Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / L. Susan Williams / This study focuses on experiences of women workers in Brazilian street markets, as told in their own words. Feminist epistemology informs this study, including face-to-face interviews as well as participant observation. Participants share how they became informal entrepreneurs, offering a unique perspective of market work that is local and personal. Two major concepts inform this study. First, local gender regimes emphasizes context as influential in women's practices and perceptions; both opportunity structures and cultural milieux restrain earning potential. Equally important is the second concept, luta, or "fighting energy," a concept that emerged from interviews. Luta expresses agency that guided these women toward an entrepreneurial decision. Interviews reveal that traditional expectations, conducive to acceptance of gendered experiences for these women's mothers and grandmothers, were transformed into new meaning in the marketplace. However, they do not openly deny dominant ideological practices. In a process that includes both resistance and accommodation, they maintain their business, but keep religious ideologies of obedience and responsibility for household tasks. These ideologies, mostly unacknowledged, may keep some of them as feirantes –market vendors who see themselves and their business as limited. To others, the street becomes a preparatory stage to engage in larger business endeavors; they become empreendedoras informais, who demonstrate an entrepreneurial vision to take the business beyond a small market stall. Findings support the feminist postulate that gendered structural factors significantly shape experiences of women, but also that a strong element of agency marks practices of Brazilian women in the marketplace. In particular, this study contributes to an international scholarship by and for women, exploring cultural influences on their life processes and perceptions. Literature on women and the informal economy should continue to include the pervasiveness of gendered ideologies without neglect to women's capacity for producing change through human agency.

This study investigates the relationship between gender, social capital and resilience in four of British Columbia’s rural, island communities. Each community’s unique circumstances provide a distinctive context in which to study the interaction between these concepts. This study utilizes quantitative data from several sources, including Statistics Canada, BC Stats, and a mail out survey conducted by the Resilient Communities Project (RCP). This study also utilizes qualitative data from several sources, including two sets of RCP interviews, interviews carried out in the Haida First Nation community of Old Massett, and participant observation. The results of these case studies confirm the necessity of taking context into consideration in any study of the operation of social capital. Within this specific context, social networks operate very differently than in an urban setting. The small size of these rural communities means that the entire community functions as one social network, within which residents have ties of differing strengths. The strength of their ties determines their access to resources within the network, as access to these resources is only given to those who are accountable and trustworthy. Through visible and repeated social interaction, residents built strong ties to one another. These ties allow for processes of generalized reciprocity to take place, wherein residents give to others with no immediate expectation of receiving back, knowing that should they need help, it will be available. This process relies entirely on the trust built up through repeated interactions and the sanctions imposed on those who break it, and contributes greatly to community resilience. Women play a particular role within these communities. Unlike studies that find that women are disadvantaged by their social networks, the results of this study find that women have parlayed their higher levels of involvement in the social life of the community and the informal economy into beneficial social networks based on trust and reciprocity. In addition, their higher levels of education put them at the forefront of the new service economy with lower levels of unemployment and equal likelihood of self-employment, all of which contributes not only to individual resilience, but community resilience as well. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

