Rogers Orock | Independent Researcher (original) (raw)

Papers by Rogers Orock

Africa, 2022

Achille Mbembe's groundbreaking essay 'Provisional notes on the postcolony' (1992a) (hereafter 'P... more Achille Mbembe's groundbreaking essay 'Provisional notes on the postcolony' (1992a) (hereafter 'Provisional notes') 1 is the most cited article published by the journal Africa. Three decades later, the article continues to influence the ways in which scholars account for the contradictions of socioeconomic and political formations not only in Africa but in other postcolonial societies. In this part issue, we reconsider some of the vistas opened up by the essay in the analysis of different socio-political formations in Central, Southern and West Africa. Rarely does a single essay attain such significant influence as to immediately command the attention and critical response of colleagues and peers, enough to redirect debates and scholarship in a discipline or subfield. And yet, this is what Achille Mbembe achieved with his article. Remarkably, according to the entry in the contributors' biographies in that issue of the journal, this was one of Mbembe's earliest scholarly publications in English. Mbembe had already published very important books and essays on Cameroon's history in leading French outlets, between the mid-1980s and 1991 (see Mbembe 1985a; 1985b; 1988; 1996). Furthermore, he had also been working for a few years as an academic at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania in the USA after his doctorate in history from the leading French university, the Sorbonne, in 1988. Yet, it was primarily 'Provisional notes' 2 that first introduced Mbembe to the

AFRICA: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2022

Achille Mbembe’s ground-breaking essay ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (Reference Mbembe199... more Achille Mbembe’s ground-breaking essay ‘Provisional notes on the postcolony’ (Reference Mbembe1992a) (hereafter ‘Provisional notes’)Footnote 1 is the most cited article published by the journal Africa. Three decades later, the article continues to influence the ways in which scholars account for the contradictions of socio-economic and political formations not only in Africa but in other postcolonial societies. In this part issue, we reconsider some of the vistas opened up by the essay in the analysis of different socio-political formations in Central, Southern and West Africa.

Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2022

This essay is part of responses on the occassion of the 25th annivesary of Achille Mbembe's 1992 ... more This essay is part of responses on the occassion of the 25th annivesary of Achille Mbembe's 1992 essay "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony." Here, I draw on Chinua Achebe’s fiction of the postcolony in two novels, No Longer At Ease and A Man of the People, to discuss the value of the African literary archive for an anthropological interest in elites and postcolonial decay. This African literary archive has contributed enormously to Mbembe’s critique of the postcolony. I argue that, in contrast to anthropologists of the late colonial and early postcolonial moment, African writers like Achebe mobilised fiction as a powerful form of critique to address early signs of postcolonial despair and disillusionment in Africa.

Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2020

Recently Cameroonians have invented a new word to characterize the state of their country: anusoc... more Recently Cameroonians have invented a new word to characterize the state of their country: anusocracy (litt. the rule of the anus). It is a new step in the moral panic, roughly since 2000) over a supposed proliferation ofhomosexuality in the country. Anusocracy notably links such same-sex practices to the illicit enrichment by the national elites. As elsewhere on the continent, the angry articulations of moral concerns over same-sex practicesoften denounce them as colonial and post-colonial impositions.However, the explosion of popular accusations against elites in Cameroon as “homosexuals” (also in Gabon and other neighbouring countries) is also an interrogation of elite enrichment as morally dubious. Elite enrichment is contested as resultingfrom bodily practices of witchcraft, which are directly linked to homosexuality and membership of esoteric organizations like Freemasonry and the Rosicrucian Order. Such enrichment is seen as part of an ‘occult economy’and its hidden processes of circulation and distribution. However, for Cameroon, it is clear that the association of same-sex and enrichment has a much longer history. It has center space in the classic monograph of the first ethnographer of Cameroon, Günther Tessman, who studied this association among the Fang, already at the beginning of the last century. Our confrontation of recent rumors and elements from older ethnographies shows that the recent panic in Cameroon – but also in Gabon and elsewhere - about Freemasons and other secret cults imposing ‘homosexual’ initiations on ambitious youngsters is grafted onto older imaginations about same-sex and riches - traces of which can be found all over the continent. Confronting queer theory with these African ‘realities’ provides unexpected insights on both sides.

