Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Robert K. Schaeffer / Informal markets are prevalent all over the globe. The work done in such markets is often for the purposes of supplementary or subsistence income and it is done by men, women, and children. The purpose of my research was to understand how micro-informal markets are created by informal workers in Manhattan, Kansas. This was done through examining how informal workers used their social networks to find customers and how customers used their social networks to find informal goods and services produced by such workers, or more specifically, how micro-informal markets were created. This builds on the economic theory of embeddedness, which states social relations are an important part of the exchange process even in today's capitalistic market economy. In addition, my research also looked at why customers consumed from informal workers, why informal workers decided to go into business for themselves, how the city of Manhattan, Kansas viewed informal workers and whether city officials and affiliates encouraged informal businesses or not.

Através do estudo do trabalho ambulante regularizado, a pesquisa discute as transformações na área central influenciadas pela espacialização dos circuitos de produtos que compõem o denominado \"comércio popular\". Cada circuito aciona uma rede de relações específicas, as quais podem existir na mais absoluta legalidade ou estarem ligadas ao contrabando, pirataria e falsificação. O mercado de produtos cuja oferta é criminalizada movimenta outro que transaciona \"mercadorias políticas\" - negociações de caráter político transformadas em valores monetários - tanto no âmbito das normas comerciais, quanto das que regulamentam a apropriação do território. A hipótese é que as negociações observadas no comércio ambulante constituem formas de gestão dos espaços da área central, as quais são compartilhadas entre o Poder Público e outros agentes. Por continuamente transitarem nas liminaridades do ilegal, ilícito e informal; elas caracterizam o território como uma \"zona de indeterminação\" entre o direito e o não-direito, a lei e a norma, o juízo e o arbítrio. Aborda-se a questão tendo como referência o caso de Campinas, cidade sede de uma região metropolitana localizada no interior do estado de São Paulo. A organização dos trabalhadores em ocupações nos espaços públicos - realizada pela Prefeitura desde os anos 1980 - resultou na construção de um imaginário sobre a atividade, no qual tem papel fundamental a negociação monetária da licença de uso. Para compreensão deste processo, foram analisadas especificamente as políticas de regulamentação adotadas de 2001 a 2004, período em que a regularização de novos espaços perpassou o debate sobre os sentidos da revitalização do centro. Os desdobramentos dessas políticas, captados nas falas dos entrevistados de 2005 a 2010, ajudaram a montar um quadro das negociações e a identificar a complexificação da população que vive da atividade. A convivência nas áreas regularizadas entre as dimensões clássicas e as reconfigurações do trabalho ambulante - provenientes do atual papel que a informalidade ocupa nos processos de acumulação - abre novas questões para a análise do chamado centro \"degradado\" e \"decadente\", locus do comércio popular. / Through the study of the regularized street trading, the research discusses the transformations in the central area influenced by the spatialization of products circuits that constitute the known \"popular trade\". Each circuit triggers a network of specific relationships which can exist in the strictest legality or be linked to smuggling, piracy and counterfeiting. The market of products whose bid is criminalized moves other which transacts \"political commodities\" - political negotiations converted into monetary values - both in the context of trade rules, as those which regulate the appropriation of the territory. The hypothesis is that the negotiations observed in the spaces of street trading constitute a form of downtown\'s territory management, which is shared between Public Power and other agents. By continually transiting in illegal\'s liminality, illicit and informal, they characterize the territory as a \"zone of indeterminacy\" between right and rightless, law and norm, judge and will. It is addressed taking Campinas as a reference, a regional metropolis located within the state of Sao Paulo. The organization of workers in public territory occupations - held by the Prefecture since the 1980s -resulted in the construction of an ideal about the activity, in which the license\'s monetary negotiation plays a key role. To understand this process, the regulatory policies adopted from 2001 to 2004 are analyzed specifically, during which the regularization of new territories pervaded the debate on the meanings of downtown\'s revitalization. The consequences of these policies, as captured in the words of those interviewed from 2005 to 2010, helped to set up a negotiating framework and to identify the complexification of the population which does this activity for a living. The living in the regularized areas between classical dimension and the reconfiguration of street trading from the current informality role in the process of accumulation opens new questions for analyzing the \"degraded\" and \"decadent\" downtown, locus of the popular trade.

