The Idea of Form, Informality, and Aspirations of Workers

The literature on informality is rich and diverse. Two of the dominant analytical themes are the conceptual analysis of the idea of informal, and the role of the informal economy in the overall productivity and growth of the economy. Additionally, there are literature on organisations and trade unionisms of informal workers, case studies of specific informal entrepreneurships, and interactions between informal entrepreneurs and workers with the government and the civil society. We briefly discuss some of these analytical approaches that are closer to our agenda in the present volume. We do not take informality as a neo-liberalism induced aberration per se; we attempt to look at informality from a wider perspective that does not only hold neo-liberal globalisation responsible for informal activities. However, we understand that neoliberalism has aggravated precarious conditions associated with informality and has narrowed down the possible responses to informality so far as the interests of workers are concerned. Unlike some scholars’ preoccupation, we are also not concerned only with the re-emergence of informalisation; we are concerned about the idea of informality and its relation with the workers albeit with a focus on workers’ own experience of working informally. Moreover, the abovementioned works principally focus on countries in the global South, an orientation we hope to overcome in this book by integrating perspectives from both the global South as well as from the North, albeit illustratively. However, a caveat must be added that since the informality phenomenon is much more pervasive in the South, our collection too has more contributions from this region reflecting the pervasiveness. A good starting point towards a contextual understanding of the informal could be the idea of informal itself. We analyse the theoretical and policy-related usefulness of the idea of informal and argue for a worker-centric understanding of the concept, thereby indicating a way to overcome a neoliberalism dominated economy-centric conceptualisation of the informal. Pushing the boundaries of the idea of informal, we propose the recognition of unremunerated work as socially valuable and a category of informal work. However, for policy-purposes, we argue that we need to focus on each specific category of informal work and put workers at the centre of the policy-making process