Certes l’étude du monde de la prostitution clandestine et la rencontre des prostituées clandestines sont, pour nous, une expérience fort enrichissante. Mais, côtoyer ces femmes et faire partager leurs expériences et leur vécu n’est pas du tout une tâche aisée. En étudiant cette communauté bien particulière, nous nous sommes heurtée à des difficultés : fréquentation de lieux infâmes, refus de collaboration de certaines prostituées, arnaque et dépense de grandes sommes d’argent. Notre objectif est de comprendre le phénomène de la prostitution clandestine dans la ville de Sfax, les profils des femmes qui y évoluent, y compris celles issues de la migration, et ce qui les incite à cette condition. Notre motivation principale est de découvrir un phénomène minoré dans les études sociologiques en Tunisie. Nous avons opté pour une perspective de la sociologie compréhensive. Des prostituées clandestines ont été rencontrées par l’intermédiaire de plusieurs acteurs ; proxénètes, courtiers immobiliers, prostituées clandestines, éducatrices paires. Des récits de vie, issus d’observations réalisées dans les salons de thé et dans les grands boulevards de la ville de Sfax, ont été réalisés auprès de 25 femmes tunisiennes et ont permis d'explorer en profondeur leurs expériences prostitutionnelles. À cela s’ajoute l’expérience que nous avons vécue à l’Association Tunisienne de Lutte contre les Maladies Sexuellement Transmissibles et le Sida basée à Sfax, en tant qu’assistante sociale dans le cadre du projet du Fonds mondial de lutte contre le Sida, la Tuberculose et le Paludisme. / Certainly the study of the world of illegal prostitution and meeting clandestine prostitutes are, for us, a very rewarding experience. However, contacting these women, and therefore sharing their experiences is by no means an easy task. While studying this particular community, we faced several difficulties: getting access to infamous places, resisting to collaborate on the part of certain prostitutes, swindle and spending big amounts of money. Our goal is to understand the phenomenon of clandestine prostitution in Sfax City, the profiles of women who live there, including those from migration, as well as the push factors to this condition. Our main motivation is to explore un understudied topic in the sociological literature in Tunisia. We opted for a perspective of comprehensive sociology. Meeting clandestine prostitutes have been arranged through several actors; pimps, real estate agents, clandestine prostitutes, peer educators. Life stories of 25 Tunisian women were drafted based on observations made in the tea rooms and on the boulevards of the city of Sfax, which allowed to explore in depth their prostitution experiences. In addition, our experience with the Tunisian Association to fight Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS, based in Sfax, as a social worker in the framework of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

This is a dissertation about Kibera, a large informal settlement on the margins of Nairobi, Kenya. Based on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and related participant observation, this thesis explores the interactions between young people, grassroots groups, and national and international NGOs in Kibera and how these influence youth journeys to adulthood. International development practitioners working in Kibera have focused their efforts on young people, especially given Kenyan census figures documenting that 78% of Kenya's population is below the age of 35. This demographic trend poses both challenges and opportunities, but Kenya's gerontocratic leadership has, for the most part, failed to find solutions to improve opportunities for young people. Population increases have resulted in increases in crime, income inequality, and un- and underemployment. These changes are exacerbated by protracted liminality, a long period of ambiguous status, experienced by young men and sanctioned by custom as a way to moderate inter-generational tensions. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) fill in the gaps and compensate for the failure of public policy by providing basic social services to improve the systemic political, economic and social issues affecting Kibera’s youth. This study follows a group of young men who have discovered that they can alleviate their liminality by practicing resourcefulness in Nairobi’s vast informal economy, an action colloquially referred to as "hustling." Specifically, these youth hustle the "shadow aid economy" that has emerged as a byproduct of Kibera's saturated NGO environment. The outcome of this is not an upending of the traditions of age and seniority in Kenya—these young men will continue to experience liminality in certain contexts and situations. The ultimate result is that youth create networks of reciprocity and build internal hierarchies in the settlement as they hustle, which leads the most successful NGO hustlers to create alternate means of advancement and shift the criteria of respectability to accelerate their progress towards adulthood.

No description available.

