Paper short abstract:

The paper concerns the economic practices and representations of southern Italian workers employed by small-scale sub-contactors. Many of the practices concerned here are illegal. These islands of illegality produce specifics forms of mutuality and market organisation with their own situated logics.

Paper long abstract:

The paper concerns the economic practices and representations of southern Italian workers employed by small-scale sub-contactors working for north and central Italian firms. I examine how local ways of working, kinship and other forms of social relations between workers and workers and between workers and employers, articulate with classical market behaviours. Particularly significant is the illegality, or semi illegality, of many of the practices concerned; these enable workers and employers to construct social contexts insulated from the framework of the law. Social science has tended to consider practices that contravene the law in terms of exploitation, resistance or of what neo-liberal economists label as « flexibility ». Instead, I argue that these islands of illegality produce specifics forms of mutuality and market organisation with their own creative « situated » logics.