Re-thinking informal entrepreneurship: commercial or social entrepreneurs?

This paper evaluates critically the assumption that entrepreneurs who start-up their business ventures operating wholly or partially off-the-books are engaged in commercial entrepreneurship. Reporting evidence from a 2005–2006 survey involving face-to-face interviews with 298 informal entrepreneurs in Ukraine, the finding is that they are not all commercially-driven. Instead, these informal entrepreneurs range from purely rational economic actors who pursue for-profit logics through to purely social entrepreneurs who pursue solely social logics, with the majority somewhere in the middle of this spectrum combining both for-profit and social rationales. The result is a call for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneous logics of informal entrepreneurs that recognises the existence of social entrepreneurs in the realm of informal entrepreneurship.