Work on urban renewal internationally focuses on a vast range of topics, including gentrification, increased criminalization of poverty, rent-seeking behaviour, and neoliberal urbanism. These arguments tend to centre the interests and actions of certain actors, prioritize certain forces (such as economic ones), and thus tend to predict a particular set of outcomes. In adopting a southern urbanist epistemology, and Jennifer Robinson’s reimagined comparativism through a reconceptualized 'case’, this research shows how predominant assumptions regarding the drivers and outcomes (both social and physical) of urban renewal do not necessarily apply in the case of Braamfontein, an instance of urban renewal in Johannesburg, a post-apartheid city in the south. The findings examined here include policy narratives and empirical referents to culture-led strategies of urban renewal and ways in which they speak less to market-orientated objectives, and more to socio-political ones; how the findings in Braamfontein speak to literature on gentrification, studentification, and youthification, showing that urban renewal and gentrification are not the same processes, and that studentification does not necessarily lead to youthification or gentrification; how attempts to suppress informal trade have led to the proliferation of iterant strategies on the part of hawkers, and have in turn led to enhanced relationships between informal traders and the formal economy; and, finally, how the presence of communities self-identifying as foreign or gay are shown to be driven by forces other than those that the literature typically predicts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law & Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2014. / South Africa’s Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) scores are consistently well-below the average of other efficiency-driven economies, as well as for other sub-Saharan countries (Turton and Herrington, 2013). Despite this, a 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report suggests that youth in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrate marked entrepreneurial propensity and potential (Kew, Herrington, Letovsky and Gale, 2013). As such, this thesis seeks to contribute an understanding of how black, youth entrepreneurs located in Johannesburg’s informal economy, seek to achieve legitimacy, and thus ‘become’, through the attainment of an accepted entrepreneurial identity. To this end, the role of hybridity, as a form of entrepreneurial capital, is explored as a potential mechanism. A hypothesised conceptual framework is accordingly evolved which explores the relationships between entrepreneurial identity aspiration, resource attainment, legitimacy, and how these are mediated by hybridity. Survey data gathered from young, black entrepreneurs (n=503) across Johannesburg’s seven administrative districts, using a structured questionnaire, and tested using multiple regression analysis, reveals the following: a direct relationship between entrepreneurial identity aspiration, entrepreneurial resources as well as the attainment of legitimacy is found, suggesting that black youth do indeed aspire to entrepreneurial legitimacy, and thus, seek to ‘become’ accordingly. Moreover, hybrid values are seen to mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial iii identity aspiration and resource attainment such that they accounted for the relationship. This suggests the potential for hybridity as a form of entrepreneurial capital such that values might have been seen to act as a form a catalyst for the attainment of other resources. The study contributes a conceptual framework which provides a theoretical understanding of young, black entrepreneurs in South Africa. More specifically, it suggests a values-mediated relationship between entrepreneurial identity aspiration and the attainment of resources such that youth seek legitimacy accordingly. As such, this study is the first to provide insights into the potential impact that hybrid values might have on shaping an entrepreneurial identity. Additionally, it contributes evidence to suggest that opportunity-driven behaviour motivates young, black entrepreneurs in Johannesburg’s informal economy, beyond necessity motives which are used to stereotypically frame this space. It is recommended that further research be undertaken to test this framework in other contexts in order to gain a finer understanding of hybridity as a potential entrepreneurial resource. This might additionally involve research into the cues that potentially result in a switching between different values.

In this study I explore two understudied aspects of India's informal economy, viz. the institutions that sustain informal knowledge, and gender disparities among self-employed workers using a combination of primary survey and interview methods as well as econometric estimation. The data used in the study come from the Indian National Sample Survey (NSS) as well as from fieldwork conducted in the city of Banaras (Varanasi) in North India. The vast majority of the Indian work-force is "uneducated" from a conventional point of view. Even when they have received some schooling, formal education rarely prepares individuals for employment. Rather, various forms of apprenticeships and on-the-job training are the dominant modes of knowledge acquisition. The institutions that enable creation and transfer of knowledge in the informal economy are poorly understood because informal knowledge itself is understudied. However, the rise of the so-called "Knowledge Society" has created a large literature on traditional and indigenous knowledge and has brought some visibility to the informal knowledge pos- sessed by peasants, artisans, and other workers in the informal economy. The present study extends this strand of research. In Chapter Two, taking the weaving indus- try as a case-study, work is introduced into the study of knowledge. Thus informal knowledge is studied in the context of the production relations that create and sustain it. Further, the family mode of production and apprenticeships are foregrounded as important institutions that achieve inter-generational transfer of knowledge at a low cost. Clustering of weaving firms ensures fast dissemination of new fabric designs and patterns which holds down monopoly rents. In Chapter Three taking advan- tage of a recently issued Geographical Indication (GI), an intellectual property right (IPR) that attempts to standardize the Banaras Sari to protect its niche in the face of powerloom-made imitation products, I investigate the likely effects of such an at- tempt to create craft authenticity. Through field observations and via interviews with weavers, merchants, State officials and NGO workers, I find that the criteria of authenticity have largely been developed without consulting artisans and as a result tend to be overly restrictive. In contrast, I find that weavers themselves have a more dynamic and fluid notion of authenticity. Homeworking women are widely perceived to be among the most vulnerable and exploited groups of workers. Piece-rates and undocumented hours of work hide ex- tremely low hourly wages and workers themselves are often invisible. Though women form a crucial part of the Banaras textile industry, to the outside observer they are invisible, both because they are in purdah and because women's work proceeds in the shadow of weaving itself, which is a male occupation. In Chapter Four, using field observations, interviews, and time-use analysis I show that women perform paid work for up to eight hours a day but are still seen as working in their spare time. Because the opportunity cost of spare time is zero, any wage above zero is deemed an improvement. Hourly wage rates in Banaras are found to be as low as eight to ten cents an hour, well below the legal minimum wage. In Chapter Five, I use Na- tional Sample Survey data on the informal textile industry to test the hypothesis that emerges from ethnographic work in Banaras. If women are indeed penalized for un- dertaking joint production of market and non-market goods, women working on their own without hired workers are expected to perform much worse than men working by themselves. I find that after accounting for differences in education, assets, working hours, occupation and other relevant variables, women working by themselves earn 52% less than their male counterparts. This gender penalty disappears in case of self- employed women who can afford to employ wage-workers. I also show that women in the informal economy are more likely to be engaged in putting-out or subcontracting arrangements and suffer a gender penalty as a result.

