Work, Employment &

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Work beyond employment: representations of informal economic activities

Colin C Williams and Sara Nadin
Work Employment Society 2012 26: 1
DOI: 10.1177/0950017012437006

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437006
2012
WES0010.1177/0950017012437006Williams and NadinWork, Employment and Society

Article: E-special issue

Work, employment and society

Work beyond employment:  1­–10

© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
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DOI: 10.1177/0950017012437006
economic activities wes.sagepub.com

Colin C Williams
University of Sheffield, UK

Sara Nadin
University of Sheffield, UK

Abstract
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 century, however, articles published in Work, Employment and Society have been at the forefront
of re-reading the informal sector. This article reveals how this body of literature has shown informal
economic activities to be a persistent and ubiquitous feature of the economic landscape, mapped
the complex and variable dynamics of formal and informal work in different populations, transcended
simplistic universal structure/agency explanations for the persistence of informal work by developing
context-bound understandings, and challenged the formal/informal dichotomy which represents
the formal and informal sectors as separate hostile worlds. The article concludes by highlighting
some possible future directions for research on this topic.

Keywords
dual economy, gender, housework, informal economy, informal employment, underground
economy, uneven development, unpaid work, voluntary sector, work organization

Introduction
Given that a greater proportion of working time is spent engaged in informal economic
activities than in formal employment (Gershuny, 2000; Jütting and Laiglesia, 2009),
understanding this sphere is essential if the organization of work is to be fully compre-
hended. Traditionally, Work, Employment and Society has been a principal outlet for the

Corresponding author:
Colin C Williams, Professor of Public Policy, School of Management, University of Sheffield,
Sheffield S1 4DT, UK.
Email: C.C.Williams@sheffield.ac.uk

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2 Work, employment and society

highest quality research on this topic. The aim of this e-special is to showcase a selection
of this body of work so as to display how many of the articles published in this journal have
transformed the way informal economic activities are theorized, measured and treated in
policy-making. In this introductory overview to the e-special, we synthesize the findings of
the wide range of articles on informal economic activities published in the journal. In doing
so, the aim is to chart the significant advances made in understanding informal economic
activities, ranging from unpaid domestic work through voluntary and community activity
to undeclared work, and to discuss some possible future directions for research on this topic.
At the outset, however, what is meant by informal economic activities needs to be
clarified. This residual catch-all umbrella category includes all work that is not ‘formal
employment’, by which is meant paid work registered with the state for tax, social security
and labour law purposes. The result is that multifarious work practices are brought together
under this heading. To differentiate these heterogeneous practices, three broad forms of
informal work have been commonly distinguished. First, there is ‘unpaid domestic work’
which is the unpaid household work undertaken by household members for themselves
or for other members of their household. Second, there is ‘unpaid community and voluntary
work’, which is unpaid work conducted by household members by and for the extended
family, social or neighbourhood networks and more formal voluntary and community
groups. Third and finally, there is ‘undeclared work’ which is monetized exchange unreg-
istered by or hidden from the state for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes but
which is legal in all other respects. Below, the contributions articles in the journal have
made to advancing knowledge on all these forms of work, as well as the relationship
between formal and informal work in different contexts, will be evaluated.

Re-placing informal economic activities

Throughout much of the 20th century, the near universal belief was that there would be
an inevitable, natural and unstoppable universal shift of work from the informal into the
formal economy. Informal economic activities were consequently represented as a leftover
from an earlier mode of production and their continuing presence taken as a sign of
‘under-development’, ‘traditionalism’ and ‘backwardness’. Over the past quarter of a
century or so, however, Work, Employment and Society has been at the forefront of re-
reading the organization of work in global perspective, displaying how informal economic
activities are a persistent feature of the contemporary economic landscape and widely
used not only in the western world (Warde, 1990; Williams and Windebank, 2002) but
also in post-socialist societies (Pickup and White, 2003; Stenning, 2005) and the ‘major-
ity’ (third) world (Hill, 2001).
For many years, this persistence of informal economic activities was explained either
from a structuralist perspective to be a direct result of surplus labour being off-loaded onto
the informal economy where they pursue survival practices in the absence of alternative
means of livelihood, or from a more agency-based perspective as a freely chosen alternative
to participation in formal employment. However, many articles published in Work, Employment
and Society have begun to transcend this either/or approach of structure versus agency.
Studying English urban localities, Williams and Windebank (2002) reveal how although
deprived populations are more likely to conduct informal work as a survival practice, in
affluent populations such work is more likely to be freely chosen, enjoyable and rewarding

