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This article 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 under gone a transition to greater reliance on the market, an analysis of household coping practices provides little evidence that this is widely the case. Instead, households in most post‐socialist societies continue to rely heavily on a multiplicity of economic practices in order to secure their livelihoods with little, if any, shift over time towards the use of the formal economy in general and the market in particular. The outcome is a call for recognition and appreciation of the heterogeneous economic practices being used by households in East‐Central Europe and for greater consideration to be given to the contributions of the in formal sector in securing livelihoods.

To transcend the current debates about whether participation in the informal sector is a result of informal workers “exclusion” or their voluntary “exit” from the formal sector, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the existence of a dual informal labour market composed of an exit-driven “upper tier” and exclusion-driven “lower-tier” of informal workers.

To do this, data from a 2013 Eurobarometer survey involving 27,563 face-to-face interviews across the European Union is reported.

The finding is that in the European Union, there is a dual informal labour market with those participating in the informal sector due to their exclusion from the formal sector being half the number of those doing so to voluntarily exit the formal sector. Using a logistic regression analysis, the exclusion-driven “lower tier” is identified as significantly more likely to be populated by the unemployed and those living in East-Central Europe and the exit-driven “upper tier” by those with few financial difficulties and living in Nordic nations.

The results reveal the need not only to transcend either/or debates about whether participants in the informal sector are universally exclusion-or exit-driven, and to adopt a both/and approach that recognises a dual informal labour market composed of an exit-driven upper tier and exclusion-driven lower tier, but also for wider research on the relative sizes of these two tiers in individual countries and other global regions, along with which groups populate these tiers.

This is the first evaluation of the internal dualism of the informal sector in the European Union.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the degree to which there is cross‐national cooperation when tackling undeclared work and how the fight against undeclared work in Europe might be more effectively coordinated.

A multi‐stage inductive approach is used involving a web survey of 104 senior government officials, trade unions and employer organisations in 31 European countries, 33 follow‐up in‐depth explanatory interviews, four two‐day focus groups in European regions involving 44 stakeholders, and a European‐wide focus group of 20 stakeholders.

Collaboration between European countries is currently partial and very limited when tackling undeclared work. To more effectively collaborate, the consensus amongst the participating stakeholders is that an inclusive network of experts covering the tax, social security and labour aspects of undeclared work needs to be developed which engages in information sharing, capacity building and operational cooperation not only on the issue of cross‐border undeclared work but also combating undeclared work at the national level.

Until now, the literature on undeclared work has not evaluated the extent and nature of cross‐national collaborations to tackle this phenomenon. This paper fills that gap.

The paper reports the consensus reached amongst pan‐European stakeholders on how to more effectively broker knowledge on a multilateral cross‐national basis to tackle undeclared work.

This is the first evaluation of cross‐national collaboration in relation to tackling undeclared work in Europe.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the nature of undeclared work in South East Europe and the rest of the European Union and in doing so, to evaluate critically the validity of depicting the character of undeclared work as being the same everywhere.

A 2007 survey of undeclared work is reported, conducted in 27 European Union (EU) member states involving 26,659 face‐to‐face interviews. This paper focuses on the results of the 2,432 interviews conducted in five South East European countries, namely Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Romania and Slovenia.

In South Eastern Europe, more undeclared work is found to be waged employment and conducted by marginalised population groups out of necessity compared with other EU regions. Nevertheless, and similar to other EU regions, most undeclared work is conducted on an own‐account basis, rather than as waged employment, for close social relations, rather than anonymous employers, and out of choice rather than necessity, although different mixtures prevail in different places and populations both within South Eastern Europe and across the EU as a whole.

This recognition of the multifarious work relations and motives involved in undeclared work, and different mixtures in varying populations, displays the need to move beyond treating undeclared work as everywhere the same and towards nuanced spatially sensitive representations.

Given the proportion of undeclared work conducted on an own‐account basis and for closer social relations, this paper reveals that if South East European governments continue to seek its eradication, they will deter with one hand precisely the entrepreneurship and mutual aid that with another they are seeking to nurture.

This is the first evaluation of undeclared work in South East Europe and the EU.

Until now, most scholars have used one of four competing theories to explain undeclared work. Political economy theories explain undeclared work as resulting from the exclusion of workers from formal work and welfare, neo-liberal theories explain such work as a voluntarily chosen rational economic decision and neo-institutionalist and post-structuralist theories explain those engaging as social actors who disagree with the formal rules or seek to help others out respectively. Recognising that each theory focuses upon different employment relationships, this paper evaluates the proposition that these different theories are more explanations of different types of undeclared work.

To evaluate this, data reported is collected in 2019 across 28 European countries (the 27 member states of the European Union and the United Kingdom) in special Eurobarometer survey 92.1 involving 27,565 interviews.

Of the 3.6% of citizens participating in undeclared work, 10% engage in undeclared waged employment, 42% in undeclared self-employment and 48% in undeclared paid favours. Reporting their rationales, 7% state purely political economy exclusion-driven reasons, 19% solely neo-liberal rational economic actor reasons, 20% purely social actor reasons and 54% mixed motives. A logistic regression analysis finds those engaging in undeclared waged employment significantly more likely to state purely exclusion-driven rationales, those engaging in undeclared self-employment significantly more likely to state neo-liberal rational economic actor and neo-institutionalist social actor rationales and those engaging in undeclared paid favours post-structuralist social actor motives.

