Post-socialist Informalities

Power, Agency and the Construction of Extra-legalities from Bosnia to China

Abel Polese, Lela Rekhviashvili, Borbála Kovács, Jeremy Morris

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351585187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book is a comprehensive collection of key scholarship on informality from the whole post-socialist region. From Bosnia to Central Asia, passing through Russia and Azerbaijan, the contributions to this volume illustrate the multi-faceted and complex nature of informality, while demonstrating the growing scholarly and policy debates that have developed around the understanding of informality.

In contrast to approaches which tend to classify informality as 'bad' or 'transitional' – meaning that modernity will make it disappear – this edited volume concentrates on dynamics and mechanisms to understand and explain informality, while also debating its relationship with the market and society.

The authors seek to explain informality beyond a mere monetaristic/economistic approach, rediscovering its interconnection with social phenomena to propose a more holistic interpretation of the meaning of informality and its influence in various spheres of life.

They do this by exploring the evolving role of informal practices in the post-socialist region, and by focusing on informality as a social organisation determinant but also looking at the way it reshapes emergent social resistance against symbolic and real political order(s).

This book was originally published as two special issues, of Caucasus Survey and the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.

“States” of informality in post-socialist Europe (and beyond)

Abel Polese, Jeremy Morris and Borbala Kovács

ABSTRACT

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.

Since the early 2000s, the number of articles with “informality” in the title has grown from a few thousand each year to consistently more than 15,000 (according to Google Scholar). Interestingly, if we add in the search term “postsocialism,” we observe a smooth upward curve in the number of articles returning these words in their titles from the low tens in 2000 to approximately ten times that number in the last year (271 in 2015–2016 – to be precise). Clearly, a parallel process is occurring. Social scientists are finding the term informality, with all its inbuilt imprecision, more interesting and useful over time, but so too are those scholars focusing on changes in post-communist, or post-socialist societies.

But this growth over more than a decade should make us cautious about complaining too much at the imprecision of both terms. Clearly, such a correlation (which implies no causation) – implies at least some synergy in looking at on the one hand non-formal associations and networks, in-group social trust, corruption and on the other at the post-communist spaces as a totality of some kind. Informality then is more than a passing buzzword, even if the theoretical problems with it are similar to those with the term “social capital” – much criticized because of the lack of empirical work in social sciences underpinning the numerous theoretical versions of it.

And that is where the idea for this special issue comes in, given the exponential growth in informality literature. Just as with “social trust,” not only are more empirical groundings of the nebulous “informality” needed, we felt it was also time to go beyond empirical reflections and to inject more theoretical rigour in the scholarship on informality, at the very least in terms of the region. It was only at the last EASA conference in Prague (August 2015) that we could sit down and put some ideas on paper for this special issue, which has the humble aim of at least starting to build an understanding of the “state” of informality debate in post-socialist Europe and beyond.

Having been working on informality for some years, we have been fortunate to cross paths with some outstanding people studying informality who have agreed to work with us on this special issue. As a result, we have been lucky enough to feature some of the most promising (along with some prominent) scholars on informality. In no way, however, can we claim to have the only or the best ones. Some scholars to whom we owe a lot intellectually are absent from this list and our hope is that we can work with them in the near future. It is to all of them, present and absent scholars, that this special issue is devoted. We have an immense debt to our authors, who have been able to meet deadlines, and have patiently reworked to their papers following our suggestions. But we have another no smaller debt to all those who are working, in a way or another, on informality, thus inspiring us and demonstrating that the direction we took some time ago was worth taking. We are also grateful to Andy Kilmister and the editorial board of JCCEE for supporting this idea, allowing us to get to the end of this process.

