PurposeFor many decades, European national governments sought to stamp out undeclared work using a repressive approach. In the changing economic context of declining employment participation rates, however, the European Commission has called for a new approach to transform undeclared work into...

PurposeProviding support to off-the-books business start-ups to help them make the transition to legitimacy could be a novel and effective method of creating new legitimate business ventures. The aim of this paper is to advance understanding of why some business start-ups operate off-the-books...

The analysis of employment relations needs to include work in the informal economy. For this purpose, we propose a ‘degrees of informalization' framework that evaluates the proportion of employment relations infused with informality and the nature of this permeation. We apply this framework to...

This paper contributes to a small but growing body of thought that has questioned the hegemony of capitalism by revealing the persistence of multifarious economic practices in everyday community economies. To further advance this school of thought, first, a conceptual framework is developed to...

For much of the previous century, the informal sector was largely represented as a residue of a previous mode of production confined to marginal populations and gradually disappearing due to the inevitable and natural shift towards the formal economy across the globe. Over the past quarter of a...

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...

Recent research has revealed that a large proportion of entrepreneurs startup their ventures operating on a wholly or partially off-the-books basis. Until now, it has been commonly assumed that those who operate in the informal economy are exclusively commercial entrepreneurs. They are assumed...

Purpose – This paper evaluates critically the competing theories of informal entrepreneurship that variously represent such endeavour as a residue from a previous mode of accumulation (modernisation theory), a direct by-product of contemporary capitalism and survival strategy for those...