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==Complexity and pattern recognition== | ==Complexity and pattern recognition== | ||
What are the implications of tackling complexity? Does articulating matters that are elusive (runaway scheming), substantively ambivalent (neither nor, or both), hidden (workings behind the facades of formal institutions), non-measurable, constitute paradoxes (legal corruption or legitimate crime, Sorites paradoxes), grey areas (neither legal, nor illegal) or blurred borderlines (both subversive and supportive, being both a problem and a solution, vague and necessarily unknowable) make a difference? Will articulation change the way things work? How does pattern recognition of complex datasets work? What are the key patterns you have identified in the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality? | What are the implications of tackling complexity? Does articulating matters that are elusive (runaway scheming), substantively ambivalent (neither nor, or both), hidden (workings behind the facades of formal institutions), non-measurable, constitute paradoxes (legal corruption or legitimate crime, Sorites paradoxes), grey areas (neither legal, nor illegal) or blurred borderlines (both subversive and supportive, being both a problem and a solution, vague and necessarily unknowable) make a difference? Will articulation change the way things work? How does pattern recognition of complex datasets work? What are the key patterns you have identified in the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality? | ||
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'''Brainstorming session from the Brainstorming Workshop, 22 March 2018, UCL, London''' | |||
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In the session: | |||
*'''Prof Saadi Lahlou, Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, LSE''' | |||
*Irina Davydova, independent researcher | |||
*Dr Scott Newton, Reader, School of Law, SOAS, University of London | |||
*Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Senior Lecturer, School of European Languages, Culture and Society, UCL | |||
*Dr Peter Zusi, Lecturer and Director of the FRINGE Centre, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL | |||
“Informal practices may escape articulation in official discourse, but they capture the ‘know- how’ of what works in their vernacular representations” (Ledeneva, 2018: 1). The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality is amazingly rich and diverse; it spells out, for the first time in academia, the unwritten rules, “ways of getting things done” from five continents and 66 countries. | |||
In this unprecedented endeavour, do patterns emerge out of the complexity of this diversity of human practices? Well, no and yes. Our group’s ambiguous response reflects the ambiguity inherent in informality (and it is consistent with what the Encyclopaedia’s authors write themselves). No, if we want to formally classify the diversity of situated practices per se; but yes, because that complexity can appear simple if we start from the other end, the formally stipulated rules. | |||
Should ontological aspects of informality be distinguished from epistemological aspects? Scientists’ formal models and observed patterns always simplify phenomena. Moreover, formalization can be an attempt by society to simplify life; an attempt to introduce rule systems that manage the complexity of human life-in-the-world. Formalisation can be an attempt to control and regulate life in society. That is, societies provide simple if/then rules, sets of predicates that prescribe what one is supposed to do in a given situation. As a result, all of us, as natives of a given society, even as children, become lawyers, that is, in Scott Newton’s expression, “expert manipulators of rule systems and exploiters of ambiguity”. | |||
These if/then are, to take Hodgson’s definition of institutions “systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions” (Hodgson, 2006). We must note here that in fact most if not all of the informal practices described in the Encyclopaedia are indeed rules, even if non official. They are, to take now Hamilton’s definition of institutions: “a way of thought or action of some prevalence and permanence, which is embedded in the habits of a group or the customs of a people. (…) our culture is a synthesis or at least an aggregation of institutions, each of which has its own domain and its distinctive office. The function of each is to set a pattern of behaviour and to fix a zone of tolerance for an activity or a complement of activities.” (Hamilton, 1932) | |||
If we now look more closely at what is a formal rule, we see in what sense “informality” can depart from the official rule. A rule has a domain of application, (when, where, to whom it applies), a content (what, in the letter and in the principle), and a community of reference (which community enforces it as an institution). All these components are conventions. Therefore they are a matter of interpretation. Informal rules are the ones that contrast with the “official” rule (of law) in one or several of the aspects above (domain, content, community of reference). They are nevertheless institutions, informally known in their community of reference. The Encyclopaedia collates those non-official rules which still have reached the level of being institutions. | |||
However, as pointed out by the followers of Wittgenstein, “a form of a human activity can never be summed up in a set of explicit precepts” (Winch 1958). Rules, even when formal, are context-bound and, furthermore, limited in their reach in the sense that application of a rule cannot be exhaustively formalised. Rules have to be applied in practice, and although we may formulate another, higher-order, set of rules prescribing how the first set is to be applied, this only pushes the problem further down the road. Even in formal logic “the actual process of drawing an inference is something that cannot be represented as a logical formula. (…) Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning how to do something. (Winch, 1958). | |||
Here we see two issues: | |||
1) The limitation of formalism per se (any rule will have fuzzy boundaries because formalization has its limitations). Therefore, what is the standing rule and what counts as its application is subject to interpretation. | |||
2) The fact that rules and their application are products of power struggles, historical path-dependency, and politics. This impacts on which rules are enshrined in law, who can choose what rule (e.g. official or informal) to apply, and with what degree of leeway in interpretation. | |||
So what? | |||
a) Not everything can be formalized. The border of informality will recess indefinitely beyond our efforts to extend formal regulation. | |||
b) Behind conventions are power struggles, historical and political issues: the choice of applying the rule is only in theory a logical, systematic and universal calculation of predicates; it is in practice a complex choice that involves the leeway a given individual has within the system in a particular situation, given her own agency to interpret the rule. | |||
c) Informal practices are often another, unofficial, set of rules. | |||
To conclude, as the domain, the context and the community of reference of rules are a matter of local interpretation, subject to the above local particulars, the problem of choice between rules in a given situation (formal or informal, core or borderline interpretation) will always remain a complex matter. The matter is further complicated as the justification system behind the choice may refer to diverse, often contradictory, systems of values (e.g. equality vs care; efficiency vs inspiration; etc., see (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006)). | |||
The Encyclopaedia of Informality is an impressive endeavour to inventory worldwide informal practices in the process of institutionalisation. Few projects have had such ambition, perhaps G.P. Murdock’s Human relations Area Files (http://hraf.yale.edu/). While the limits of informality will forever recess, as a compendium the Encyclopaedia is an invaluable resource to understand better the efforts of humans to make society. | |||
'''References:''' | |||
Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification : Economies of Worth (1st ed French 1991). Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. | |||
Hamilton, W. H. (1932). Institution. In E. R. A. Seligman & A. Johnson (Eds.), Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 8 (pp. 84–89). New York: Macmillan. | |||
Hodgson, G. M. (2006). What Are Institutions? Journal of Economic Issues (Association for Evolutionary Economics), 40(1), 1–25. | |||
Ledeneva, A. (2018). The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity; Volume 1. Lond: UCL Press. http://doi.org/he Global Encyclopaedia of Informality Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity. | |||
Winch, P. (1958). The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. New York: Humanities Press. | |||
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==Superseding dichotomies== | ==Superseding dichotomies== | ||