Difference between revisions of "History of the Project"

The newsletters trace the development of the Global Informality Project.  

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To refer to the specific page in the volume, you have to add "#page=X" where X is the page number of the entry you want to refer to. For example, entry "kula" in Volume 2 is on page 386 of the document. (NOTE: this is not the page number on the bottom of that page. You need to open the PDF in a web browser like Chrome, and then see what page number “kula” appears on, according to the browser.) It takes a little while to download.

 

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10041172/1/The-Global-Encyclopaedia-of-Informality-Volume-2.pdf#page=386

Format: Paperback/Hardback

Invoice name/address/email (if not the same as above).

 

Thank you to all authors who has volunteered already to organize book launch events in their universities and other professional platforms and associations. In alphabetical order:

Telebridge UCL - Indiana University, Bloomington/ 6 April/ with Justin Otten

Bazel, Switzerland - 24 April/ contact Lucy Koelcin and Claudia Baez Camargo

IAS Paris, France / November date tbc/

Boston 50th annual ASEEES convention --New York, NY--Washington / December 2018

Petra Matijevic is appointed Research Associate by the INFORM project ("Closing the Gap between Formal and Informal Institutions in the Balkans", Horizon 2020 project no 693537) to work on the West Balkans and Global Informality Project website. Contact: informality2014@gmail.com

'''Newsletter No 12 - 17 January 2018'''

'''Dear Author,'''

'''The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality is out in paper and online. It is available in open access for a free download at:'''<br>

'''http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/global-encyclopedia-of-informality-i'''<br>

'''Congratulations to all of us!'''<br>

'''Please make sure you join at least one of the book launch events: the first one is in San-Diego, CA! (see details below)'''

If you would like to purchase a discounted copy (a third OFF the retail price) they should send the

following information to uclpresspublishing@ucl.ac.uk, and the UCL distributor will invoice you.<br>

Invoice name/address/email (if not the same as above).

Please add the FREE download link to your email signature and to your profile on you university

website; social media (Facebook; Twitter; Linkedin); and various research gates (Academia;

ResearchGate; SSRN). Please also use the word of mouth and inform your colleagues, students and

friends about the publication. Ask them to twit and write amazon reviews.

Please come to the book launch event on '''22 March 2018 in London''', hosted by the UCL

Global Engagement Fund and FRINGE Centre at the UCL Institute of the Advanced Studies,

from 2.30 to 7.30pm. We plan to start promptly at 2.30pm with a workshop with a working

can organize several group discussions for an hour, followed by a joint roundtable and a

drinks party. The proposed themes for the discussion of the implications of the Global

* Power distance and closed access societies

* Curious incidents in the dataset (what does not fit?)

If you can be in London on this date, please let me know which group you would like to be

in.

We cannot pay the flight but we will be able to get a night at a hotel for you. Please me

know if you need a hotel reservation in advance. We can only reimburse to the UCL partner

hotels, so it is probably easier to book through the UCL.

Thank you to all authors who has volunteered already to organize book launch events in

<blockquote>'''Bazel, Switzerland (Lucy Koelcin and Claudia Baez)<br>Belgrade, Serbia (Ivana Spasic and Predrag Cveticanin)<br>Boston, USA (Sheila Puffer)<br>Lund, Sweden (Rustam Urenboyev)<br>Montreal, Canada (Tina Hilgers)<br>Moscow, Russia (Svetlana Barsukova)<br>New York, NY (Sven Horak, Jessica Allina-Pisano)<br>Paris, France (Florence Weber)<br>Riga, Latvia (Klāvs Sedlenieks)<br>San Diego State University (David Jancsics)<br>Skopje, Macedonia (FYROM) (Misha Popovikj)<br>Tokyo, Japan (Yoshimichi Sato)<br>Washington DC, USA (Sergei Samoylenko and Marlene Laruelle)<br>Tampa Florida, USA (Golfo Alexopolous)'''</blockquote>

We need more events around the world. Please let me know if you would like to organize an event at your university or at a professional association meeting. Any format is welcome, from a seminar with students and colleagues to a small informal celebration. UCL Press will send you leaflets, paper copies and I will be happy to join in by Skype. If you could send us a photo of the event or short video, that would be great!</p>

