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Long dismissed as too weak and fragmented to collectively organize, millions of informal workers have begun mobilizing for labour rights over the past 40 years. As informal workers gain a measure of power to reshape the structure and conditions of their work, but continue to face constraints due to their subordinated positions in the broader political economy, tensions may emerge between the imperatives of combatting exploitation and dispossession. Recent conflicts over recycler rights policy in Bogotá, Colombia are illustrative of this dilemma. For the first 25 years of its existence, the recycler rights movement experienced little tension between these two imperatives, as it had little capacity to do either. In recent years, however, recyclers have become powerful political agents, and since 2012 conflicts have erupted among recyclers and state officials over how to navigate the twin threat. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article exposes both potentials and constraints of state-led interventions to improve informal livelihoods. Such interventions are likely to entail thorny tradeoffs as long as they occur within a broader system of social relations that is based on exploitation and exclusion.

Since its coining in 1971, the concept of the "informal sector" has been used to draw scholarly, political, and philanthropic attention to hundreds of millions of workers who lack basic labor protections. But as the term proliferated, so too did its detractors. Critics claim that the label of "informal" homogenizes the world's poor and distorts understandings of the sources of and solutions to their economic woes. What are the origins of the concept's contradictory nature? What strategies have scholars used to increase the likelihood that it will be used to illuminate and uplift, rather than to distort and denigrate? This article analyzes how scholars have resignified and retheorized the informal economy in response to five conceptual challenges: stigmatization, definitional fuzziness, homogenization, an either/or fallacy, and the presumption of "formalization" as the solution. Such efforts have preserved the concept's analytic potency and political relevance. In the longer term, however, a true testament to the concept's value would be if it outlives its own utility; that is, if it mobilizes enough recognition and resources to the invisibilized majority of the world's workers that scholars and state bureaucrats no longer feel the need to lump them together under a misleading catchall label.

Under what conditions do collaborations between informal workers and the state in public service provision lead to socially beneficial synergies, and when might they intensify inequalities? This article, based on 14 months of ethnographic research, addresses this question through a comparative case study of two attempts to co-produce recycling services in São Paulo. The first, a grassroots organizing effort in the 1980s and 1990s, improved the incomes and conditions of hundreds of waste pickers and inspired a national upsurge of waste picker organizing. The second, an ambitious overhaul of waste management in the early 2000s, generated about 1,500 jobs but functionally excluded the very population of street waste pickers it was designed to benefit. The findings suggest that co-production is most likely to lead to pro-poor outcomes if concerted efforts are made to level inequalities between poor constituents and more powerful stakeholders during processes of policy design and implementation.

This article details the principles and practices animating an “ethnographic” method of teaching social theory. As opposed to the traditional “survey” approach that aims to introduce students to the historical breadth of social thought, the primary objective of teaching ethnographically is to cultivate students as participant observers who interpret, adjudicate between, and practice social theories in their everyday lives. Three pedagogical principles are central to this approach, the first laying the groundwork for the two that follow: (1) intensive engagement with manageable portions of text, (2) conversations among theorists, and (3) dialogues between theory and lived experience. Drawing on examples from our experiences as graduate student instructors for a two-semester theory sequence, we offer practical guideposts to sociology instructors interested in integrating “living theory” into their own curricula by clarifying how each principle is put into action in course assignments, classroom discussions and activities, and evaluations of student learning. We conclude by encouraging sociology departments and instructors to consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of offering social theory courses built around in-depth readings of and conversations between social theorists and the social world.