During the London Olympic games, a team of British track cyclists won the gold medal, but only after a peculiar incident: Philip Hindes, one of the team members, crashed at the first bend, after which the race was restarted and the British team beat France in the final. Interestingly, Hindes was reported as saying, just after the race: âI just crashed, I did it on purpose to get a restart, just to have the fastest ride. I did it. So it was all planned, really.â Later on, he denied having said this, going along with British Cyclingâs immediate reaction that German-born Hindesâ statement was undoubtedly lost in translation. Even more interestingly, Isabelle Gautheron, the French teamâs technical director, did not formally complain about the British tactic: âYou have to make the most of the rules. You have to play with them in a competition and no one should complain about that.â She does not formally complain, but reluctantly concedes: âHindes prepared for that possibility and knew exactly what to do after his poor start. We donât share the same kind of mindset.â Another coach adds that âitâs part of the game, but you shouldnât tell others,â which suggests the difference between playing by the rules and cheating is, after all, more of a shaded zone than a precise line. In any case, the International Olympic Committee agreed with the International Cycling Union that âthe result is not in question.â1 It decided otherwise, however, in a very similar case where it charged four teams of badminton players with ânot trying hard enoughâ to win in an attempt to manipulate the final standings in the group stage â they themselves having already qualified.
These examples already reveal a good deal about the theme of this edited volume. The theme revolves around two distinct but related and interacting concepts: Making use of the game metaphor, we can first consider its explicit rules, publicly announced and referred to when players are accused of foul play. Different authors may have other words for them_ âformal rules,â (North 1990) ânormative rules,â (Bailey 1973) âlegitimately socially enforceable rules,â (Moore 1973) âofficial and social norms.â (Olivier de Sardan, this volume, Chapter 2)
Players can just play within the rules of the game, but their strategies usually also include, every now and then, playing with the rules themselves. Philip Hindes winning the gold medal is undoubtedly proof of both gamesmanship and of pragmatic cheating without being disqualified. Both elements suggest at least some dexterity. Bailey accordingly develops the concept of âpragmatic rules,â rules that tell you how to âbreak a normative rule without being penalized for it.â (Bailey 2001, p. 115) One finds pragmatic rules in sports and also in politics:
Pragmatic rules are part of the practical wisdom that politicians tap into when they want to avoid the shackles that normative rules put on them and cannot think of any straightforwardly strategic way to do so. The rules exist mostly as folk wisdom, an art to be acquired through hearsay and practice, and generally are not formalized as a science or systematically described in handbooks. Machiavelliâs The Prince is an exception.
(Bailey 2001, p. 119)
Defined in this way, Baileyâs pragmatic rules are a subset of actorsâ strategies (Crozier and Friedberg 1977) or heresthetics, the art of political strategy (Riker 1984). Pragmatic rules Ă la Bailey are ways to âplay aroundâ with the explicit rules of the game â or play with them. The concept of a pragmatic rule presupposes three things. First, a set of explicit rules of the game exists and is recognized as such. Second, no rules exist that cannot be played with; actors may have various motives to bend or twist the explicit rules. As already pointed out e.g. by Garfinkel, and demonstrated by him in sometimes hilarious experiments with games of chess (1963), all rules have an âet ceteraâ property, i.e. even the most specific rules do not cover all the problematic possibilities that could conceivably arise (Edgerton 1985) and that transform the clear line between dos and donâts into a grey zone. In this respect, Crozier and Friedberg (1977) talk about âzones of uncertainty.â Third, while the explicit rules by definition do not regulate all possible variations and loopholes, smart cheating practices are nevertheless regulated by other types of rules. They reveal that some implicit rules exist behind the explicit rules.
For this reason, Garfinkel argues they ultimately rest on another, and perhaps a deeper, kind of consensus than the one expressed by the explicit rules of the game. He talks about âconstitutiveâ rules, suggesting their basic importance, together with explicit rules, in reproducing social order (Garfinkel 1963). Edgerton himself proposes the concept of âimplicitâ rules, in order to emphasize that most constitutive rules are implicit in practice rather than explicit. Such implicit rules could be labelled âmeta-rules,â often also described as the âspiritâ of the norms. For Garfinkel or Edgerton, constitutive rules are consensual and imply shared meanings. We agree, but we also think that such implicit rules, consistent with the spirit of the norms, hardly exhaust the patterns of behavior we observe in practice. In our opinion, not all implicit rules are by definition constitutive, far from it. Many practices are not consensual; they often evoke pragmatic logics and routines that would question, contest or redefine those constitutive rules. Moreover, sometimes practices do not so much play with or around the rules of the game but play with or around (or against) their enforcement. Corruption is a case in point. If you are caught, you could be put on trial and sent to jail. Nevertheless, corruption is also regulated. Corrupt practices by definition defy constitutive rules but they follow implicit norms themselves (Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006).