“I would like to invite authors of the Encyclopaedia to come and participate in a

roundtable in San Diego on March 9th. We would be very happy to host authors of

Mexican, Latin American, Middle Eastern or North American entries since our faculty

research is related to these regions but other authors are also welcome. Participants

should come at their own expense but hotel and food will be covered by the School of

Public Affairs. If you are interested in participating please let me know as soon as

If you are on the West Coast or can get there, please contact David and don’t forget to send

Anyone plans to be at the 50 th annual ASEEES convention in Boston this year? Please

More soon,

 

Alena Ledeneva<br>

Professor of Politics and Society<br>

University College London<br>

'''Newsletter No 11 - 20 December 2017'''

'''Dear Author,'''

'''I am writing to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2018 from the Global Informality Project! It has been a pleasure to work with you over the years and our first printed output – Global Encyclopaedia of Informality – is under way.'''

'''GOOD NEWS!'''

'''GLOBAL BOOK LAUNCH!''' Given that our project embraces five continents and 66 countries,

volunteered to host a book launch - we will have one in New York, Washington, Paris, Tokyo,

Montreal and Moscow. Please let me know if you would like to host an event – we will send

you leaflets, paper copies and assist in every way.<br>

I also look forward to hearing from you if you have some ideas for marketing – which journal

we should have a review, where we could publicize our publication.<br>

For the moment, please include the publication in your email signature; in your research

gate or academia.edu profile, on your university website. Once I receive a link to the UCL

Press website where the Encyclopaedia can be freely downloaded, I will send it to you.

In the meantime, enjoy the winter break and stay in touch.

Professor of Politics and Society<br>

'''Newsletter No 10 - 4 November 2017'''

'''Dear Author,'''

'''Just to update you on the publication process of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality!'''

* We have managed to return the first proofs of the Encyclopaedia with changes more or less on time

* Second proofs will need signing off I mid-November, but no further changes will be required.

* I have assembled a list of endorsements for the back cover.

* As far as I know, the following ISBN numbers are confirmed: for Volume I it is 9781911307884 and for Volume II it is 9781787351912.

* It is already possible for libraries to order the book on Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=global+Encyclopaedia+of+Informality

* We plan a book launch event on 22 March 2018 in London, hosted by the UCL Global Engagement Fund and FRINGE Centre at the UCL Institute of the Advanced Studies.

* The book will be available online, in open access, free of charge.

'''GLOBAL BOOK LAUNCH!''' Given that our project embraces five continents and 66 countries,

Best wishes,

'''Alena Ledeneva'''<br>

 

'''One good news and one urgent request, please!'''

 

'''GOOD NEWS!''' With some delay, we have received the first proofs of the Encyclopaedia. As

you will see it is not perfect and needs typos, misspellings and other types of irregularities to

Most commonly, the mistakes cluster in places taken-for- granted, such as titles and subtitles

of chapters, entries, figures, tables and around places where you were asked to provide

additional information (references, page numbers, images to be inserted). Placing of images,

 

You should first check with the Table of contents to see if your entry is in volume 1 or 2, and

 

described. I will be the one to integrate all corrections for the final file, so please make sure

'''Number of the entry'''<br>

'''Para beginning with''' ‘quote’ or the number of paragraph on the page<br>

'''SHOULD BE:''' ‘say how it should look after I have inserted the correction’.

in the subject line.<br>

Once we have a list, we will collate all corrections onto the whole book PDF and return the

I should be grateful if you could check your entry as soon as possible and return your

 

I do hope you are pleased with the proofs – there are some easy-to- fix mistakes of course –

so do let me know.

 

'''Newsletter No 8 - 17 June 2017'''

'''Dear Author,'''

I am writing to ask you to reserve the

dates for helping with the index and

proofs. The following timetable has

'''Index due to us:''' 14 July 2017<br>

'''Index comments due back:''' 28 July 2017<br>

'''Page proofs (to authors) for review:''' 25 August 2017<br>

'''Project Update:'''

* Our Digital Humanities intern, Yuan Gao, has started work on updating the website database. To date, she has added most entries to the website and will continue working on images and correction over the summer.

* We have received a few possible entries from Canada and Malaysia, so we hope to add two more countries to the map.