Résumé
Les Camerounais ont récemment lancé un nouveau terme pour caractériser l’état du pays : ‘anusocratie’ (‘le gouvernement de l'anus’). L'idée jouait un rôle central dans la panique morale depuis 2000 à cause d'une prolifération supposée de l'homosexualité. ‘Anusocratie’ relie des pratiques même-sexe à l'enrichissement illicite par l’élite nationale et son implication profonde dans des associations secrètes de provenance du Nord, comme la Franc-maçonnerie, le Rosicrucianisme et les Illuminati. Notre article essaie de dénouer le nœud dans l’épistémologie populaire de l'homosexualité, l'occulte (Franc-maçonnerie) et l'enrichissement illicite. D'abord en le historicisant. Un intérêt spécial du cas camerounais est qu'un lien similaire figure dans une des premières ethnographies, Die Pangwe par Günther Tessmann. La Franc-maçonnerie a été sans doute une imposition coloniale sur le pays, mais le lien entre homosexualité et enrichissement a une histoire plus longue dans la région. Deuxièmement, une comparaison avec des idées similaires ailleurs dans le continent peut aussi ouvrir des perspectives plus larges. Le lien avec enrichissement illicite ne figure pas dans les conceptions classiques de l'homosexualité comme elles ont été développées en Europe au 19ème siècle, mais il émerge clairement des exemples de partout en Afrique. Achille Mbembe et Joseph Tonda ont montré tous les deux que cet image de l'anus – et de la pénétration anale – exprime des préoccupations populaires sur des inégalités inédites et croissantes. Pourtant cet aspect est ignoré dans les débats courants sur l'intensification récente de l'homophobie sur le continent. Une confrontation avec des textes classiques des queer studies occidentaux (Mieli, Bersani) peut servir à déceler d'autres tendances dans des discours africains. Cette confrontation peut servir aussi à relativiser l’équation des pratiques sexuelles aux identités sexuelles qui paraît toujours aller de soi dans maints énoncés des queer studies de provenance occidentale.

African Affairs, 2021

It has become important in the academic literature to address why the explosive moral panics (deb... more It has become important in the academic literature to address why the explosive moral panics (debates and struggles) over homosexuality have emerged in Africa only recently as well as the meanings attributed to the term. This article focuses on the figure of Dr. Louis Paul Aujoulat, a French colonial official in Cameroon. It examines his role in the new rumours on homosexuality and Freemasonry that affect contemporary debates and struggles over the meanings of (de)colonization in Cameroon since the 2000s. The article underlines the particular configuration of factors- historical as well as current- that give such a mobilizing force to accusations of homosexuality in Cameroon. Here, accusations of homosexuality express popular dissatisfaction with the national elite and its practices of illicit enrichment. By denouncing the involvement of elite persons in secret societies of western provenance (Freemasonry, Rosicrucians, Illuminati) and therefore in same-sex practices, the article discusses how elites are criticised for their amoral behavior but also as colonial stooges. Rumours on Dr. Aujoulat, we argue, define him as a key figure in linking Freemasonry and homosexuality to present-day issues of state governance, citizenship, and elite corruption in Cameroon. Ultimately, this critique of Aujoulat is also a denunciation of French decolonization in Cameroon as unfinished and dissimulated in the neocolonial opacity of Francafrique. Under such circumstances, Freemasonry and homosexuality (including the attendant undercurrent of homophobia) designate much larger questions and anxieties about postcolonial sovereignty than solely questions of sexuality and sexual citizenship. Such a careful historical analysis of recent moral panics about homosexuality in the Cameroonian case is instructive for the broader debates on the continent more generally regarding the empirical and analytical uses of the term.