In the context of rapid urbanization, globalization, market liberalization, and growing flexibility of labor in the post-Fordist era, urban environments have seen economic opportunities and employment in the formal sector become increasingly less available to the vast majority of urban dwellers in both high-income and low-income countries. The intersectional forces of globalization, and neoliberalization have contributed to the ever-growing role of informal economic opportunities in providing the necessary income to fulfill household needs for individuals throughout the world and have also influenced social, cultural, and spatial organization of informal sector workers. Using a case study and ethnographic information from several regions of southern Ghana, this research examines the way in which informal sector food vendors in Ghana are imbedded in larger global food networks as well as how globalization is experienced by vendors at the ground level.

Cinco hipóteses explicam a permanência do trabalho informal nos espaços públicos do Centro de São Paulo como ocupação precária e vulnerável: 1- Incapacidade estrutural do mercado de trabalho formal de absorção de mão-de-obra: informalidade como processo mundial e exceção permanente no formato do capitalismo brasileiro; 2- Desconhecimento do comércio informal de rua como produção do espaço urbano: modificação de atributos espaciais: valorização, competição, posse, etc.); 3- Exploração oportunista da clandestinidade dos trabalhadores na forma de corrupção e clientelismo; 4- Marketing urbano e Segregação Espacial: articulação entre as elites locais, Poder Público e agências multilaterais no intuito de promover a revitalização do perímetro estudado, expulsam ou isolam sistematicamente os trabalhadores de rua; 5- Inoperância das políticas públicas: o conhecimento insuficiente ou parcial do comércio de rua resulta na formulação de políticas públicas descoladas da realidade e, portanto, inoperantes. A partir dessas hipóteses,foi possível pensar parâmetros para políticas públicas que superem a polarização entre intolerância e permissividade em relação à atividade. / Five hypotheses explain streetvending in downtown Sao Paulo as a precarious and a vulnerable occupation: 1- Structural impermeability of formal labor market: informal sector as a global process, and as a permanent exception in brazilian capitalism; 2- Lack of awareness of streetvending as a production of urban space: transformation of spatial attributes - profit, competitiveness, ownership, etc.; 3- Opportunist exploitation over clandestine street vendors: corruption and patronage; 4- Urban marketing strategies and Spatial segregation: partnership among government, ruling elite and multi-lateral financial agencies in order to improve urban renewal, frequently isolate and gentrify against street vendors; 5- Innefective public policies - lack of understanding of streetvending results in unlikely public policies. Assuming these hypotheses, this research built public policies directions in order to overcome contradiction between intolerance and permissiveness.