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The purpose of this paper is to analyze data from the first-ever national-level study of informal work in the USA to test two prominent points of focus in the literature: how participation in informal work relates to social embeddedness and formal labor supply. This paper also provides a comparative test of the factors associated with exchange-based informal work (i.e. money/barter) vs self-provisioning activities.

The study draws on data from a national-level household telephone survey and uses descriptive statistics and logistic regression models.

The data show that participation in the informal economy is widespread in the USA. Consistent with theory, it is found that measures of social embeddedness and formal labor supply are much more salient for predicting participation in informal work for money/barter compared to self-provisioning.

Drawing on unique data from the first national-level household survey of informal work in the USA, this study provides generalizable support for the contention that the informal sector stands as a persistent structural feature in modern society. The results build on the wealth of information produced by qualitative case studies examining informal economic activity as well as a smaller number of regionally targeted surveys to provide important theoretical insights.

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.

Cross‐class affiliation and unpaid work in and around the home are important in affecting the propensity of an individual to vote Conservative, as are elements of patterns of domestic interaction. Regardless of whether occupational status is a relatively transitory phenomenon in a woman's life it seems to influence her voting behaviour and that of her husband. Political consciousness as evidenced by the propensity to vote Conservative in the 1979 election is explored as to how women's occupational class “makes a difference”. Elements for determining political consciousness include the production relation of both men and women in the household, the relations to the means of consumption of household members and the social interaction of men and women engaged in a variety of other forms of work in and around the house. A very complex set of data is required to study these three spheres. The Sheppey survey explores the relative significance of households' relationships to production and consumption as well as the interactions of men and women inside the dwelling. In 1981 a survey of 526 household couples on the island gave detailed information about their social and economic behaviour inside and outside the house. No previous study of voting behaviour, or the determinants of political consciousness has had access to such material: 403 respondents actually voted — 52 per cent Conservative and 48 per cent for the other parties. Factors associated with voting Conservative are explored. The island was representative of the situation for Great Britain as a whole.

A dominant belief is that the continuing encroachment of the market economy into everyday life is inevitable, unstoppable and irreversible. Over the past decade, however, a small stream of thought has started to question this commercialization thesis. This paper seeks to contribute to this emergent body of thought by developing a “whole economy” approach for capturing the multifarious economic practices in community economies and then applying this to an English locality.

A survey conducted of the economic practices used by 120 households in a North Nottinghamshire locality in the UK is reported here, comprising face‐to‐face interviews in an affluent, middle‐ranking and deprived neighborhood.

This reveals the limited commercialization of everyday life and the persistence of a multitude of economic practices in all neighborhood‐types. Participation rates in all economic practices (except one‐to‐one unpaid work and “off‐the‐radar” unpaid work) are higher in relatively affluent populations. Uneven development is marked by affluent populations that are “work busy”, engaging in a diverse spectrum of economic practices conducted more commonly out of choice, and disadvantaged populations that are more “work deprived”, conducting a narrower array of activities usually out of necessity.

This snapshot survey only displays that commercialization is not hegemonic. It does not display whether there is a shift towards commercialization.

Recognition of the limited encroachment of the market opens up the future to alternative possibilities beyond an inevitable commercialization of everyday life, intimating that the future will be characterized by the continuing persistence of multifarious economic practices rather than market hegemony.

The paper provides evidence from a western nation of the limited commercialization of daily life.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenge of interpreting the growth in arbitrage opportunities at the Ukrainian‐Romanian border within a rural Ukrainian border community. The author illustrates that whilst the proliferation of economic activity through the border has provided a boost to the local economy, it has also led to the development of discursive performance around these practices within rural Ukrainian communities, which both mitigates the potentially negative impacts of economic growth in Romania and also reflects emerging views of consumption as a cultural competence.

The paper draws on more than 18 months of participant observation in three rural communities on either side of the Ukrainian‐Romanian border between September 2007 and May 2010.

The discursive performance of consumption has emerged as an important means for the production of values amongst the low income households of Diyalivtsi (pseudonym). As part of this performance, the villagers of Diyalivtsi differentiate themselves from their Romanian neighbours through critical analysis of Romanian consumption practices, which are viewed through the prism of cross‐border economies.