Journal of Modern African Studies, 2019

Cameroon's autocrat, Paul Biya, declared war on Boko Haram in 2014. Using a variety of ethnograph... more Cameroon's autocrat, Paul Biya, declared war on Boko Haram in 2014. Using a variety of ethnographic materials, this article examines the politics of rumours and conspiracy theories that have defined the popular response to this war in Cameroon. It underlines the mobilising force of these rumours on intra-elite struggles within the national context as well as on international relations, particularly on French–Cameroon relations. I argue that rumour-mongering is a central mode of production of suspicion in times of war and social crisis. Yet, the current rumours in the wake of the war against Boko Haram in Cameroon are inscribed within a historical framework of a state-directed politics of paranoia that seeks to define ‘enemies of destabilisation’. In the end, this politics of suspicion also works to bring otherwise disaffected Cameroonians to support the autocratic Paul Biya as a victim of foreign plots for regime change in Cameroon.

Anthropological Quarterly, Jun 15, 2015

This article discusses the connections between elites, development, and issues of moral agency in... more This article discusses the connections between elites, development, and issues of moral agency in contemporary Cameroon. It argues that, in Cameroon, development is not only a means by which elites are socially created but, more importantly, that it is increasingly the means by which elites are held accountable by their local village or ethnic and regional communities. Integrating detailed observations of an elite figure and popular debates on elites in Cameroon, the article discusses the centrality of development as an idiom through which social inequality between elites and non-elites is internalized, negotiated and legitimated. The article underlines how the expectations that elites should “do development” are critical to the mutual engagements between elites and their local communities, mainly through local development associations in which elites and would-be elites are expected to assume leading roles. By suggesting that development is central to the cultural practice of elite power in Cameroon, the article points to interesting connections between development and age-old idioms of patrimonial politics such as kinship, ethnicity, and patronage as forms of redistribution in which elites are highly implicated. [Keywords: Belonging, development, elites, inequality, morality, local development associations, Cameroon]

Social Dynamics: a Journal of African Studies, 2014

Violent crime poses important challenges for quotidian concerns over security and safety by ordin... more Violent crime poses important challenges for quotidian concerns over security and safety by ordinary citizens in several Africa states. This is especially so in contexts where state security agents are perceived as highly corrupt and/or where African states seem unable to “protect” their citizens from violent crime. The widespread sense of anxiety over various forms of violent crime and state failure to guarantee protection for citizens generates a quest for alternative practices of safety-making that, in turn, evoke serious concerns over state power and sovereignty in Africa. Focusing on mob justice in Cameroon, this article argues that the political contextualisation of sovereignty must pay attention not only to the sovereign’s right to kill and let live, but also its responsibility to guarantee safety for those citizens it chooses to let live. The paper demonstrates that in Cameroon mob justice is an insurgent mode of social control or securitisation as well as a contextual expression of contested sovereignty directed at the state’s unwillingness or incapacity to contain dangerous forms of violent crime.

Keywords: Cameroon; crime; mob justice; security; sovereignty

Critique of Anthropology, Jun 11, 2014

"Since the importation of liberal democracy by African postcolonial states in the 1990s mainstrea... more "Since the importation of liberal democracy by African postcolonial states in the 1990s mainstream political science scholarship has mainly represented the outcome as a pathologically ethnicized disfiguration of a universal model of politics upon which many had invested much hope for political empowerment and accountability. This article draws from a recent anthropological theoretical position on democracy as a work of cultural construction as well as on ethnographic material on an ethno-regional elite organization in Southwestern Cameroon called SWELA to provide an alternative reading of the ethnicity-elite-democracy nexus in postcolonial Africa.
I suggest that while ethnicity is a major idiom through which the politics of democracy is practiced in Africa where most states are very patrimonially organized, this need not be seen as unproductive to the democratic ideals or expectations of effective political participation, deliberation (voice), and political accountability. Taking the case of Cameroon, I argue that in complete reversal of the situation under the one-party state, the historical shift from the one-party state to multiparty politics in 1990 has been dovetailed by the venarcularization of democracy in Cameroon along a cultural politics of ethnic identities . These two have provided political spaces to the elite that were previously in-existent.
I explore how South-West political elites successfully articulate personalized and collective interests on the state through various ethno-regional modes of political action that range from lobbying to threatening memoranda to the regime. These successful strategies by South-West elites indicate how ethnic and patrimonial politics by political elites can link up to democratic expectations in quite surprising ways, suggesting the need for a more cautious interpretation of democracy as a culturally enfolded and enfolding formation subject to local political conditions.
"

Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, May 1, 2014

This article draws on a political ethnography on the hosting of state ceremonies to engage with e... more This article draws on a political ethnography on the hosting of state ceremonies to engage with erstwhile theoretical accounts of African politics as highly patrimonial and built on a social complicity between African rulers and their citizens. The article examines the patrimonial relationship between Cameroon’s Head of State, Paul Biya, and political elites of local ethno-regional communities who support the president within the framework of the Cameroon’s People Democratic Movement (CPDM) in Anglophone Cameroon. It approaches such elite politics of hosting as part of the vast cultural repertoire of patrimonial domination that emphasizes a spectacularization of proximity and intimacy between the Head of State and his coterie of supporting elites who seek development resources for their local regional communities in exchange for their political support. Accountingfor hosting as a practice of patrimonial elite politics, the article demonstrates the complex logics and pragmatics of ethnic and regional competition as well as the deployment of symbolic idioms of hierarchical relations, mutuality, and interdependence in the cultural performance and legitimation Biya’s patrimonial domination of Cameroon.

Cultural Dynamics, Nov 7, 2013

This article explores the social and political connections between youths and political elites fr... more This article explores the social and political connections between youths and political elites from Manyu Division in South-Western Cameroon. Unlike several recent studies on youths in Africa, it focuses on educated youths from Manyu, exploring their strategies to secure greater political inclusion and better chances for upward social mobility. With a critical attention to their discourses and practices, the article examines the disjuncture between the promise of Cameroon’s patrimonial state as an inclusive structure of political action and the sense of exclusion, anxiety, and uncertainty felt by many actors. It argues that this tension generates relations of mutuality and interdependence between elite and nonelite actors. Yet, the article finds that while the logics of political intimacy between Manyu students and their political elites in Cameroon are mediated by kinship, ethnicity, and patronage, these do not always guarantee inclusion and success in social mobility for the youthful actors. For these youths, they felt their exclusion to be more a result of the obstructive character of middle-aged elites who were reticent to acknowledge the values of kinship, ethnicity, and patronage as valid basis for granting opportunities to their younger kinsmen.

Dialectical Anthropology, 2013

In the wake of transformations being ushered by globalization, figures suggest that there is a ri... more In the wake of transformations being ushered by globalization, figures suggest that there is a rise in the power of transnational corporations (TNCs), raising important questions about the exercise of such power and/or how to hold them accountable for it. Concomitantly, corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse has emerged as a new discursive formation; a new meta-narrative that is propagated by TNCs. It seeks to portray the actions of TNCs as oriented by such values as ‘‘responsibility,’’ ‘‘sustainability,’’ ‘‘development.’’ Situated within what is emerging as ‘‘an anthropological imperative to critique’’ the actions of corporations, this article takes a critical approach to such a meta-narrative. It argues that not only do TNCs behave irresponsibly in contexts outside the Global North where they can easily get away with doing so, but also that the CSR discourse of responsibility helps to occlude these often damaging actions by TNCs. Drawing from an overview of the often untold or less-known stories of damaging actions by TNCs in Africa in the recent past, this article illustrates the disturbing co-existence of socially irresponsible actions amidst a forceful tendency to circulate a feel-good CSR discourse of responsibility.

Conference Presentations by Rogers Orock

African Studies Association (United Kingdom) Conference, University of Birmingham. September 10-13, 2018

