Introduction: Informal Economies as Varieties of Governance
The growing body of research on informality, that has its origins in the work of Hart (1973) in Ghana, and which has resulted in a burgeoning literature comprising thousands of new articles ever year, has moved in recent years a long way from the monodisc
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wing body of research on informality, that has its origins in the work of Hart (1973) in Ghana, and which has resulted in a burgeoning literature comprising thousands of new articles ever year, has moved in recent years a long way from the monodisciplinary approach and lack of dialogue between disciplines that conventionally plagued the study of the informal sector. Initially approached from the perspectives of economic anthropology (1973) and labour studies (ILO 1972) that dealt, respectively, with informal economy and informal labour, studies on informality have increasingly broadened in terms of disciplines and geographical scope.
A. Polese (*) Tallinn University and Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia C.C. Williams University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK I.A. Horodnic Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Iași, Romania e-mail: [email protected] P. Bejakovic Institute of Public Finance, Zagreb, Croatia © The Author(s) 2017 A. Polese et al. (eds.), The Informal Economy in Global Perspective, International Political Economy Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40931-3_1
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A. POLESE ET AL.
Drawing from a range of diverse theoretical approaches, recent scholarship on informality, informal practices, diverse and shadow economy have tended to agree on two major points. First, informality is—although in different forms and affecting different areas of a state’s competence— present both in the global North and global South. Second, informality is not necessarily a transitory phenomenon nor it is limited to sweatshops and is not used only by the poor and marginalised. Starting from Gibson- Graham’s seminal work contending that capitalism is not the only way (Gibson-Graham 1996, 2008), several works have been informing the creation of the understanding of diverse economies and, subsequently, the rediscovery of anarchism in geography (White and Williams 2014). This is a tendency that may be seen as stretching the literature on informal welfare and practices (Polese et al. 2014, 2015) to reject the state as the only provider of services and welfare so as to rediscover the role of human agency (Morris and Polese 2015) and mechanisms and practices that are not informed by the state or its institutions. Recent tendencies on informality have gone beyond both a mere economic view and, building on Granovetter’s early works (1984), rediscovered its interconnection with social phenomena (Gudeman 2001; Yelcin-Hackman 2014). The outcome has been a proposal for a more holistic interpretation of the meaning of informality and its influence in various spheres of life (Helmke and Levitsky 2004; Isaacs 2011; Ledeneva 1998, 2013; Misztal 2000; Morris 2011). The contemporary literature has also grown partially away from the original understanding that informality is premised on mostly a monetary logic (Gudeman 2001; Parry and Bloch 1989; Williams 2005) and there has also been recognition that it permeates societies in not only the global South but also the g
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