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The purpose of this paper is to explore an important nexus of formal/informal economic activity in Russia: “normative” workers (in waged formal employment) by virtue of a strongly embedded work‐related social identity and characterized by a significant number of weak social ties, move with little “effort” between formal and informal work.

The paper presents extensive ethnographic data from the Russian provinces on workers and diverse economic practices. It utilizes participant observation and semi‐structured interviews from periods of fieldwork over the course of a year (2009‐2010).

This study traces the theoretical debates on the informal economy from 1989 to 2008 and argues for a substantivist position on household reproduction that focuses on the interdependence of social networks, employment, class‐identity and (informal) work. The findings demonstrate significant performative and spatial aspects of embedded worker identity, including the workspace itself as a contested domain, that facilitate movement between formal‐informal work.

The originality of the paper resides in its ethnographic approach to informal economies under post‐socialism and the substantivist evaluation of diverse economic practices in Russia as supported by formal work‐based shared identities.

This paper explores economic moralities in self-organised alternative economies and argues that the diverse economies approach is particularly useful in elaborating the self-understandings of such economic communities. The analysis focuses on two types of alternative economies in Finland: ridesharing and timebanking.

Through qualitative data, the paper looks into moments of negotiation where economic moralities of self-organised alternative economies are explicitly debated. The main research data consists of social media conversations, supplemented by a member survey for the participants of the studied timebank. The data are analysed through theory-guided qualitative content analysis.

The analysis shows that the moments of negotiation within alternative economies should not be understood as simple collisions of mutually exclusive ideas, but rather as complex processes of balancing between overlapping and partly incommensurable economic moralities. While self-organised alternative economies might appear as functionally uniform at the level of their everyday operations, they still provide considerable leeway for different conceptions of the underlying normative commitments.

To date, there is little qualitative research on how the participants of self-organised alternative economies reflect the purpose and ethics of these practices. This study contributes to the body of diverse economies research by analysing novel case studies in the Finnish context. Through empirical analysis, this paper also provides a theoretical framework of how the different economic moralities in self-organised alternative economies can be mapped.

In recent years, the socio-economic power of local purchasing by both individuals and organisations has become of increasing interest. Despite growing recognition of social enterprises as local development actors, relatively little attention has been given to the motivations and effects of purchasing from social enterprises, particularly in regional settings. Informed by the literature on diverse economies, this paper aims to examine the patterns and motivations for purchasing from social enterprises by local citizens and organisations.

The analysis draws on an in-depth mixed-methods case study of purchasing from two social enterprises in a regional city in Victoria, Australia. Data sources included semi-structured and standing interviews, as well as sales data. Data analysis includes thematic analysis and geo-spatial mapping.

The findings suggest purchasing from social enterprises in regional settings is shaped by both typical consumption needs and ethical concerns that emphasise the place-based orientation of social enterprises’ operations and missions.

This paper extends understanding of how community economies are negotiated and configured in regional contexts. It also contributes to consumer understandings within the social enterprise literature, which to date has been surprisingly scant in unpacking how and to what end their customers’ consumption choices affect the kinds of value social enterprises are able to create.

In 2009, Lucha, a Mexican woman who had migrated to Chicago and worked at a candy factory described her work as ‘A slow assassination of your soul’. Her experience in the United States was transformative. The power she previously had as a community activist and college student in Mexico was eroded. Lucha's experience exemplifies a shift in her identity and how that changing identity fashioned the character of her economic activities. Race, ethnicity, and gender shift and change meaning through migration (Gilmartin, 2008, p. 1840) and shape ‘migrant women's multiple relations in the process of migration’ (Parreñas, 2009, p. 11). We are interested in the struggles, realities and contestations of immigrant women. We want to better understand how migrant women negotiate the dynamic intersections of race, gender and citizenship identities in new places in order to survive, prosper and exert influence in new places and economic environments. Based on indepth interviews with immigrant women in Chicago, Illinois, United States and in the Barcelona area of Spain, we demonstrate that issues of race, gender and citizenship influenced the kinds of jobs they obtained and the working conditions they experienced, as well as their ability to become accepted members of the community. In this chapter, we want to respond to the call made by Parreñas (2009) to contribute to the gender and migration literature by analysing structural gender inequalities beyond differences between men and women, and focusing on how gender inequalities are constructed as they intersect with other inequalities based on race and citizenship. The women we interviewed endured humiliation based on their intersecting identities at work; some questioned their belonging in their new countries while at the same time feeling that they did not belong in their home country, as other authors such as Parreñas (2001) have found. The challenge for planners and policymakers is to understand the intricacies of multiple identities across places and scales. Hearing their complex stories of work and perceptions of belonging in their country of origin and new country can help academics who are training future planners and professionals build more inclusive planning and policy theory and practice.