This finding suggests that the policy initiatives required to tackle undeclared work will vary according to the type of undeclared work addressed. These are outlined.

Evidence is provided that a different weighting needs to be given to different theories when explaining each type of undeclared work.

This study aims to explore how the shift from traditional to digital banking transforms the nature of trust between banks and their younger clients (aged 18–35) from the perspective of bank employees.

Qualitative semi-structured interviews with representatives of Ukrainian classical banks and neobanks were conducted. The interviews were analysed using the theoretical approach of institution-based and social network-based trust to identify the key distinctions between the nature of trust in traditional and digital banking.

The employees of the banks reported that digitalization processes have helped to mitigate trust issues; as a result, their banks have not experienced any difficulties in this regard among young people. Furthermore, social networks, particularly social approval, were found to be significant factors for establishing trust in digital banking among young people.

The results of this study could assist bank managers in adapting their strategies for cultivating trust among younger clients and aiding international law regulators and government institutions in preventing unintended circumstances in financial services. These contributions were shaped by the study’s limitations, including its focus on only two concepts of trust building: institution-based and social network-based, as well as its specific Ukrainian context.

This study highlights social approval as a valuable constituent of the trust-building process that influences trust in institutions. Furthermore, while gaining social approval – particularly through digital platforms – can promote trust-building among young people, this “easy way” may have negative societal consequences by endorsing unscrupulous institutions.

Recently, the recurring narrative that capitalism is stretching its tentacles ever moe widely and deeply into every crevice of daily life across the globe has been challenged in the context of Western economies and the Third World by an emerging post‐development corpus of thought. The aim here is to extend this critique of market hegemony by investigating the so‐called “transition” economies of East‐Central Europe.

The paper analyses the extent to which market practices penetrated the “transition” economies of East‐Central Europe in the years following the collapse of the socialist bloc, first through a review of the post‐development literature and then by examining the nature of work and trajectories of the “transition” economies.

Analysis highlights not only the shallow permeation of market practices but also the multiplicity of development trajectories being pursued at both the household and societal levels.

The outcome is to provide additional evidence from the post‐socialist East‐Central European bloc to support the critique of market hegemony and open up the future to alternative possibilities beyond marketisation.

This paper aims to examine the geographic distribution of social enterprises at the local sub-district level in one Indian state.

This paper adopts a multimethod approach. The exploratory phase involved interviews and analysis of social enterprise distribution at the national level. Phase 2 involved mapping the distribution of social enterprises at the sub-district level in one state. Distribution around established social enterprises was plotted using latitude–longitude positions. Grounded theory approach to analysing qualitative data was adopted to identify the mechanism for agglomeration.

Social entrepreneurship sees the entrepreneurial problems as solving universalized social problems abstracting them out of the geo-historical and political economic context of the social problem. This study shows that solving a social problem is itself implicated in a social–historical organizational context of aid giving within developing countries. Networks of resources that early enterprises enable draw newer organizations toward them and lead to the formation of clusters. While such clusters might improve chances of enterprise survival, the phenomenon inadvertently leads to a new kind of inequity, as areas with fewer social enterprises lack the organizational infrastructure necessary for delivery of welfare.

Research in social enterprises needs to pay more attention to the context of the enterprises or society in addition to its current focus on universal social problems. Social enterprises themselves could be new sources of inequity in terms of the organizational infrastructure they represent.

Policymakers need to make directed efforts that respond not only to social problems but also to the socio-historic-organizational contexts where the problems are being solved and seeding the entrepreneurial effort in those spaces.

This chapter offers a few stylized observations about the middle class and its role in the fall of communist regimes in East Central Europe. I claim that successive East European modernization projects during the 20th century (intrawar, communist, and postcommunist) were essentially middle-class “revolutions from above.” They occurred in a backward region among late modernizers keenly aware of their peripheral position and were based on and carried out by the state. Both a product of the state and dependent on it, the middle class was the main actor and supporter of these modernization efforts. I also argue that the Solidarity movement in 1980/81 and the 1989 collapse of communism were the last successful middle-class revolutions. Hopes for another political rebellion against postcommunist authoritarianism may be misplaced, since the transformational potential of the East European middle class, produced by the peculiarities of communist rule, has been exhausted. Fast progressing modernization, segmentation, and fragmentation of identity of the postcommunist middle class brought about by the economic, cultural, and political integration with the West undercut its mobilizational potential and its role as an agent of political transformations. The East European middle-class revolution against communist rule can offer four basic lessons. First, the middle class is a cultural and historical not economic phenomenon. Second, it is extremely rare for the middle class to become a collective actor, the class for itself. Third, the main competitors of middle-class identity are nationalism, ethnicity and religion. Finally, postmodernity with its fluidity, uncertainty, fractured identities, fragmented lifestyles, consumption patterns, and status configuration does not provide facilitating conditions for middle-class solidarity and mobilization, making it politically feeble.