Call for papers

Special issue: Informality, gender and work

Guest Editors:

Annie Delaney, RMIT University ([email protected])

Fiona Macdonald, RMIT University ([email protected]);

Amanda Coles, Deakin University ([email protected]).

There is growing recognition that informal work is a feature of contemporary economic growth and the global economy. Informal work presents challenges for industrial relations and for disciplinary approaches to work and labour relations. However, literature on informality is growing in influence within employment relations scholarship due to its ability to help explain contemporary developments in work and the labour market. A resurgence of interest in informal work is generating new thinking on the concept and traditional binary notions of separate ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ activities have given way to more nuanced understandings, including a focus on ‘processes of informalisation’ (Fudge, 2012), and on the neoliberal economic, social and political influences that devalorise work to redefine it as non-work and workers as non-workers (Krinsky & Simonet, 2012). Importantly, feminist approaches to work include social production to highlight structural disadvantage, racialized and gendered intersections and global divisions of labour that compromise women economically and replicate gender disadvantage (Peterson, 2013).

This special issue of Labour & Industry seeks to build on and advance a growing set of debates on gender and processes of informalisation in work and employment. We invite papers to consider the following questions in relation to informality, gender and work:

Theoretical developments: Do traditional theoretical approaches to informality and informalisation offer adequate explanations of the forces driving the growth in informal employment? How can we theorise gender and informalisation in ways that challenge existing gender disadvantage? What challenges does informal employment present to conventional theories of work, the workplace and the labour process?

Institutional responses: What strategies have unions and civil society organisations developed to organise informal workers? Do contemporary forms of informal work require new approaches to organising? Is formalisation of informal employment feasible or is there a need for different or more radical policy approaches beyond the existing capitalist framework?

International comparisons: What are the similarities or differences that characterise informal employment in developed and developing economies? In what ways does informal employment impact on worker rights, protection and representation?

Impacts of different supply chain dynamics on informalisation: How does the interaction of gender and informal work in supply chains and other processes impact on workers? What key elements of informal employment in supply chains impact on the capacity of workers to seek collective strategies for justice and redress?

Papers can be submitted for consideration for publication in a special issue of Labour & Industry in 2018. The closing date for full paper submissions is 31 December 2017. For more information on submission guidelines and to submit your manuscript, go to www.tandfonline.com/rlab