Why informality is important (not to us only)

We believed, and believe, that informality is still relatively understudied considering how influential a phenomenon it has become in accompanying relatively rapid social change and indicating the meaning of state-society relations. If we go beyond a merely economistic view of the phenomenon, one could argue that informality can explain a variety of things and the variety of cases where we have been able to apply an informality framework is perhaps very telling. From the study of corruption (Morris and Polese 2014, 2015a) to redefinitions of the welfare state (Polese, Morris, and Kovacs 2014), to a framework for the analysis of sharing economies (Kovacs et al., forthcoming): in all these cases our approach sees the informal as complementary to the broad framing of activities that are not “regulated, monitored or controlled directly or indirectly by the state.” (Routh 2011: 211)

Indeed, increasingly, our desire is to expand the extra-state or para-state framework to incorporate broader insights into what a state is “good” or “bad” at and what citizens do when they perceive the latter. There are always formal rules that regulate the political and economic life of any state, even failing ones. However, these rules cannot account for explaining cultural and sometimes social phenomena that economic logic cannot fully capture. The separation of economic and social realms is a point we owe to Gudeman (2001) and has informed most of the non-economic oriented literature on informality, in particular the cluster inspired by economic anthropology (Hann 2010; Hann and Hart 2009).

We have been also been inspired by the works of critical geographers from Gibson-Graham (1996) onwards. Starting from a feminist framework for the understanding of capitalism, and then neoliberalism, we see a spectrum of works moving from simply critically looking at the role of the state all the way to anarchic geographies (Springer 2012; White and Williams 2012) and emphasizing, in one way or another, the need for a more thorough-going critical reflection on the role of the state that does not assume it to be benign, a process that has also been joined by critical political economists (Bruff 2011).

A result of our commitment to a more theoretically holistic approach, this special issue brings together papers from a variety of disciplines and empirical groundings and is intended to seek a dialogue between scholars, a thing that rarely happens (and is also notable in the “social trust” literature, mentioned above). For one thing, Dixit’s work on lawlessness economics (2007) overlaps in many parts with work on informality but has not been sufficiently exploited in our target region. Another example of limited dialogue between disciplines is the dual use of informal governance. Given its regional focus, we are inclined to follow Ledeneva’s developments (which in turn point to a scholarly interface between area studies, sociology, cultural studies and political science), looking at how domestic governance structures are informed by informal practices, relations and how most of the negotiations are informal (1998, 2006). However, Stone’s framework (2013) suggesting that institutions and international organizations also work informally to discuss and make decisions on international matters is also an interesting evolution of the initially economistic concept of informality (Lewis 1954, 1959). Informality has also started permeating the work of urban geographers and planners (Kudva 2009; Roy 2005), informing reflections on a variety of areas of the world (Roy and AlSayyad 2004) as well as theoretical and epistemological reflections on the boundaries between formality and informality (McFarlane and Waibel 2012).

The post-socialist region has been a fertile ground for the study of informality. Indeed, the fact that we often hear of new colleagues who have “converted” to the study of informality, at least part-time, seems to confirm our guess. We are thinking of the Academic Swiss Caucasus Network conference in Fribourg 2013, featuring 120 papers with informality as a main theme (see also the volumes resulting from the conference: Giordano and Hayoz 2014; Morris and Polese 2015a, 2015b, Polese and Rekhviashvili, forthcoming). We are also thinking of the voluminous Encyclopaedia of Informality that Alena Ledeneva has recently sent to print and the growing number of PhD students that we come across at conferences, showing that there is a real interest in informality with a particular focus on former socialist spaces.

Background and rationale of the special issue

Back to the state; Creed’s book (1997) Domesticating Revolution serves as a useful starting point in recent scholarship focused on the significance for state socialism of the solidification/emergence of informal arrangements in “oiling” the machinery of creaky centralized systems, a point also made by economists of totalitarianism (Paldam and Svendsen 2000). This makes us think that the “state” relationship of formality and informality deserves further explication – particularly now, with the seeming “victory” of institutional transition belied by the continuing ubiquity of informal relations. Recent debates on informal practices and informal economies have suggested that they may be a direct consequence of excessive bureaucracy even within neoliberalism (the transitionalist or modernist view), or a response to state ineffectiveness (the structuralist view). In spite of a growing body of literature, informality has often been under-estimated and frequently seen as an unimportant – rather than a major – feature of the economic and social life of a polity.