This is one of the first papers to consider how the diverse economies of post‐socialism are (re)performed in the communities in which they have become embedded. Rather than seeking to theorise or quantify cross‐border economies and the practices of trading and consumption, it illuminates the social aspects of them for rural Ukrainian communities.

This paper argues that by shackling the future of work to a vision of full employment, alternative futures are closed off. At present, employment creation is seen as the sole route out of poverty. Here, however, we reveal that a complementary additional pathway is to help people to help themselves and each other. To show this, evidence from a survey of 400 households in deprived neighbourhoods of Southampton and Sheffield is reported. This reveals that besides creating job opportunities, measures that directly empower people to improve their circumstances could be a useful complementary initiative to combat social exclusion and open up new futures for work that are currently closed off.

This paper explores the perceptions and experiences of women and men who work as informal waste collectors in four different cities. The purpose of this paper is to map out how and to what extent occupational, political-legal, economic and social dynamics are experienced differently by gender in a highly vulnerable segment of the urban informal economy, and explore gender differences in these workers’ coping strategies and the levels of action they develop to protect their livelihoods.

The analysis is based on a mixed methods study which combined a quantitative survey of informal workers with a qualitative participatory methodology. Study participants were drawn from a purposive sample of informal workers who belong to, or are affiliated with, membership-based workers’ organisations. The sample consists of waste pickers (n=614) from Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Bogotá, Colombia; Durban, South Africa; and Nakuru, Kenya.

The data show that despite significant differences between women and men upon entry into (informal) employment, their perceptions of key drivers and impacts are largely similar, with the exception of concerns around various types of physical security among women. They also indicate that levels of action among men and women waste pickers are only moderately influenced by gender, but are strongly influenced by the degree of organisation in the sector and the symbolic assets held by workers. The findings also illustrate the way in which gendered power dynamics operate within the informal recycling sector and how different levels of sector organisation and development often contribute to opportunities for collective action and, in turn, a reduction in gendered vulnerabilities.

The study offers a new policy angle which connects the level of sector organisation and development with the levels of action taken by informal workers in adapting to different types of shocks, as well as what this means in terms of gender empowerment.

In this paper, a Web portal is presented for multicast communication management, providing fully automatic service management with integrated provisioning of hardware equipment. The portal is based on an open and configurable object‐oriented framework, that allows self‐provisioning by the user and the seamless integration with all types of multicast application software. As its topological structure is ideally suited for multicasting, and it allows the accurate control of the transmission bandwidth, the portal focuses currently on satellite as a delivery medium. The software architecture, the implementation, and the application usage of the Web portal for multicast delivery are described.

Presents the concept of outsourcing as a means for achieving strategic advantages. Describes the process of outsourcing and provides a practical approach which uses six steps. The six‐steps approach described provides a framework to outsourcing in a systematic way by addressing key issues around objectives, readiness, alternatives, proposals and negotiations. Outlines the expected benefits of outsourcing. Provides an illustration on how organizations outsource their maintenance activities such as plant overhauls and turnaround.

The aim of this paper is to move beyond the market/non‐market divide and to recognise the plurality of labour practices in societies by adopting a variant of what Glucksmann calls “a total social organisation of labour” approach.

To transcend the conventional depiction of separate market and non‐market spheres, this paper adopts a total social organisation of labour approach which recognises a multiplicity of labour practices existing on a spectrum from market to non‐market practices crosscut by another spectrum from wholly monetised to wholly non‐monetised practices. This conceptual lens is employed to analyse the results of 861 face‐to‐face interviews on the labour practices used in affluent and deprived urban and rural English localities.

The outcome is to reveal the multifarious labour practices in these English localities along with how both work cultures and the nature of individual labour practices vary socio‐spatially. While affluent and rural populations draw more on an array of market‐oriented and monetised labour practices, deprived populations and urban localities are found to rely more on a range of non‐market and non‐monetised labour practices, and all labour practices are more likely to be conducted out of necessity in deprived and urban populations and out of choice in affluent and rural populations.

The paper only provides a snapshot survey. It does not show the changes taking place over time.

It reveals how it is mistaken to privilege the development of labour practices in the formal market economy and displays the feasibility of, and possibilities for, alternative futures beyond market hegemony.

The paper transcends the market/non‐market dualism and proposes an alternative conceptual framework to capture the multifarious labour practices in societies.