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.

La présente thèse explore la dynamique des institutions informelles dans la gouvernance nationale et mondiale et l'ajustement de l'ordre politico-économique, dans un pays en transition et à l'échelle mondiale dans un contexte de crise financière internationale, en utilisant l'approche institutionnelle comparative. Elle adopte le point de vue de la nouvelle économie institutionnelle (New Institutional Economics - NIE) afin d'étudier comment différentes formes de gouvernance, notamment les mécanismes de gouvernance informels, émergent et fonctionnent dans diverses circonstances. Le chapitre deux fournit la preuve de la prédominance des relations accommodante et concurrente entre les systèmes de fourniture de services publics et d'ordre public, qui sont formellement et informellement décentralisés dans soixante-quatre provinces vietnamiennes. Notre analyse de l’«informalité» dans le chapitre trois soutient l'argument selon lequel les mécanismes formels ne sont pas suffisants pour inciter les acteurs publics à assumer leur pleine responsabilité, mais doivent être accompagnés de ceux informels pour combler les déficits de responsabilité du système formel. L'analyse empirique de quarante-cinq pays développés et en développement dans le chapitre quatre découvre que la non-congruence institutionnelle, en général, a un effet complémentaire sur la taille de l'économie informelle, mais agit comme un substitut dans les pays qui ont un faible niveau de non-congruence, une bonne gouvernance de la corruption, ou une grande pro-activité dans la prise d'initiatives visant à réduire l'écart de perception de la légitimité des activités économiques informelles. / This dissertation explores the dynamics of informal institutions in national and global governance and the adjustment of the economic political order in a transition country as well as on the global scale after two recent global financial crises, using the comparative institutional approach. It adopts the perspective of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) to study how alternative forms of governance, particularly, informal mechanisms of governance, emerge and work in various circumstances. Chapter two provides evidence to the prevalence of the accommodating and competing relationships between the formally and informally decentralized systems of providing public services and public order in 64 provinces in Vietnam. Our “informality” analysis in chapter three has supported the argument that formal mechanisms alone are not sufficient to create incentives for public actors to make private efforts to full accountability, but needs accompanying with other informal ones to fill in accountability deficits of the formal system. The empirical analysis of 45 developed and developing countries in chapter four finds that institutional incongruence, in general, has a complementary effect on the size of the informal economy, but acts as a substitute in those countries that have a low level of incongruence, good governance of corruption, or high proactivity in taking initiatives to minimize the perception gap about the legitimacy of informal economic activities.