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Williams and Nadin 3

in nature. Given that relatively affluent populations also undertake more self-provisioning,
voluntary and community work and undeclared work than relatively deprived populations,
uneven development has been thus portrayed not as a polarization between more formalized
populations and more informalized populations, but as a polarization between ‘fully engaged’
populations with multiple formal jobs and high levels of engagement in informal economic
activities, and ‘dis-engaged’ populations excluded not only from formal work but also
informal work due to their lack of resources, skills and networks (Clarke et al., 2000; Morris,
1987; Pickup and White, 2003; Williams and Windebank, 2002).
The recognition, therefore, has been that no one representation of informal economic
activities is always valid but instead different explanations are useful in varying contexts.
With this in mind, attention here turns towards the advances made in understanding the
different forms of informal work.

Unpaid domestic work

Over the last quarter of a century, many of the articles published in Work, Employment
and Society on informal economic activities have focused on unpaid domestic work. The
majority of these articles, recognizing the persistence of gender divisions of labour in
society, have concentrated on evaluating the gender divisions of unpaid domestic labour
(Baxter, 1992; Bond and Sales, 2001; Charles and James, 2005; Cousins, 2004; Craig
et al., 2010; Crompton et al., 2005; Kan, 2008; Kitterød and Pettersen, 2006; Punch, 2001;
Speakman and Marchington, 1999; Van der Lippe, 2007; Warde and Hetherington, 1993;
Windebank, 2001). Indeed, this topic has been prominent from the very first issue of the
first volume of the journal (Morris, 1987) until the present day (Craig and Powell, 2011).
The overarching finding is that the gender divisions in unpaid domestic work are prov-
ing intransigent to change, whatever type of welfare regime is considered. Even in Norway,
Kitterød and Pettersen (2006) show that despite strong work-family policies to enhance
fathers’ family role, full-time employment for the mother does not increase the father’s
contribution in any type of family work. Instead, there is a need to rely on external provid-
ers to substitute for the mother’s absence. Windebank (2001), examining France and
Britain, similarly shows that women remain responsible for the vast amount of unpaid
domestic work and that although men might help out to a slightly greater extent than in
the past, men largely still do not take responsibility for organizing such work.
Where women manage to reduce their domestic workload, therefore, it is largely because
women outsource the work to other women. One outcome has been a growing interest in
the trend towards outsourcing. Examining this in Australia, Bittman et al. (1999) find that
neither the modernization thesis which depicts the widespread formalization of domestic
services, nor the self-servicing thesis (Gershuny, 1978) which depicts greater levels of
self-provisioning, is universally valid. Instead, they identify diverse trends with some
household tasks being increasingly externalized (e.g. child-care) and others increasingly
in-sourced (e.g. laundry).

Voluntary and community work

The growing desire to replace public-sector provision with voluntary and community-
sector provision (Cunningham and James, 2009), as exemplified by recent adoption of

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4 Work, employment and society

the ‘Big Society’ theme by the UK Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government,

