Official histories suggest that the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the term ‘informal sector’ as a replacement for ‘traditional sector’, which, in its pairing with the ‘modern sector’, had fallen out of favour. This article argues that the adoption of the informal sector concept is better understood as arising out of a different context: the ILO’s post-war efforts to generate a globally operational concept of unemployment for use in the ‘developing world’. ILO officials abandoned this project in the late 1960s when they realized that, where work for wages did not constitute a widespread social norm, an accurate measure of what they called ‘disguised unemployment’ was impossible to construct. That led the ILO to develop alternative constructs, including ‘employment in the informal sector’. However, it proved difficult for the agency to operationalize those, too, and it soon found itself losing control of the policy implications of the measures that it was producing.

中文翻译：

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非正规性的起源：处于失业概念极限的国际劳工组织

官方历史表明，国际劳工组织（ILO）采用“非正规部门”一词来替代“传统部门”，后者与“现代部门”相结合，已经失宠。本文认为，采用非正规部门概念更好地理解为产生于不同的背景：国际劳工组织在战后努力产生一个全球可操作的失业概念，以供“发展中世界”使用。国际劳工组织官员在 1960 年代后期放弃了这个项目，因为他们意识到，在为工资工作并不构成普遍的社会规范的情况下，他们所谓的“变相失业”的准确衡量标准是不可能建立的。这导致国际劳工组织开发替代结构，包括“在非正规部门就业”。然而，