Conventional shopping-scapes are designed to promote a linear form of consumption. Products are moved from production systems through consumer distribution nodal points. The consumption of commodities through these points is promoted as the main, if not only, legitimate activity of shopping centres. A circular economic (CE) paradigm offers an alternative to the current model of linear consumption so that there are restorative processes to ensure products, components and materials are valued at all stages of product life (Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2013). However, this model, like its contemporary linear model, overlooks the opportunities for more socially rewarding consumption that could particularly be addressed through the shopping scape. The ByeBuy! Shop was conceived to test ideas on an alternative shopping scape to increase social engagement and reduced consumption without the use of money for exchange. Accordingly, it is used here to exemplify a CE paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consensus decision making serves as a foundation for organizing an alternative economy while the agency of the economic project itself organizes participants because it serves to distribute resources as people need them and foment a community of sharing based on the concept that as individuals we are lacking but as a community we have enough. The paper asserts that as activists looking to foment change, alternative economic projects in themselves are actors in organizing community building and resistance to capitalism.

El Cambalache (The Swap in English), located in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, is an exchange-based money-less economy that trades unwanted items as well as knowledge, abilities and skills that one wants to share. The project receives anything; specifically used, broken and/or unwanted electronics as well as just about anything else that one might possess. In exchange people provide laptop maintenance classes, language exchange, land to be worked, rooms, gardening services, objects, stories, etc. The rules in this money-less non-capitalist economy organize participation through one exchange or many.

Consensus decision making is an effective method for engaging in non-hierarchical research projects.

This project contributes to research in heterodox economies by presenting an original project with a new suggestion for exchange value as an inclusive process of exchange among participants in the economy. It also provides evidence that consensus decision making can be a useful and productive method for research.

–This paper is the second of a two part series which offers new theoretical and empirical insights investigating the rates structures appropriate for exhaustible resources with a particular emphasis on urban land, based upon the differentiation of strong- and weak-form sustainability concepts constrained by the objectives of the sustainable criterion of Daly and Cobb (1994). The integration of the concepts and objectives allow the theoretical formulation of discount and capitalization rates that can be empirically tested. This empirical application employs data from 12 diverse national economies. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The paper integrates the concepts of discount rate development for environmental and long-term assets and discounted utility analysis to the policy concerns associated with the valuation of public and sustainable resources. The new approach empirically shows the diverse issues of competing sustainable objectives across nations.

The potential and degree of strong-form or weak-form sustainability application in each nation enabled the identification as to whether alternative capital as defined by the modified Ramsey model used per nation, or the marginal rate of resource return as defined by strong form objective of a constant natural resource endowment, can identify which form of capital becomes the major constraint on the resource valuation and allocation decision appropriate within each nation. The findings showed constraints on nation resource endowments relative to population needs and the culture preferences endemic across nations.

The findings serve as a basis for future research on the optimal levels of sustainable development appropriate for different nations, the impactions of the timing and level of capital re-switching associated with the application of strong- or weak-form sustainability and the develop of rate and risk measures that can assist in the consideration of sustainable resource as a distinct asset class.

Developed economies with high-cost environments face industrial transitions from scale-based manufacturing (MAN) to knowledge, technology and intangible asset-based sectors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the changes in employment and value-adding profiles of transitioning industry sectors in Australia and discuss the implications for policy that influences the intellectual capital (IC) profile of industrial sectors in transition.

The approach borrowed concepts from the firm-level strategic management literature and applied them to a macro level of industry analysis. In this paper the authors examine the transitions in the Australian economy which, due to a rising cost base, is experiencing a decline in its value chain-oriented MAN sector. The authors contrast four industry sectors with the MAN sector and examine the different value creation models.

The findings clearly show how the contribution to employment and value added (termed Economic Value Contribution ) of the different sectors vary. The authors extend these findings to a discussion on policy and the dimensions of IC that may have a role to play in facilitating transitions within an economy. The main conclusion is that a more rapid transition and higher value may be created if innovation and entrepreneurship are facilitated by targeted policies in transitioning sector.

This work is based on a single country analysis of selected industry sectors. Further work needs to be done across many more countries to contrast the findings across nations/regions that differ in industrial complexity and to refine the analytical framework to improve construct validity and increase analytical power.

This work has implications for policy-makers facing the challenges of a transitioning economy, whether national or regional. Governments that are hands-on with respect to interventions to salvage and/or extend the life of sectors are at risk of missing opportunities to build the capacities and capabilities of emerging sectors while those governments that are hands-off, deferring to market mechanisms, risk transitions that are too little and/or too late to maintain a national or regional competitiveness.

To the authors knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate the specific firm-level strategic management perspectives, used in this paper, with the macro-policy level to examine industry sectors with the twin metrics of economic productivity and employment in transitioning economies.

This introduction provides an overview of the discourse on alternative agrifood movements (AAMs) to (1) ascertain the degree of convergence and divergence around a common ethos of alterity and (2) context the chapters of the book. AAMs have increased in recent years in response to the growing legitimation crisis of the conventional agrifood system. Some agrifood researchers argue that AAMs represent the vanguard movement of our time, a formidable counter movement to global capitalism. Other authors note a pattern of blunting of the transformative qualities of AAMs due to conventionalization and mainstreaming in the market. The literature on AAMs is organized following a Four Questions in Agrifood Studies (Constance, 2008) framework. The section for each Question ends with a case study to better illustrate the historical dynamics of an AAM. The literature review ends with a summary of the discourse applied to the research question of the book: Are AAMs the vanguard social movement of our time? The last section of this introduction provides a short description of each contributing chapter of the book, which is divided into five sections: Introduction; Theoretical and Conceptual Framings; Food Sovereignty Movements; Alternative Movements in the Global North; and Conclusions.