clearly signals the current importance of understanding the dynamics of voluntary and
community work.
Indeed, in an age in which myriad forms of unpaid community and volunteering endeav-
our persist and new forms are emerging (e.g. unpaid internships), understanding this sphere
is becoming increasingly salient. For many years, it was perhaps assumed that voluntary
and community work is a chosen endeavour. In a study of volunteering in Canada, how-
ever, Baines (2004) reveals that the volunteer labour of paid employees operates along a
continuum with ‘compulsion’ at one end and ‘coercion’ at the other. As Arber and Ginn
(1995) show, meanwhile, not only is voluntary and community work heavily gendered
but when women take on informal volunteering responsibilities, it does not reduce their
labour force participation. It simply reduces the hours spent in formal employment, not
overall participation rates. Nevertheless, the net outcome of combining paid employment
and such informal caring responsibilities results in very high total working hours when
both their informal and formal work is included.
There are also differences in participation across lower- and higher-income populations.
Higher-income populations engage in more voluntary and community work than lower-
income populations (Williams and Windebank, 2002). A number of articles have therefore
sought to evaluate what might be done to tackle the exclusion of populations from such
networks of community solidarity. These have resulted in new strategies for tackling social
exclusion other than the employment-centred approach which simply seeks to insert people
into formal employment in order to promote social inclusion. Recognizing how many are
excluded from embedded and interconnected relationships which they can draw upon for
help (Huang, 2008; Parry, 2003), various policy interventions have been evaluated that
seek to re-embed such excluded groups in networks of social support, such as Local
Exchange Trading Schemes (Aldridge et al., 2001; Seyfang, 2001; Williams, 1996) and
basic income schemes which seek to provide people with an access to a guaranteed mini-
mum income so that they can then choose how to combine formal and informal work so
as to secure their livelihood (McKay, 2007).

Undeclared work
Similar to voluntary and community work, undeclared work is also currently at the top
of public-policy agendas as governments seek to narrow the ‘tax gap’ in response to the
recent fiscal crisis. Understanding its character and the motives underpinning it is essential
if ways of tackling it are to be developed. The journal again has a long history of publish-
ing seminal articles that unravel the nature of, and rationales for, undeclared work (Ahmad,
2008; Geetz and O’Grady, 2002; Hill, 2001; MacDonald, 1994; McGrath and DeFilipis,
2009; Pollert, 2003; Ram et al., 2001; Round et al., 2008; Thomas, 1988).
The article by Thomas (1988) on the ‘black economy’ (a term now fallen out of use
due to its racist connotations) was one of the first to call for greater use of direct survey
methods for evaluating its extent and nature, and also to argue that it is easier for employed
people to engage in undeclared work than unemployed people and thus that governments
could not simply cut welfare benefits based on the rationale that the unemployed are

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Williams and Nadin 5

getting by on the black economy. This led to a raft of small-scale direct surveys of informal
employment (MacDonald, 1994, 1996; Round et al., 2008; Williams and Windebank,
2002) which revealed how the unemployed are not getting by on the informal economy
and how higher-income populations conduct more undeclared work and for better pay
than lower-income populations.
Indeed, nuanced understandings of different population groups have now started to
emerge. Ahmad’s (2008) account of the low paid exploitative work conducted by London’s
Pakistani (illegal) immigrant population, has shown how structuralist accounts, depicting
such work as necessity-driven, are valid, as do Geetz and O’Grady’s (2002) study in rela-
tion to young homeless workers. In Ukraine, however, more agency-based accounts have
been validated by showing how undeclared work is more a voluntarily chosen alternative
to the formal economy due to the corruption and bribes that are an inherent part of formal
employment in this post-socialist society (Round et al., 2008).