*We look forward to the FRINGE annual workshop in on illegal Housing across the Globe on 22-23 June 2015. For details see: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/fringe-centre/events.

Thank you very much and more soon,

'''Newsletter No 7 - 28 April 2017'''

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'''A quick update:''' As some of you know, we have been struggling with the technical side of

the manuscript: illustrations, captions, copyright, tables and diagrams had to be submitted

as separate files and in the right format, and listed throughout. Costanza has done her best

on this and now the manuscript is back with the publishers. Unfortunate as it is, because of

the publishers’ rules, we have had to cut out many pictures and graphs. We are very grateful

to those of you who provided images and copyright for their use, and we will make sure that

they duly appear on our website.<br>

Penfold, is that we will send a standard contract to all authors (attached to this Newsletter)

for your records. The contract states your agreement to be published by UCL Press. Given

stipulated in the contract. If this is the case, please contact Chris at c.penfold@ucl.ac.uk

received.

'''For citation:''' We will let you have the publication date as soon as we know it but, given the

scale of the project, it is probably unrealistic to expect publication before January 2018. In

the meantime, you can refer to your piece as Author, Name of entry, in Ledeneva, A. et al.,

eds. The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality. UCL Press, forthcoming. You can look up

further details in the UCL Press Spring catalogue at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press.

'''Online version:''' We are delighted to announce that we have a new intern, Yuan Guo from

the UCL Digital Humanities Department, who will be up-dating and improving our website

www.in-formality.com. It would be useful to have your suggestions as to how we make the

website useful for teaching. If you have specific keywords for your entry that you would like

to include in the search system online (and in the index of the printed version), please email

them to us without text and mark your email with KEYWORDS in the subject line. We look

forward to continuing to work with you on making the dataset searchable and easy to use.

'''World Map of Informality:''' To date, we have all five continents, 66 countries and over 200

entries! We aim to increase the number of countries in the online version and would be

grateful for your help. Do spread the word!

 

 

'''Alena Ledeneva'''<br>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

project deliverables report to the European Commission in Brussels, on 7 February 2017.

 

 

 

 

'''Newsletter No 5 - 14 October 2016'''

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

''Introduction: Gaming the system by '''Phil Hanson''' Conclusion on the Enabling Power of Constraints''

'''Newsletter No 3 - 7 April 2016'''

Dear Author,

I am delighted to inform you of the progress of the Global Informality project.

'''Number of entries:''' The editorial team has made terrific progress and we are happy to

'''Publication:''' We are happy to report signing a contract with the UCL University Press. UCL

University Press is a new publisher and the pioneer of open access publishing (simultaneous

online and paper copies). They will provide open access to our Encyclopaedia and make

paper copies affordable. Publication is due to take place in 2017. As part of the contract, we

Our proposal received extremely encouraging feedback. One of the anonymous reviewers

stated:

<blockquote>The proposed book will provide a broad academic and interested audience with a fascinating, in fact unique and durable collection of descriptions and analyses of informal practices from all over the globe. As far as I know no such venture exists. I strongly support the publication. The value that will be added by this project to existing research in the area is threefold:

''First'', it will give the academic and broader interested audiences insights into the great variation of informal practices, their institutional, social and cultural embeddedness, path dependencies and interactions with formal rules. At the most basic level the encyclopaedia will make accessible specialist knowledge about a widespread but often hard-to-grasp social phenomenon;

''Second'', in the same way, the collection will offer very useful material to researchers of informality, but also to those studying institutions and socio-economic development who might want to compare different practices in different contexts and time. The collection will allow them to overcome the limitations that usually accompany ethnographic and other qualitatively oriented empirical work on social practices, which usually focuses on a few cases only. Hence, the encyclopaedia will be useful for theoretical and comparative research on the subject since it presents excellent research material for further elaborations – a feature that is quite unusual for a text collection.

''Third'', the book will be able to be widely used in seminars and lectures because of the uniqueness of the collection, and will thereby also inform new theoretical and comparative considerations.</blockquote>

We will be working on the critique as well.

