Abstract
Until now, participation in underground work has been explained either through a structuralist lens as driven by “exclusion” from state benefits and the circuits of the modern economy or through a neoliberal and/or poststructuralist lens as driven by the voluntary “exit” of workers out of formal institutions and into this alternative economic environment. Reporting the results of an extensive twenty-seven-nation European survey, this article reveals how such either-or explanations need to be transcended and displays the need for future research to analyze how both exit and exclusion are variously entwined in different settings so as to achieve a more context-bound understanding.
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