s formal institutions (i.e. its codified laws and regulations) with its informal institutions (i.e. the norms, values and beliefs of its population). To further advance this explanation, this article reports a 2013 Eurobarometer survey involving 27,563 face-to-face interviews across 28 European countries. The finding is that there is a strong association between the degree to which formal and informal institutions are unaligned and participation in the informal economy. The greater is the asymmetry between the formal and informal institutions, the more likely is participation in the informal economy at the individual-, population group- and country-level. A new policy approach for tackling the informal economy which focuses upon reducing this institutional incongruence is then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major questions of concern in this article are: Whose responsibility is it to provide services to the international informal sector practitioners in given municipalities? What scope is there for taxing the informal sector players to manage ‘free riding’ effectively? Can regional integration ensure policy coherence, charting a sustainable path for development? In light of these questions, this article aims at exploring and defining the roles of the informal sector in Africa’s regional integration agenda highlighting pitfalls and antics. The article is conceptual and based on literature review of scholarly, some official and media articles on the nexus between informal sector, women entrepreneurship and regional integration. Despite this analytical and practical divergence, critical for policy dialogue is the determination of the character of this loose, albeit important nexus. In Africa, the urban informal sector is marked by conspicuous ubiquity. Yet, this phenomenon is no longer a single country subject; it transcends country boundaries. Evidence includes the pervasive practice of cross-border trading and the provision of essential services and infrastructure to the migrants engaging in the informal sector as a survival coping strategy. Reality on the ground may fast-change than the debates present here. Latent in the present debate is the notion of ‘powerless places and placeless powers’ that affect informal sector, women entrepreneurship and regional integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]