What is informality? (mapping) "the art of bypassing the state" in Eurasian spaces -and beyond (original) (raw)
Related papers
Informality ‘in spite of’ or ‘beyond’ the state
Framed in the growing body of research on informality, this article attempts to define a distinction between informality performed ‘in spite of’ and ‘beyond’ the state. ‘In spite of’ the state refers to the case where state institutions already regulate a given situation, but citizens decide that state governance is not enough (or not appropriate, effective). ‘Beyond’ the state refers to the case where state institutions do not regulate a particular exchange and interaction so that citizens organize in response to make up for this deficiency. We support our claims through the use of two case studies built on in-depth interview material with Romanian parents and Hungarian private citizens from diverse walks of life to bring to light how individuals may understand and narrate the informal practices they engage in a positive light. By doing this, we investigate the possible conflict between individual and state morality, documenting and conceptually refining how they do not necessarily overlap, informal activities being a locus through which mismatch between them can best be explored
Informal economy, informal state: The case of Uzbekistan
In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a ‘shadow’ economy. In the postsocialist context, the unregulated, often extra-legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of postsocialist ‘Mafias’, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept of the ‘informal economy’. This article argues that what we might think of as informal economic activity in Uzbekistan cannot be understood in relation to a formal economy, but is rather an expression of a more general informalisation of lifeworlds following the end of the Soviet Union. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union, the informal does not emerge from and exist in relation to formal political and economic structures. The state itself is experienced in personalised terms, as a ‘Mafia’, and the informal is all that there is. If the concept of the informal depends on the existence of the formal, how useful is the term informal economy in a context like Uzbekistan? Where the state no longer provides a formal structure in practice, this is sought in moral ideals of state and community.
Informality and Governance (in Ukraine)
What is the best way to enjoy financial security after retirement in a country with an ineffective pension system? Is there a moral justification for under-the-table payments to a doctor? Is there a clear boundary between a gift and a bribe? Based on the undesrstanding that informality is “the space between two formal rules” this book seeks alternative and critical explanations to phenomena and behaviours that are often too quickly classified as corruption, bad governance, and absence of the rule of law. From bottom-up construction of welfare and security to responses to the construction of social and cultural habits challenging a state, it draws from a number of examples where individual and state morality do not overlap. Informality, it is argued, is not always informed by a monetary or rent-seeking logic but can be regarded as a mechanism by which citizens provide feedback on governement policies. Consequently, this book maintains that a more nuanced understanding of informality may represent a major step towards better and more inclusive governance.
States' of Informality in Post-Socialist Europe (and beyond)
This article explores the main debates and works that underpin the theoretical conceptualization of this special issue and documents the exponential growth of literature on informality both globally and, especially, in post-socialist spaces. In spite of this growth, informality is still relatively understudied considering how widespread and significant a phenomenon it has become. In particular, if we go beyond a merely economistic view of the phenomenon, one could argue that an understanding of informality explains a variety of social responses and the number of cases where we have been able to apply an informality framework is perhaps very telling. Debates remain too bounded by one of two paradigms: either recourse to geographic particularism or exceptionalism or ongoing debates on transition or transformation (the appropriateness of ‘posting’ socialism). To break with this attitude, we suggest with this special issue that study of informality needs to build into itself a middle-field theory explaining its endurance which acknowledges both specificities of social action arising from common(ish) pasts and experience of change after 1989/91 leading to translatable presents, as well as these societies’ positioning as mediating sites of neocapitalism between the Global North and South, with such a theory being a key articulation of the multiple modernities thesis.
Negotiating state and society: the normative informal economies of Central Asia and the Caucasus
Central Asian Survey, 39(1): 1-10 , 2020
This special issue introduces new research on informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The research presented here was conducted in Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Beijing, Guangzhou, Yiwu and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. The following eight articles illustrate how informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus provided spaces for people across the region to negotiate state and society in the last three decades; the articles also suggest that informality should be seen as constitutive of a normative order for polities in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Informal markets and trade in Central Asia rest on three factors: the inability of the state to measure commercial transactions; markets and trade becoming places from which citizens built personalized networks that required individualized networking and oral agreements based on social relations, particularly trust; and markets being embedded within states in which clientelism frequently thrives.
Informality Wiki
http://www.in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=Informality\_in\_Ukraine\_and\_beyond:\_one\_name,\_different\_flavours...with\_a\_cheer\_for\_the\_Global\_Encyclopaedia\_of\_Informality I find it difficult to locate a precise moment in time when research on informality gained such a momentum. But I can at least recall my own starting point. When I got inspired by the Odessa-Chisinau ''elektrichka'' to write a paper for a workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle in 2005, I was advised to use "survival strategies" instead of "informality" in the title because few would understand the latter word. I remember how relieved I was, a couple of years later, to find Colin Williams devoting a great deal of his time and efforts to informality and to Ukraine. A few years after that things had radically changed. After a short break from academia, I was back in November 2013, parachuted into the largest event on informality in the post-socialist world I have ever seen. Thanks to a series of generous grants, my friend Nicolas Hayoz invited around 120 scholars working on informality in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asian regions to Fribourg. Informality seemed to have gone big and has since become a catchword decorating academic articles, books and special issues from a variety of regions. At the conference I was introduced to the idea of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (Ledeneva 2018) that was being developed at the time and that eventually brought scholars from the four corners of the world to the launch of its two volumes in London in March 2018. In spite of the autobiographic introduction to the term informality, I have no intention to deny the long history of debates developed around it well before this. If we take a mostly economistic view on informality, we could look at least back to post-WWI debates on economic development. Explorations of the informal sector, as the topic was called at that time, informed a variety of economic and economistic positions (Lewis 1955, 1959) eventually evolving into several other directions: from ultra-liberal views on corruption (Leiff 1964) to the work of anthropologists shifting attention from monetary to non-monetary transactions (Hart 1973), from the tangible and measurable to the symbolic and allegedly intangible.
Informality ‘in spite of’ or ‘beyond’ the state: some evidence from Hungary and Romania
Framed in the growing body of research on informality, this article attempts to define a distinction between informality performed ‘in spite of’ and ‘beyond’ the state. ‘In spite of’ the state refers to the case where state institutions already regulate a given situation, but citizens decide that state governance is not enough (or not appropriate, effective). ‘Beyond’ the state refers to the case where state institutions do not regulate a particular exchange and interaction so that citizens organize in response to make up for this deficiency. We support our claims through the use of two case studies built on in-depth interview material with Romanian parents and Hungarian private citizens from diverse walks of life to bring to light how individuals may understand and narrate the informal practices they engage in a positive light. By doing this, we investigate the possible conflict between individual and state morality, documenting and conceptually refining how they do not necessarily overlap, informal activities being a locus through which mismatch between them can best be explored. Free copies at: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/rw3iG9Jj3hRPdDwAqCGx/full