Economie informelle et pauvreté en Turquie : une analyse des comportements individuels sur des données des dépenses monétaires et temporelles de 2003 à 2006. / Since it was first introduced by Hart in 1973, the concept of “informal economy” has had vast implications for social-scientific research. Over the last four decades, informal economy has received increased attention in literature and has been keenly discussed by public authorities and scholars. There were two main motivations behind these efforts to identify the informal economy: to measure its size and to know its determinants. From a practical point of view, informal economy has been an enigma for economists seeking to identify its nature and to measure activities that have various economic motivations. Informality has been denoted by many names, such as “shadow”, “underground”, “second” or “parallel” economy- a plethora of terms resulting from the struggle to define informality. Likewise, the various approaches to studying the phenomenon differ greatly in the way that they relate to socio-economic characterization. Although there is great variation between definitions of informality, these diversifications allow authorities to deal more easily with the source of the problem, being able to inform themselves and create accurate policies. Generally speaking, these policies aim to increase the level of productivity for any given sector and to protect growth in an economy as a whole. The implicit goal of these strategies is to prevent informal earnings by protecting formal market transactions (Schneider and Enste, 2002) and thereby combat informality. To this end, identifying the stimulating economic factors behind informal activities by gathering information about participants, their actions and the concurrency of these activities becomes essential for the optimal distribution of economic resources.

The informal economy represents a large segment of the economic activities in emerging economies but still remains a puzzling phenomenon. In particular, research emphasising the organising processes of firms within the informal economy is scant. Weak formal institutions, conflicting institutional centres and large levels of economic inequality contribute to the development of informal entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Yet, an understanding of the links between institutional incongruence and economic exclusion as facilitating mechanisms of informal entrepreneurship remains limited. Furthermore, it is unknown how hybrid organisations, combining institutional logics, emerge and function within the informal economy. Despite a large number of empirical and theoretical studies, there is a lack of understanding about the interplay between the institutional dynamics and the creation of informal institutions developed by informal entrepreneurs. To enhance the understanding of informal entrepreneurship, this PhD thesis explores how institutional entrepreneurs embedded in the informal economy respond to economic inequality. This grounded theory study, based on interviews and participant observations conducted at La Salada, South America's largest black market, conceptualises how institutional entrepreneurs exploit the illegitimacy of formal labour institutions to generate institutional change. This qualitative study has followed a constructivist grounded theory design based on simultaneous data collection and analysis and making systematic comparisons throughout inquiry. In line with grounded theory guidelines, the researcher identified emerging first-order categories and looked-for relations between them, in order to move to a higher level of theoretical abstraction with the aim of generating new theory. The researcher conducted 75 in-depth interviews and semi-structured interviews, non-participant observation, and made use of archival documents. The thesis is organised as three empirical studies which can be read independently, but together constitute an in-depth study of institutional entrepreneurship in the informal economy. The thesis's theoretical contributions to the field are as follows. The first study reveals the conditions that generated institutional change in the apparel value chain in response to prevailing conditions that were leading to increasing economic inequality. It presents a model that focuses on three social mechanisms which allow institutional entrepreneurs to build new institutions that were inclusive for large segments of society excluded by the formal sector. The second study explores the emergence of new forms of hybrid organisation in the informal economy. Particularly, it focuses on how informal entrepreneurs organisationally respond to institutional complexity by identifying two types of logic - community and market - and a meta-mechanism that facilitates the interaction between the two logics, named normalisation of deviant organisational practices. The study highlights the two key generative mechanisms of the logics at play and suggests that actors embedded in the informal economy are able to dynamically adapt to two types of logic. It also emphasises how informal entrepreneurs exploit institutional arbitrage, which refers to the circumstances where entrepreneurs are provided with opportunities to exploit differences between two dimensions of the institutional environment, formality and informality. The third study explores how various types of actors and organisations such as social movements or hybrid organisations are able to develop alternative institutional arrangements to overcome the liabilities of emerging economies' institutions in an informal context. The study reveals that informal entrepreneurs entering a polycentric system are able to establish norms and rules of interaction, to exploit brokerage opportunities and multivocality between contradictory networks, and through robust action, generate proto-institutional outcomes. Collectively, these three essays reveal novel knowledge about the organisational mechanisms behind informal economic activities, constituting a theoretical bridge between the fields of institutional theory, inequality and governance and providing fundamental insights for the development of new management theories.

Los Angeles stands as the largest city in the United States without comprehensive street vending regulation. Over the span of ten years, between 1984 and 1994, street vendor activists challenged Los Angeles to regulate street vending through the work of the Street Vendors Association. Within the same ten years, the city hosted the Olympics; the city introduced broken windows policing; immigration from the global south increased; and, a riot broke out. This thesis explores how Los Angeles’ ambition as a “city of the future” and its Mexican “past” impacted the politics of street vending during this span of time.