Initially challenged by sociologists and anthropologists insisting on embeddedness (Granovetter 1984, Parry and Bloch 1989), the debate has widened in the past years, to include at least three approaches. One continues the debates in economic anthropology and sociology, seeing the market and the society as separate, but often complementary (Gudeman 2001); the second has developed from a critical perspective in human geography (Gibson-Graham 1996), gradually informing business, economics and management studies (Williams 2005, 2009, 2013; Williams and Martinez 2014). This “revival” of informality studies has prompted a turn away from a narrowly sociological perspective to engage with political economy issues (Dixit 2007) and political institutions and personalities (Helmke and Levitsky 2004; Isaacs 2015, Mollica 2014), showing that informality is also widely presented in “advanced” capitalist societies (Williams 2005; Marcelli, Williams, and Joassart 2010). Third, we have previously suggested that informality is, in fact, a globally enduring and resilient phenomenon, not transitory and only characteristic of modernizing/transitioning societies (Polese, Morris, and Kovacs 2014; Morris and Polese 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Smith and Stenning 2006). There have also been attempts at theorizing informality as an inseparable element not of modernization to market capitalism(s), but of multiple capitalism(s) (Gibson-Graham 1996).

What we can say now, and from the novel approaches and unturned stones discovered by our authors, is that informality in post-socialism has been widely researched but is still undertheorized, particularly with regard to state–citizen relations. One perspective concentrates on the incentives, or lack thereof, for citizens to act according to official rules– this body of work often falling into the trap of assuming certain values to be universal and equally applicable everywhere. A sub-stream of this approach has explored the modes in which post-socialism could transform and align with more advanced or “effective” states. The other perspective looks at practices and everyday ways of living post-socialist transformations and the acceptance, or renegotiation, of the neoliberal economic and social model locally. Informality is, from this perspective, considered as a way of creating survival strategies or, at most, domesticating neoliberalism through everyday practices (Stenning et al. 2010). These two perspectives have in common the emphasis on the mismatch between what the state claims to deliver and what it actually delivers.

The above debates have also informed policy recommendations and policy-making in the field of fighting informal and shadow economies, policies that have gradually become more pragmatic and directed towards formalization (Williams and Onoshchenko 2015a, 2015b). After the failures of zero-tolerance punitive approaches, a growing number of countries have concentrated on incentives to invite people out of the shadow. This shift is explained in part by a growing number of studies which point to informality as a phenomenon covering a wide range of (economic, social and political) practices, far from being relegated to sweatshops and small-scale, ad hoc economic transactions. Instead, it is a global phenomenon penetrating all aspects of public life. Informality is present everywhere, but in different forms and, whilst limited in some areas, cannot be liquidated as it is an integral part of state–citizen interactions and even state activity (Aliyev 2014; Polese 2015; Rekhviashvili 2015). As a result, there is no evidence that efforts to reduce atomization, the role of human agency and to increase social cohesion might lead to the desired results as far as “the fight against informality” is concerned.

To summarize: 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). Ironically, debates on other regions of the world are in a similar vein – (e.g. authoritarian development in South Asia). Recourse to post-socialist path dependency is not sufficient to explain the widespread, persistent and enduring role informality has been shown to play across these societies. The study of informality needs to build into itself a middle-field theory explaining its endurance which acknowledges both specificities of social action ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. “States” of informality in post-socialist Europe (and beyond)
• 2. Informality currencies: a tale of Misha, his brigada and informal practices among Uzbek labour migrants in Russia
• 3. End to informality? Examining the impact of institutional reforms on informal institutions in post-Euromaidan Ukraine
• 4. Informality as an interpretive filter: translating ubleha in local community development in Bosnia
• 5. Socio-economic deficits and informal domestic childcare services in Romania: the policy drivers of the commodification of care from a micro-level perspective
• 6. Counterbalancing marketization informally: Georgia’s new-institutionalist reform and its discontents
• 7. Regional security governance in the former Soviet space? Researching institutions, actors and practices
• 8. The art of not seeing like a state. On the ideology of “informality”
• 9. Accomplishing public secrecy: non-monetary informal practices and their concealment at the emergency department
• 10. Evaluating the multifarious motives for acquiring goods and services from the informal sector in Central and Eastern Europe
• 11. Introduction: Informality and power in the South Caucasus
• 12. Post-Soviet small businesses in Azerbaijan: the legacies of the Soviet second economy
• 13. Liberalism and shadow interventionism in post-revolutionary Georgia (2003–2012)
• 14. Informality as illegality in Georgia’s anti-mafia campaign
• 15. A critical assessment of informal practices as resistance: the case of birzha in Georgia
• 16. Trajectories of illegality and informality in conflict protraction: the Abkhaz-Georgian case
• Index