How can the African novel work as an ethnographic interlocutor, even an informant in the anthropo... more How can the African novel work as an ethnographic interlocutor, even an informant in the anthropological study of postcolonial politics in Africa?
In other words, is there a role for the African literary imagination in our renewed efforts to decolonize anthropology today? This essay was written in 2018 as a response on the occasion of the twenty-fifth annivessary of Achille Mbembe’s 1992 essay, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’, the most cited article ever published by AFRICA: Journal of the International Africa Institute. Grounded in discussions about the value of the literary archive for understanding African politics, I examine elites and corruption in what I call, following Mbembe, the early postcolony in Africa. As a young social anthropologist studying and working from Africa, my intellectual project so far has focused on “studying-up” (Nader), to examine how African elites negotiate the complex social and political relations that define their lives of power. Mbembe’s ideas on the postcolony have stimulated my own work on elites in Cameroon. In this essay, I am particularly interested in the early African postcolony from the vantage points of two archives: anthropological accounts through conventional ethnographic stories and literary accounts through African fiction of the period. Parsing these two archives, I suggest, offers interesting possibilities for considering how the literary ethnographic account enriches and even supplants ethnographic studies by anthropologists of that early postcolony. Drawing upon the novels of Chinua Achebe I argue that African fiction, in its ethnographic imagination and anthropological complexity, prefigures a theory of power in the postcolony as we have come to know it since Mbembe's ideas on On the Postcolony. This fictional representation of the early postcolony contrasts sharply with anthropological interests and representations of Africa that sidestepped corruption and abuse as critical issues in the social and political developments of that moment.

Books by Rogers Orock

Conspiracy Narratives from Postcolonial Africa: Freemasonry, Homosexuality, and Illicit Enrichment, 2024

Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult. In this bo... more Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult.

In this book, anthropologists Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere examine the moral panic over a perceived rise in homosexuality that engulfed Cameroon and Gabon beginning in the early twenty-first century. As they uncover the origins of the conspiratorial narratives that fed this obsession, they argue that the public’s fears were grounded in historically situated assumptions about the entanglement of same-sex practices, Freemasonry, and illicit enrichment.

This specific panic in postcolonial Central Africa fixated on high-ranking Masonic figures thought to lure younger men into sex in exchange for professional advancement. The authors’ thorough account shows how attacks on elites as homosexual predators corrupting the nation became a powerful outlet for mounting populist anger against the excesses and corruption of the national regimes. Unraveling these tensions, Orock and Geschiere present a genealogy of Freemasonry, taking readers from London through Paris to Francophone Africa and revealing along the way how the colonial past was articulated with local assumptions linking same-sex practices to enrichment.

AFRICA: The Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2022

Achille Mbembe’s ground breaking essay, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’ (1992), which profo... more Achille Mbembe’s ground breaking essay, ‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony’ (1992), which profoundly challenged extant approaches to the analysis of power and subjectivity in Africa, is the most cited article published by AFRICA: The Journal of the International African Institute in its 90 years of existence. Almost three decades after, the article—which later formed the basis of the book, On the Postcolony (2001)—continues to influence the ways in which scholars account for the contradictions of socio-economic and political formations not only in Africa but in other postcolonial societies. The article introduced the idea and concept of postcolony to the literature. Along with the subsequent book, it also established the postcolony as a heuristic device for understanding and analysing ‘a given historical trajectory’ defined essentially by the ‘banality of power’ which manifests (im)materially in contrapuntal chaos and coherence in the intertwined temporal and spatial continuum of state and society. In this special section, we reconsider some of the vistas opened up by the essay in the analysis of different socio-political formations in Central, Southern and West Africa.

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters , 2022

This chapter is about everyday encounters with the state in Cameroon. Specifically, it discusses ... more This chapter is about everyday encounters with the state in Cameroon. Specifically, it discusses my encounters with the state security actors at checkpoints in a context of war: the civil war in the two Anglophone provinces (the North West and South West Regions). Focusing on my experiences of military checkpoints and identification documents such as the national identity cards (hereafter ID cards) as crucial material objects that mediate everyday life in these settings, I recount and discuss my encounters with this Cameroonian state during my recent travels there in 2018 and 2019. What I describe are snapshots from my travels (especially my experiences in May 2018) in parts of the two English-speaking provinces. Since 2017, these two regions have been plunged into a deadly civil war, over separatist claims by a marginalized and resentful Anglophone minority whose youthful militants seek to establish a new Anglophone ‘Federal Republic of Ambazonia’ apart from the Francophone-dominated country of Cameroon.1 My experiences are embedded in this context of violence and predation . This chapter contributes to the literature on mobility, political violence, and the state in Africa. Since at least the 1980s, a vigorous and enriched literature has developed (especially in anthropology) on the state. Several studies in this register examine the state in its bureaucratic and colonial3 as well as postcolonial4 and aesthetic forms. In recent years, a focus on mobility as well as on roads and government identification documents like identity cards and passports, have been important to the discussions on the materiality of the state, sovereignty, and biopower. I situate my chapter within this line of anthropological discussion on roads, government ID documents, and mobility. In my analysis of the situation in Cameroon, I focus primarily on my own encounters with and experiences at checkpoints established by the security forces of the Cameroonian government within the Anglophone war zone. I examine the dynamics of what I describe generically as a garrison state mentality that defines the everyday state in Cameroon.

Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa, 2021

Edited with Wale Adebanwi, this book draws together contributions from an interdisciplinary grou... more Edited with Wale Adebanwi, this book draws together contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Africa, Europe, and the US. Though usually presented as a technical concept (like development), accountability is field of struggle for political interpretation in contemporary Africa. The chapters in this volume offer ethnographically rich and stimulating analyses on the dynamics of elite mobilization of accountability in its many forms.

With case studies from Cameroon, Ghana/Togo, Liberia, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and South Sudan, the chapters examine in various ways the socioculutal and legal modalities by which accountability is contextualised as a political fact in Africa.

The book is available for order electronically via the University of Michigan Press website (https://lnkd.in/dKHUdjK) as well as on Amazon and many other platforms.

Conspicuous Consumption in Africa, eds. Doborah Posel and Ilana van Wyk (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 133-149), 2019

In themselves, funerals in Cameroon are typically and conspicuously ‘wasteful’ a la Veblen in the... more In themselves, funerals in Cameroon are typically and conspicuously ‘wasteful’ a la Veblen in their spending on food, drinks, and other related items in an ‘orgiastic’ manner. But in this chapter, I am not only interested in the funeral event per se. Rather, I also take the case of big man's (Patrick) funeral as a starting point towards an exploration of the intimate and domestic lives of ‘big men’ as another, less discussed, register of conspicuous consumption. Certainly, there has been a welcome return of scholarly interest in African elites since the 1990s. But within this scholarship, there is hardly any discussion of their domestic and sexual lives (see Jua 2005 for a rare exception). This potentially obscures old and new figurations of domesticity in Africa that need to be foregrounded and critically engaged with in these times of heightened inequalities and status anxieties.

Africa, 2022

AFRICA: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2022

Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2022

Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2020

African Affairs, 2021

Journal of Modern African Studies, 2019

Anthropological Quarterly, Jun 15, 2015

Social Dynamics: a Journal of African Studies, 2014

Keywords: Cameroon; crime; mob justice; security; sovereignty

Critique of Anthropology, Jun 11, 2014

Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, May 1, 2014

Cultural Dynamics, Nov 7, 2013

Dialectical Anthropology, 2013

African Studies Association (United Kingdom) Conference, University of Birmingham. September 10-13, 2018

Conspiracy Narratives from Postcolonial Africa: Freemasonry, Homosexuality, and Illicit Enrichment, 2024

Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult. In this bo... more Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult.

AFRICA: The Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2022

Everyday State and Democracy in Africa: Ethnographic Encounters , 2022

Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa, 2021

The book is available for order electronically via the University of Michigan Press website (https://lnkd.in/dKHUdjK) as well as on Amazon and many other platforms.

Conspicuous Consumption in Africa, eds. Doborah Posel and Ilana van Wyk (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 133-149), 2019

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2022

Doing Business in Cameroon offers a rich tapestry of descriptions and analysis of what Muñoz call... more Doing Business in Cameroon offers a rich tapestry of descriptions and analysis of what Muñoz calls ‘organisational emergence’ (p. 1) in a country plagued by the complexities of colonially inherited legal codes, economic and institutional crises, as well as a series of ‘dispersed’ attempts at reforms. As Muñoz puts it pithily in his conclusion, ‘The advent of the economic crisis features prominently in the narratives of officials and businesspeople’ (p. 197). The result is a state of ambiguity, where administrative discretion plays an important role in regulation. Actors (businesspeople and officials) negotiate a variety of opportunities and challenges that have emerged in the wake of reform initiatives intended to address the variety of economic and institutional crises, whether these be ‘major overhauls’ in policy or ‘the incessant stream of small modifications to laws and administration’ (p. 198).