Beyond the formal/informal economy dualism

For many decades, the formal and informal economies were represented as separate realms
and hostile worlds. In recent years, this has begun to be contested. Not only have most of
the articles discussed above challenged the temporal separateness of these realms by depict-
ing their co-existence in the present, but also their normative separateness has come under
assault. Rather than depict all formal work as possessing positive qualities and informal
economic activities as always possessing negative qualities, it has been widely shown in
the journal that not all formal work is progressive (e.g. zero-hours contracts, false self-
employment) and neither are informal economic activities necessarily always regressive
(e.g. volunteering, reciprocity). So too has it been revealed how workers, enterprises or popu-
lations do not always work either informally or formally but instead often operate simultane-
ously in both spheres (Baines and Wheelock, 1998; Round et al., 2008; Stenning, 2005).
Until recently, however, few challenged the assumption that a job is either formal or
informal, but never simultaneously both. A seminal article by Woolfson (2007), neverthe-
less, reveals that some formal employees receive from their formal employer not only a
declared salary but also an additional undeclared (‘envelope’) wage. Rather than study
merely wholly ‘undeclared work’ where employers pay workers all their wages off the
books, a new hybrid category of quasi-formal employment or ‘under-declared’ work has
begun to be recognized, where a portion of the wage paid to formal employees by formal
employers is in the form of an informal ‘envelope’ wage. This has led to a move beyond
the long-standing belief that formal and informal jobs are separate and discrete, displaying
how informal and formal employment is sometimes embodied in the same job in contem-
porary capitalism, along with how informality has permeated the formal economy.
To transcend the simplistic dichotomous depiction of separate formal and informal
economies, and portray in a more nuanced manner the multifarious forms of labour in
contemporary society, Taylor (2004) develops the ‘total social organization of labour’
(TSOL) approach of Glucksmann (1995). Rather than portray work as either formal work
or informal work, she constructs a continuum of labour practices according to their degree
of formality and this continuum is then cross-cut by whether the labour is paid or unpaid.

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6 Work, employment and society

She then uses this to distinguish six labour practices in relation to care work but which are
more broadly relevant: paid employment (e.g. paid care assistant), formal voluntary work
(e.g. formal unpaid work in the private, public or voluntary sector), informal unpaid work
(e.g. unpaid care for a sick neighbour), paid informal work (e.g. paid babysitting), paid
labour within the family (e.g. paid babysitting within the family) and unpaid domestic work
(e.g. unpaid care for a sick relative). The outcome has been to highlight a borderless con-
tinuum of practices which overlap and seamlessly merge as one moves along the formal/
informal spectrum. This offers much promise for future studies of work organization. One
future development, however, might be to also recognize that the cross-cutting paid/unpaid
dualism is also a spectrum (rather than dualism) ranging from wholly non-monetized,
through gift exchange and in-kind labour, to wholly monetized labour practices.

Conclusions and future directions

Although nearly all the advances discussed above result from articles published in Work,
Employment and Society, it has been necessary to reduce the articles included in this
e-special down to 11 (Arber and Ginn, 1995; Baines, 2004; Bittman et al., 1999; Kitterød
and Pettersen, 2006; MacDonald, 1994; Pickup and White, 2003; Taylor, 2004; Thomas,
1988; Williams and Windebank, 2002; Windebank, 2001; Woolfson, 2007). These 11
articles have been chosen because they provide examples of how the journal has advanced
thought on all of the themes discussed, namely replacing informal economic activities,
unpaid domestic work, voluntary and community work, undeclared work and transcending
the formal/informal economy dichotomy.
This subject is of growing importance. Governments throughout the world are currently
asking questions about the ability of the voluntary and community sector to act as a sub-
stitute for the public (and even private) sectors in delivering work and welfare needs, and
undeclared work is rising to the top of the public-policy agendas as governments seek to
reduce the tax gap. The significant advances made in understanding informal economic
activities can feed into these policy debates. Whether analysing unpaid domestic work,
voluntary and community work, undeclared work, or the informal sector as a whole, a
body of work has not only started to map the complex and variable dynamics of work
organization in different populations, and transcended the use of simplistic universal
structure/agency explanations for the persistence of informal work through the develop-
ment of context-bound understandings, but also challenged the formal/informal dualism
that represents the formal and informal sectors as separate realms and hostile worlds.
However, much important research still needs to be undertaken, not least to translate these
theoretically informed advances into practice-oriented and policy relevant knowledge.
Here, we chart some fruitful potential directions for future research.
First, understanding uneven development from a ‘whole economy’ perspective is of
great importance because it shows that economic development cannot be simply equated
with formalization and reveals the need for finer grained debates about the nature and
direction of economic development that pursue a more ‘pick and mix’ approach towards
various types of informal (and formal) work. The non-academic impact could be significant
since few, if any, governments have yet moved beyond a formal employment-centred
discourse when discussing economic development.

