‘Cash-In-Hand Work: Unravelling Informal Employment from the Moral Economy of Favours’

Through the study of cash-in-hand work, an illicit type of monetary transactionoften seen to epitomise unbridled profit-motivated market exchange, the aim ofthis paper is to challenge the dominant narrative that monetary transactions areuniversally market-like and profit-motivated. Until now, most studies contestingthis narrative have focused upon relatively small marginal sites (e.g., car bootsales, local currency schemes) that can be simply explained away as peripheralor even superfluous to an understanding of monetised exchange in the mainstreameconomy. Unravelling the characteristics and logics of monetary exchange in thislarger economic sphere can be viewed as an exemplar of unconstrainedprofit-motivated market exchange, however, the intention is to provide a morerobust challenge to the view that monetary transactions are always profit-motivated than has so far been the case. To do this, the conventional focus ofstudies of cash-in-hand work on its variable magnitude is transcended andinstead, evidence is reported of a study conducted in North Nottinghamshire thatinvestigates the characteristics and logics underpinning such work. This revealsthat although there exists cash-in-hand work of both an ‘organised’ and‘autonomous’ variety that is conducted under profit-motivated market-likeexchange relations (what I here call ‘informal employment’), there is alsocash-in-hand work imbued with not-for-profit rationales and non-market economicrelations that represents a ‘moral economy of paid favours’ and is more akin tounpaid mutual aid. This paper thus concludes that if not-for-profit monetisedtransactions can be found even in this sphere, then those contesting the viewthat monetised exchange is always profit- motivated so as to illuminatealternative futures beyond profit- motivated capitalism should be encouraged toextend their enquiries to more mainstream economic spaces in order to mount amore serious challenge to the hegemony of capitalist relations.