ABSTRACT
Studies of economic activity in Third World cities have been bedevilled by confusions resulting from the application of inappropriate conceptual frameworks and terminology derived from the industrial experience of advanced capitalist economies and from the classificatory zeal of international organisations anxious to cast the whole world in the same statistical mould. Geographers and other social scientists have frequently used terms such as ‘poverty’, ‘work’, ‘employment’, ‘self-employment’, ‘underemployment’, ‘labour force’, ‘formal’, ‘productive’, ‘firm’, ‘proletariat’ and ‘working class’ without prior definition, and sweeping generalisations have often been made without adequate substantiation. Even when definitions are made, many analyses turn out to be tautologous or contradictory because ill-defined categories such as ‘the informal sector’ are duly studied and shown to have the very characteristics which were used in their initial definition, or because case studies of specific activities and places are often used to characterise vast, hetereogeneous aggregates which have never been enumerated.