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Williams and Nadin 7

Second, and on unpaid domestic work, little attention has so far been paid to unpacking
the extent of, or barriers to, the outsourcing of the domestic workload. Given that it is
now accepted that formalization is not inevitable and natural, and that self-servicing
persists, greater attention will need to be paid to developing more complex accounts of
what is being formalized and the barriers to formalization. So too is there a need to more
fully understand the motivations for both outsourcing and self-servicing/in-sourcing. Until
now, the reasons are poorly understood, especially in terms of how they vary across popu-
lations and groups.
Third, the greater use of the voluntary and community sector as a substitute for state
provision again necessitates the development of more nuanced understandings of the
degree and nature of engagement of various populations in such endeavour and the dif-
ferent barriers to participation in voluntary and community work among different groups.
Unless these are more fully understood, policy interventions to tackle the limited partici-
pation of some groups cannot be addressed. Moreover, the capacity of different segments
of the voluntary and community sector to stand alone with only limited support from the
public sector needs to be seriously evaluated, as does the issue of how to nurture the more
informal modes of voluntary and community sector provision, which have been neglected
both in terms of research and policy interventions.
Fourth, greater recognition is required of the diverse array of forms of undeclared work,
ranging from paid favours for closer social relations (displaying the monetization of reci-
procity), through informal entrepreneurship to exploitative waged work and envelope
wages, and for discussions to occur of how policy needs to adopt more nuanced policy
measures rather than adopting a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Even more importantly, the
barriers to formalization remain under-researched, particularly how these vary across
societies and populations. Until they are understood, it will be difficult to know what mix
of policy measures is required and how they need to be tailored to different contexts.
Fifth and finally, and more theoretically, it is perhaps time to transcend the formal/
informal economy dualism, not by dropping discussion of formal and informal economic
activities but by recognizing the borderless and seamless fluidity of work practices on a
spectrum from wholly formal to wholly informal cross-cut by a similar spectrum from
wholly monetized to wholly non-monetized exchanges. This will then enable more nuanced
accounts of the relations within which work is embedded. Rather than debate whether to
formalize (or informalize) work, premised on the assumption that these are separate hostile
worlds, it could then start to be debated what work practices might be nurtured and to
develop more refined views of the way forward rather than simply assert that ‘formal’
work is progressive and ‘informal’ work is regressive.
In sum, by synthesizing the high-quality published work on this subject in this intro-
ductory overview, it is hoped that we have clearly revealed both how the journal has long
been one of the primary publishing outlets for research on this topic and how the body of
work so far published in the journal has transformed the ways in which informal economic
activities are theorized, measured and treated in policy-making. If this e-special encour-
ages new submissions and helps the journal continue in its position as one of the primary
outlets for the highest-quality research in this field, then it will have fulfilled its objective.
We hope you enjoy the collection of articles and that it stimulates further reflection and
research on this important subject.

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8 Work, employment and society

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10 Work, employment and society

Colin C Williams is Professor of Public Policy in the Management School at the University
of Sheffield in the UK. His research interests include the informal economy, work organi-
zation and the future of work, subjects on which he has published some 20 monographs
and 270 journal articles over the past 25 years. His recent books include Informal Work
in Developed Nations (2010, Routledge), Rethinking the Future of Work: Directions and
Visions (2007, Palgrave Macmillan), The Hidden Enterprise Culture (2006, Edward
Elgar), A Commodified World? Mapping the Limits of Capitalism (2005, Zed) and
Cash-in-Hand Work (2004, Palgrave Macmillan).

Sara Nadin is a Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management

in the Management School at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She was previously
an ESRC post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Sheffield and has held lecture-
ships at the University of Leeds and the University of Bradford. Her research interests
are in the informal economy, entrepreneurship, small business and the psychological
contract. She has recently been coordinating an Institute for Small Business and
Entrepreneurship (ISBE) research and knowledge exchange grant on developing policies
to help businesses make the transition from informal to formal enterprise.

Date submitted January 2011

Date accepted December 2011