.This article evaluates critically the meta-narrative that a powerful, expansive, hegemonic and totalising market sphere is penetrating deeper into each and every corner of everyday life in the ‘advanced market economies'. Drawing theoretical inspiration from an emerging corpus of...

Reflecting the broader ‘cultural turn' in retail studies, recent surveys of do-it-yourself (DIY) consumers have emphasised human agency rather than economic constraints when explaining their motives for purchasing DIY products. The aim of this paper however, is to evaluate critically this...

Throughout the advanced economies, public policy has become ever more deeply involved in developing the capacities of communities to help themselves. Until now, this has been pursued through facilitating the development of community-based groups. The aim of this paper, however, is to critically...

This paper evaluates the coping practices adopted by households in East-Central Europe following the collapse of the socialist bloc. Drawing upon the New Democracies Barometer (NDB) survey, it is here revealed that although a common assumption is that post-socialist societies have undergone a...

To evaluate critically whether under a market system, monetary exchange is always and everywhere based on profit-seeking behaviour, this article examines cash-in-hand work, a form of activity conventionally conceptualised as low paid employment heavily imbued with profit motivations on the part...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically the public policy approach that seeks to tackle the underground economy in deprived populations by deterring people from engaging in such work by ensuring that the expected cost of being caught and punished is greater than the economic benefit of...

This paper aims to promote greater discussion and debate on the implications and legitimacy of the current UK government policy approach that seeks to nurture voluntary activity by encouraging participation in voluntary groups (formal volunteering) and neglects the cultivation of one-to-one help...

The view that alternative retail channels (i.e., informal and/or second-hand modes of goods acquisition) are used out of economic necessity by disadvantaged consumers has been recently opposed by cultural theorists who instead read such channels in agency-orientated terms as places of fun,...

The starting point of this paper is that the shift from a producer to a consumer society necessitates that social exclusion is investigated not only in relation to production but also consumption. To do this, case study evidence from interviews with 350 households in rural England is reported....

The starting point of this paper is a recognition that the current deterrence approach towards underground work fails to recognize either the potential asset that enterprise and entrepreneurship in the underground economy represents in western economies or the desire of governments to transfer...