ABSTRACT

A considerable amount of intellectual energy in recent years has gone into discussion of the links between the formal and informal sectors and the extent to which informal workers have been excluded from or have chosen not to join the formal economy. Much of the exclusion/choice debate has been based on the assumption that those in the informal sector care about such matters. Chapter 5 proposes that they do not. Rational choice theory, which is at the heart of neoliberalism and its position on the informal sector, does not apply. The stories the artisans tell are about entering a trade in the informal sector as children, the affinity they have with this trade in the face of economic adversity, and the transition towards treating it as a hobby in their later years.