In 2013, the Dominican state ruled to uphold a 2010 constitutional amendment that stripped thousands of Dominicans of Haitian origin of their citizenship and forced them to leave the country during summer 2015. About 2,200 of these people became displaced in Anse-à-Pitres, where most took up residence in temporary camps. I use the term forced migrants or displaced persons interchangeably to refer to these people. Many endure challenges in meeting their daily survival needs in Haiti, a country with extreme poverty, considerable political instability, and still in the process of rebuilding itself from the devastating earthquake of 2010. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic field- work in Anse-à-Pitres, I examine how these displaced people, in the face of statelessness and amid their precarious social and economic conditions, create survival strategies by drawing upon everyday labor mobility and informal economic activities within and across their communities. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the involvement of these displaced people in community life through socio-economic practices attests to a sense of belonging and produces a form of substantive citizenship in their absence of legal citizenship. This kind of substantive citizenship is also shaped by the ability of the displaced people to re-define life goals, participate in local meetings with the local state and organizations on the ground, and challenge systems of power that seek to impose their choices upon them. In this dissertation, I argue against construing the displaced people as hopeless by focusing on the forms of power and agency that they exercise in and over their lives, which make them agents of their self-development.

Within a loose framework of two ongoing and interrelated processes (globalisation and changing roles of the nation-state) family and relations between family, economy and state are studied in Greece and Sweden. Greece is in focus. Modernization, development and family in social science literature are discussed. Using the idea of the social landscape and the existence of four different types of organizations (private enterprises, nation-states, families and voluntary organizations) several advantages are achieved: care work is made visible and nation-states are seen in a wider context. Informal economy and clientelism in general and in Greece in particular are described. The role of family in maintaining such patterns is discussed and attention is paid to the mutual strengthening of family, informal economy and clientelism in a social landscape where formal, universalistic and public procedures to get access to valued resources exist side by side and interwoven with informal, particularistic and veiled ones. Traditional patriarchal ideologies are breaking up and an increasing number of women work outside the family but women's role in caring for family members in Greece is crucial. Great progress in terms of equal rights has been made. State involvement in caring activities and other reproductive work is however small. Modernization and rationalization in economy and state in the wake of EU and EMU membership challenge such phenomena as informal economy, clientelism and women's subordination. Finally development in Greece and Sweden within the EU is discussed and division of responsibilities and work with care is problematized.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the workings of multi-scalar networks that connect informal economy organizations that are active locally, nationally and internationally. The study adopts a „right to the city‟ framework wherein the relation between the local and the global is discussed. The main questions that were addressed in the research were (I) how do local, national and global networks among street vendorsand marketers and their organizations shape the resistances of street vendors andmarketers and (II) how do local, national and international networks amongorganizations that work for street vendors and marketers contribute to street vendors‟ and marketers‟ claims to the rights to the city. Qualitative interviews were conducted with street and market vendors operating from urban areas in the Zambian Copperbelt as well as with organizations dealing with market and street vendors in the samegeographical area. Results showed that networks operating on different geographical scales served the street and market vendors as well as their organizations different purposes. Findings are related to the relative importance of the global for the local as well as contemporary theories of democracy and citizenship.

This paper examines the informal economy’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions and whether it poses a problem to the effectiveness of international frameworks designed to reduce GHG emissions. With the results of a literature review conducted on the relation between the informal economy and regulations and results on 160 nations’ theoretical informal-economy emissions over time, this paper finds that the informal economy does hinder the ability of governments to manage GHG emissions. This paper then discusses how this aspect of the world’s economy limits the efficacy of international frameworks to reduce GHG emissions. Suggestions are made on how to incorporate this sector into the proposed frameworks. The paper concludes with summarizing the main findings and proposals for further research.

The relationship between economic performance and support for the incumbent government varies across voters and electoral contexts. While some of this variation can be explained by factors that make it easier or harder to hold politicians accountable, an additional explanation is that the electoral importance of economic issues varies systematically across groups and contexts. Because issues that are personally important tend to be more easily accessible when voting, we prose that exposure to economic shocks generates higher incentives to place more weight on economic conditions when voting. We test this hypothesis using archived and original survey data from Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. The analysis demonstrates that economic vulnerability enhances the economy's salience. Specifically, poverty generates incentives to cast an egotropic vote while wealth, insecure employment, informal employment, and exclusion from governments welfare programs enhances sociotropic voting because these groups have greater stakes in the national economy. By implication, elections in developing countries with large numbers of vulnerable voters should be more strongly contested over economics despite the weak institutional environment that potentially undermines the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable. Aggregate elections returns and the CSES survey support this proposition and demonstrate that economic voting is substantially more common in Latin American than in Western Europe or North America. Thus variations in economic voting provide opportunities to not only learn about the conditions under which elections can serve as mechanisms of accountability but also a laboratory to model the process of preference formation and the demands voters place on their representatives. / Dissertation