Difference between revisions of "Informational poster and project description"

<big>'''Summary of the <nowiki>Global Informality Project</nowiki> (GIP) poster'''</big>

<big>'''Summary of the <nowiki>Global Informality Project</nowiki> (GIP) poster'''</big>

by Alena Ledeneva, University College London, UK

by Alena Ledeneva, University College London, UK

The [[Global Informality Project]] invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore societies’ open secrets, to comprehend unwritten rules and to uncover informal practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done,’ these informal yet powerful practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse and policy-making. Our database at www.in-formality.com includes entries from 5 countries, 66 countries, 200+ researchers and is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice. The first Global Map of Informality is also available online. Do explore what works and how, where and why!

The [[Global Informality Project]] invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore societies’ open secrets, to comprehend unwritten rules and to uncover informal practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done,’ these informal yet powerful practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse and policy-making. Our database at www.in-formality.com includes entries from 5 countries, 66 countries, 200+ researchers and is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice. The first Global Map of Informality is also available online. Do explore what works and how, where and why!

What has been achieved in the Global Informality Project was only possible thanks to a remarkable collaboration of scholars across disciplines and area studies: sociologists, anthropologists, economists, historians and political scientists. Without their combined scholarly commitment, the ambition to portray at least a fragment of the world’s social and cultural complexity would never have materialised. The majority of entries are based on original ethnographic research and materials collected through fieldwork conducted worldwide, as well as secondary data analysis, media research through computer-aided technologies and human-assisted analysis. Collectively, it has taken the authors of this project over a thousand years of research to present this ‘informal worldview,’ itself only a beginning to our understanding of the ambivalent patterns of social and cultural complexity. The main outcome of all our efforts is, to date, the realisation that complexity can be approached only through mastering paradoxes; articulating the unspoken and visualising the invisible; finding patterns in the amorphous and formalising the informal; finding similarities in differences and differences in similarities; comparing the incomparable and doing the undoable.

What has been achieved in the Global Informality Project was only possible thanks to a remarkable collaboration of scholars across disciplines and area studies: sociologists, anthropologists, economists, historians and political scientists. Without their combined scholarly commitment, the ambition to portray at least a fragment of the world’s social and cultural complexity would never have materialised. The majority of entries are based on original ethnographic research and materials collected through fieldwork conducted worldwide, as well as secondary data analysis, media research through computer-aided technologies and human-assisted analysis. Collectively, it has taken the authors of this project over a thousand years of research to present this ‘informal worldview,’ itself only a beginning to our understanding of the ambivalent patterns of social and cultural complexity. The main outcome of all our efforts is, to date, the realisation that complexity can be approached only through mastering paradoxes; articulating the unspoken and visualising the invisible; finding patterns in the amorphous and formalising the informal; finding similarities in differences and differences in similarities; comparing the incomparable and doing the undoable.