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The Informal Firm

Organisation and Survival in Emerging Economies

  • Author Prof. Rajesh Iyer · Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

About this book

Nine in ten firms in India are informal, and management research has almost nothing to say about them because they do not appear in the registries it samples from. Iyer draws on fifteen years of field enumeration across four cities to describe how informal firms are actually organised: how they hire, how they hold capital, how they transfer ownership and why they close. A corrective to a literature built on the visible tenth.

Table of contents

  1. Counting What Is Not Registered10.53456/book.2026.informal-fir.01p. 1
  2. Hiring Without Contracts10.53456/book.2026.informal-fir.02p. 41
  3. Capital, Credit and the Cash Box10.53456/book.2026.informal-fir.03p. 85
  4. Succession and the Family10.53456/book.2026.informal-fir.04p. 129
  5. Why Informal Firms Close10.53456/book.2026.informal-fir.05p. 174
  6. Formalisation and Its Discontents10.53456/book.2026.informal-fir.06p. 218
  7. What Management Research Should Do About It10.53456/book.2026.informal-fir.07p. 263

Every chapter carries its own DOI and can be cited independently of the volume.