In order to capture these subtleties and varieties, we have proposed the concept of âpractical normsâ (Olivier de Sardan 2001, 2005, 2010), to account for the numerous and diverse latent regulations which are embedded in civil servantsâ practices while not complying with official (explicit) norms: all these more or less deviant practices are neither idiosyncratic nor anarchic; instead they are relatively convergent and recurring. They are implicit or tacit, unspoken and not taught as such publicly. Baileyâs pragmatic rules are a sub-type of practical norms (playing with the rules), but practical norms may also deviate quite significantly from official rules and even transgress them radically in practice. Practical norms cover the large gap between explicit norms and practices.
Explicit norms and practical norms in African statehood
The discrepancy between official norms and effective practices has frequently been observed in the sea of literature on African states, regardless of whether the literature emanates from the field of political science, anthropology, sociology or administrative science, and regardless of the theoretical currents and scientific positions. Across the board, there is acknowledgement that the legislation and regulations, procedures, specifications and organizational structures, all of which have largely been patterned on Western models, are rarely adhered to, in letter or in spirit, by government officials or users alike. We call this the âproblem of the gap.â
In actual fact, the problem of the gap hardly indicates a new phenomenon; in fact, it might be as old as the social sciences themselves. Montesquieu, for instance, already distinguished between lois, religion, maniĂšres and moeurs, and claimed that the law is de facto enforced by mechanisms other than state sanctions. He consequently argued that the better government is the government that adopts a piecemeal approach to change that âconforms most to menâs inclinations.â (Montesquieu, cited in Richter 1998, p. 38) But in Africa, where the problem of the gap has a specific style or intensity, it has been much less studied than in northern countries, and it has not been the subject of much in-depth empirical analysis. It is precisely by studying it in greater detail that we may find it possible to distinguish some positive outcomes; these, we hope, might prove able to inspire public policy changes. Testifying to the reality of Montesquieuâs ideas, a recent research program concludes with similar advice: âthe âgrainâ of popular demand in contemporary Africa is not a desire for âtraditionalâ institutions, but rather for modern state structures that have been adapted to, or infused with, contemporary local values.â (Booth 2012, p. 86)
We argue that the concept of practical norms can facilitate this project, and help us to avoid the rage de vouloir conclure so often observed in development (Hirschman 1963, p. 238), so as not to waste time with further analysis and but to go straight into action instead. Indeed, two interpretations of the problem of the gap dominate in the development literature, both of them temptations to forego further analysis.
A first approach is to interpret the discrepancy as a sign of social disorder. The situation is then described in terms of âpoor governanceâ, or corruption, implicit reference being made to the allegedly Weberian model of statehood in the global North. The ultimate state of disorder is reached in states that are said to âfailâ or âcollapse,â leaving a âvacuum of authorityâ (Rotberg 2003) that would correspond with the proverbial homo homini lupus situation of simple normlessness. Accordingly, the African state needs to take the Westphalian state as its reference point.
A second, more academic, approach rather tries to argue that the social disorder apparent in the discrepancy in fact reflects an incommensurability between the logic of a Weberian bureaucracy and a longue durĂ©e logic specific to African cultures, circumscribed by concise expressions varying from sui generis descriptions like âpolitics of the belly,â âimported stateâ or âeconomy of affection,â to more neutral concepts like âclientelism,â âinformalityâ and âneo-patrimonialism.â2 This approach will be scrutinized further below (Olivier de Sardan, this volume, Chapter 2). The general policy conclusion is to find ways to go with the grain of this logic in planning institutional change (Booth 2009).
These two perspectives concur in their claim that many social problems in Africa are rooted in governance issues, which is a point we agree with, but they explain them either by the lack of norms or by the presence of cultural norms incompatible with a modern state administration. We think that both arguments are either wrong or very partial and not generalizable. It is important to take a more detached look at the discrepancy between public norms and effective practices and investigate the gap between them empirically first. We concur with the second view in that, perhaps, the discrepancy does not signal a lack of norms, but rather an excess of them. On the other hand, the diagnosis of a longue durĂ©e logic specific to African cultures cannot pay due attention to the observed heterogeneity in real governance and its modernity (Olivier de Sardan, this volume, Chapter 3). The landscape of African governance is plural and multiform_ It is composed of multiple dimensions, some of them convergent and others contradictory; it is also the product of local, sectorial and individual micro-dynamics and innovations, some of them palliative answers to institutional failure or to ânormative double-bindsâ (Blundo, this volume, Chapter 6); and finally, on every front it faces a pluralism of forms of action. All this amounts to a permanent re-assembling of the social order out of a variety of already existing logics and practices.
The approach we promote here connects to a more general post-cold-war...
