ABSTRACT
Taken together, the chapters throughout this book display how this field of inquiry is moving away from the promulgation of universal hues about informal work and toward a more socially, culturally, and geographically embedded appreciation of this economic practice. In this final chapter, therefore, our intention is to pull the preceding strands together. To do this, we could simply summarize the main arguments of the individual chapters. Here, however, our intention is not only to synthesize the ways in which the findings brought together in this volume advance understanding of the informal sector but to directly relate the ways in which this is occurring to some wider shifts taking place in the social sciences. To achieve this, the findings reported in this volume with regard to informal work are related to two broader contemporary social scientific projects. On the one hand, the current shifts in how informal work is being conceptualized are related to the wider social scientific project of deconstructing Western hierarchical binary thought. On the other hand, they are shown to feed directly into the broader emerging body of thought that is seeking to both rethink the “economic” and re-embed the economic in the social.
