Although tackling informal employment is being accorded ever greater priority by governments across the western world, critical reviews of how public policy is addressing this issue are notable by their absence. This paper begins to bridge this gap. Providing a typology of the various public...

Purpose – In the majority (third) world, informal employment has been long viewed as an asset to be harnessed rather than a hindrance to development. The purpose of this paper is to show how a similar perspective is starting to be embraced in advanced economies and investigates the...

In the past few years, the view that participation in informal and/or second-hand modes of goods acquisition results from economic necessity has been contested by an agency-orientated cultural reading that views such engagement to be about the search for fun, sociality, distinction, discernment,...

The aim of this paper is to explore the behaviour and preferences of lower-income populations when acquiring goods and services. Drawing upon empirical evidence from several English cities, this paper finds that in the realm of goods acquisition, these consumers want new goods from formal retail...

Despite the existence of a fervent opposition to regional shopping centres (RSCs) in Britain, this article argues that there is little evidence to support the view that they have negative economic, social and environmental impacts. Instead, the vehement rejection of RSCs is asserted to be at...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the psychological contract from the employers’ perspective, by examining violations where the employer rather than employee is the victim, an issue that has so far seldom been addressed in extant psychological contract research....

The conventional portrayal of the formal/informal economy dichotomy endows the formal economy with positive attributes and the informal economy with negative characteristics. Recently, this hierarchy has been inverted by scholars portraying the informal economy positively as a chosen alternative...

This working paper is part of a series of deliverables within the project entitled GREY – Out of the shadows: developing capacities and capabilities for tackling undeclared work in Bulgaria, Croatia and FYR Macedonia’ (‘GREY’), funded by the European Commission’s Framework 7...

In the light of high unemployment in deprived neighbourhoods, this paper considers whether community exchange is being used as a coping strategy. Examining its current magnitude and character as well as the barriers to participation in a particular deprived neighbourhood, this paper finds that...

In recent years, there has been a growing realisation that beyond the realm of legitimate entrepreneurship is a large hidden enterprise culture composed of entrepreneurs conducting some or all of their trade off-the-books. Until now, however, few have evaluated how many entrepreneurs start-up...