Studying informality: beyond disciplines and regions

The purpose of the first and in-person MARKETS meeting was to get to know each other and discuss our research in a rather relaxing and informal atmosphere. The meeting was held during the Eurasian Insights EISCAS Final Conference in Ghent in September in which MARKETS project had two panels on informality and fieldwork process. The conference environment facilitated our conversations on informal practices, governance, borders, and (post-)colonialism, while the sunny weather gave us the chance to explore the city and each other’s career paths. Not to mention Ghent “classic” mussels & chips places that allowed many of those conversations and discussions. I think it was a great chance for all of us to share our experiences and challenges in the early PhD research stage. So, here I take the opportunity to reflect on what has been discussed during the conference panels and in-between.

The starting point of many presentations on informality was that it is a concept that is hard to predefine before entering the field. It is a slippery concept that has been surrounded by the debates of how it can be defined, measured, or differentiated from other phenomena such as face-to-face communication and corruption. Informality can be defined as “ways of getting things done” (Ledeneva, 2018, p.1) or it can be viewed as a less purpose-oriented practice in terms of “mutual assistance and generalized reciprocity within the collective” (Caldwell, 2004, pp.29-30). It can be located within certain regions or political regimes and explained through the formal and informal dichotomy (e.g. Misztal, 2000). Informal practices can be also conceptualized as secondary, derivative, and suspicious in the studies of the “traditional sector” in developing countries (Steenberg, 2016), or in contrast, they can be viewed as supportive to the formal governance system like the Soviet one (Ledeneva & Barsukova, 2018). To complicate the picture even further, some practices and institutions are not necessarily conceptualized as “informal” at all but still have a common meaning. For instance, Science and Technology Studies (STS) traditionally pay a lot of attention to how science making is enabled by the range of unspoken and unregulated practices, social norms and hierarchies, and tacit knowledge. Sociology of labour and economic sociology also have a long-standing tradition to research informal labour, grey economies, or black markets. There are even endeavors of creating new theoretical hybrids like the “habitus of informality” (Bryceson & Ross, 2020). So, given the varieties of informality and its different shades, how do we bound this concept? How do we facilitate the dialogue between disciplines and regions?

Listening to my colleagues’ presentations at the conference, I noticed that informality is commonly localized and explored in the context of gaps between top-down initiatives and local practices. The exploration of these gaps can be a good starting point to discuss how we understand informality. For instance, drawing on the research presented, these gaps are found:

·      between the enforcement of international standards and their actual application (the case of the Europeanization mechanism in Georgia);

·      between the policy implementation and its re-negotiation at the local level (the case of street-level bureaucracy in Russia and Kazakhstan);

·      between new institutions promoted by the international donors and the strategies of adaptation of local farmers (the case water governance in Uzbekistan);

·      between entrepreneurship initiatives and dealing with government officials and bureaucracy (the case of female entrepreneurship in Kyrgyzstan)

·      in State-owned giant company whose wealth is built upon the informal employment of migrant workers (the case of informal brokerage in Latvia’s construction sector).

It seems that these gaps exist across regions and can be described through a different theoretical lens. However, what lies in common is that they are persistent meaning one can find them everywhere where the new practice, institution, or policy is implemented. It seems that any new enterprise and initiative become enabled by the range of informal practices that can take the form of resistance, accommodation, adaptation, etc. These informal practices are not necessarily damaging but can encourage solidarity among social actors. They can support the existing governance, but they can also challenge and potentially change it. They are not necessarily directed to achieving certain practical goals, but they can provide people participating in it with an alternative form of security and access to services. Informal practices can be chaotic at first glance, however, in practice, they are routinized practices with their own specific rules and behavioral repertoires. The task of each of our projects is to provide a nuanced perspective of informal practices embedded in different cultural, political, and economic contexts.

References

Barsukova, S., & Ledeneva, A. (2018). Concluding remarks to Volume 2: Are some countries more informal than others? The case of Russia. In The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality. Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity, 2. (UCL Press, pp. 487–492). UCL Press.

Bryceson, K. P.  and Ross A. (2020), "Habitus of informality in small scale society agrifood chains–Filling the knowledge gap using a socio-culturally focused value chain analysis tool", Journal of Asia and Pacific Economy, 25 (3), pp. 545–570

Caldwell, M. L. (2004). Not by bread alone: Social support in the new Russia. University of California Press.

Ledeneva, A. (2018). Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 1: Towards Understanding of Social and Cultural Complexity (UCL Press). UCL Press.

Misztal, B. A. (2000). Informality: Social theory and contemporary practice (Psychology Press). Psychology Press.

Steenberg, R. (2016). The art of not seeing like a state. On the ideology of “informality.” Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 24(3), 293–306.