It is popularly assumed that the main barrier that prevents household services from being outsourced to the small business sector is household disposable income. This paper evaluates critically whether this is the case. Reporting survey results from 418 households in the UK city of Sheffield,...

Environmental issues are demanding deep changes, both by governments as well as by the private sector through strategic management, across all sectors. This is particularly the case in the automotive services sector, where the need to reduce CO₂ emissions has become a central target. In this...

To tackle cash-in-hand work, public policy has so far concentrated on detecting and punishing the suppliers of such work. Drawing upon evidence from 861 face-to-face interviews in English localities on off-the-books work in the household services sector, however, a widespread cash-in-hand ethos...

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...

To explain participation in the self-service economy, competing theorisations have variously depicted participants as rational economic actors, dupes, seekers of self-identity, or simply doing so out of economic necessity or choice. To evaluate motives for self-servicing in the home improvement...

To evaluate critically the ideal-type depiction of entrepreneurs as wholesome super heroes that permeates the entrepreneurship literature, this paper analyses whether entrepreneurs in the service sector are involved in off-the-books transactions. Reporting data from interviews conducted in...