'''Online version:''' Since December 2016, the development of the online version (using

searchable, WIKI software based) has been maintained by Dr. Philipp Koeker, the FP7

ANTICORRP Postdoc Fellow, to whom we are most grateful for updating the database. In

April, we will be selecting new interns from the UCL Digital Humanities, and plan to appoint

a new images editor and a web designer in order to be able to open the website to the

authors and to explore possibilities of crowdsourcing for new ideas of practices and of

finding ways of assessing them: visibility, familiarity, frequency, ambivalence, and impact.

Once done and tested, we should be able to open up the website to a wider circle of

the publication of the print version for maximum impact.

'''World Map of Informality:''' The map continues to develop thanks to the help of Philipp

Koeker, who keeps adding dots to mark submitted entries. This function works on the basis

of the Google Maps software. We are wondering whether we can actually make the map

crowdsourced as well. If any of our authors have experience with such software, we would

be interested to hear your ideas. The map has been an important visualisation tool and my

students on the Informal Practices MA course are likely to further contribute to the map.

(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/fringe-centre), the

Alena Ledeneva<br>

'''Newsletter No 1 - 5 October 2015'''

Dear Author,

You are receiving this email because you have submitted or have agreed to submit an entry towards the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality.

The editorial team has been working really hard this summer and we are happy to report a few developments. First of all, we now have around 70 entries almost ready to go to the publisher. If everyone is on schedule with their deadlines we should be able to assemble a near 100 entries strong volume.

As Editor-in-Chief, I would like to update you on the progress of my negotiations with the publishers. As some of you know, the Encyclopaedia is part of the list of publications of the FP7 ANTICORRP project, and Cambridge University Press is considering our book proposal and sample entries (12) as part of the Memorandum of Understanding between CUP and ANTICORRP. We expected an answer from the Press by September, but have not received it yet. It is normal for CUP to be slow and I will keep you updated on the progress. According to the FP7 ANTICORRP schedule, we are to submit the complete manuscript in January 2016.  

In the meantime, I am exploring other publication options and have sent another proposal to the UCL Press (University College London). The UCL Press is a new one and will be leading on ‘open access’ publications. The latter makes it really attractive to the Global Informality Project as we aim to reach out to the general public and eventually to collect data through crowdsourcing. I have received an enthusiastic response from the Commissioning editor, but as elsewhere the process is going to be a lengthy one.

In parallel with the paper copy of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, we have been working on the online version of the encyclopaedia. We are using WIKI software for uploading entries, but this is very much work in progress that will need more funding and help. Especially when it comes to the use of images to brighten up the entries and future plans to develop some measurement tools for assessing the visibility, familiarity, frequency, impact of informal practices.

Perhaps, the most exciting event of this summer was the creation of the first World Map of Informality, depicting informal practices that prevail in various parts of the world. We have ‘mapped’ all entries we have received and ‘colloquial terms’ that we have we have commissioned or would like to commission. Although still very basic at this moment, the map has been an important visual tool to explain the project to those unaware of the importance of informal practices and their role all over the globe. We are working on the possibility to give access to the under-construction site to all authors, so that you could use the map and the online version for teaching and research, but technical issues around this possibility remain unresolved. Please be patient with us, as our editorial team works really hard on a very modest budget.

I would like to thank all members of the team who worked really hard from different locations this summer: Project Manager Dr Anna Bailey and editors Costanza Curro, Maximillian Lambertson, and Elizabeth Teague. Our special thanks go to our Digital Humanities intern Sharon Lin, who has handled the setting up of the website. But without our esteemed contributors of ideas and disciplined authors of entries, we would have been nowhere. So thank you very much again and we look forward to working with you further!

Alena Ledeneva<br>Professor of Politics and Society<br>University College London

'''Newsletter No 2 - 7 Decenber 2015'''

Dear Author,

I am delighted to give an update on the progress of the Global Informality project.

'''Number of entries'''

The editorial team has been most efficient this autumn and we are happy to report just under 80 completed entries before Christmas. Although the difference from the October newsletter is only 10, there are many more that are in the process of being drafted, edited or awaiting return from the authors. We cannot emphasise enough just how grateful we are to the authors who turn around entries promptly. We are still aiming at assembling 100 entries by the end of 2015, which should be easily achieved if all the contributors with December deadline send in their entries.