Guerrilla economics and the wild economy

This paper assesses the latest contributions, by Harding and Jenkins and by Portes, Castells and Benton, to the literature on the informal or hidden economy. It places these works in the context of the now significant body of theoretical and empirical research that has developed over the past 17 years. It traces the emergence of the concept from its roots in economic anthropology, developmental studies, criminology, poverty studies, industrial and urban sociology, and Soviet studies, to its current demand for an interdisciplinary economics. It shows how, what was originally a fragmented polemical critique of the classical model of economic man, dismissed by many as peripheral, even trivial, has emerged as a new approach to the analysis of economic life. This guerrilla interdisciplinary irreverence is forcing a new dialectical vision in which economic life is reveled to be anything but the predictable, rational activity of market forces. Instead we see a wild economy, of formal and informal, market and non-market, as interrelated dimensions of the same whole, a whole permeated by social networks and clusters of workers. Failure to take this development seriously is to be blind to the realities of modern economic life and itself constitutive of the myth that is the formal economy. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AW502012 00002