This chapter argues that we need to rethink ‘work’ from the perspective of the global majority for whom wage employment has never been the norm. It outlines three dominant ways of conceptualising work – as commodified, informal and precarious – and demonstrates the ways in which all three are constructed against a particular idea of wage employment. An alternative framework of ‘ordinary work’ is presented which de-centres the wage through a focus on everyday values and practices in diverse economies. This framework proposes to broaden the socioeconomic imaginary of work, opening up new possibilities for how work, identity and security might be woven together differently. The chapter ends by outlining the structure of the book, organised around three key themes: ruptures, struggles and possibilities.

This article builds on observations of self-employed Romanian migrants and their encounters with UK fiscal obligations to position tax as a distinct node in the worker-citizen nexus. Speaking to anthropological critiques of neoliberalism, I argue that economic activity is not merely the ethical imperative of a political order premised on self-reliance. It is also a practical test of migrants’ abilities to translate the moral capital of ‘hard work’ into the categories and bureaucracy of fiscal contribution. Analyzing migrants’ compliance with immigration controls and fiscal regimes, seen as a duty to ‘account for oneself’ in moral and financial terms, this article theorizes tax returns as a key junction in the worker-citizen nexus—one that can allow migrants into, but also confine them to the margins of, European citizenship.

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