Williams, C.C. orcid.org/0000-0002-3610-1933 and Oz-Yalaman, G.Ö. (2021) Explaining different types of undeclared work: lessons from a 2019 Eurobarometer survey. Employee Relations, 43 (6). pp. 1382-1396. ISSN 0142-5455
Abstract
Purpose Until now, most scholars have used one of four competing theories to explain undeclared work. Political economy theories explain undeclared work as resulting from the exclusion of workers from formal work and welfare, neo-liberal theories explain such work as a voluntarily chosen rational economic decision and neo-institutionalist and post-structuralist theories explain those engaging as social actors who disagree with the formal rules or seek to help others out respectively. Recognising that each theory focuses upon different employment relationships, this paper evaluates the proposition that these different theories are more explanations of different types of undeclared work.
Design/methodology/approach To evaluate this, data reported is collected in 2019 across 28 European countries (the 27 member states of the European Union and the United Kingdom) in special Eurobarometer survey 92.1 involving 27,565 interviews.
Findings Of the 3.6% of citizens participating in undeclared work, 10% engage in undeclared waged employment, 42% in undeclared self-employment and 48% in undeclared paid favours. Reporting their rationales, 7% state purely political economy exclusion-driven reasons, 19% solely neo-liberal rational economic actor reasons, 20% purely social actor reasons and 54% mixed motives. A logistic regression analysis finds those engaging in undeclared waged employment significantly more likely to state purely exclusion-driven rationales, those engaging in undeclared self-employment significantly more likely to state neo-liberal rational economic actor and neo-institutionalist social actor rationales and those engaging in undeclared paid favours post-structuralist social actor motives.
Practical implications This finding suggests that the policy initiatives required to tackle undeclared work will vary according to the type of undeclared work addressed. These are outlined.
Originality/value Evidence is provided that a different weighting needs to be given to different theories when explaining each type of undeclared work.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited. This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in Employee Relations. This version is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. |
Keywords: | informal economy; labour markets; self-employment; institutional theory; public policy; Europe |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 30 Apr 2021 07:27 |
Last Modified: | 01 Mar 2022 14:09 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Emerald |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1108/ER-12-2020-0544 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:173418 |