History of the Project
The newsletters trace the development of the Global Informality Project.
Newsletter No 13 - 28 March 2018
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality book launch went well in London on 22 March 2018. Over 25 authors came together for the event. The write-ups of brainstorming ideas on the future of the Global Informality Project will be on www.in-formality.com soon. Five themes included: informal governance, complexity and pattern recognition; theory and practice of ambivalence; superseding dichotomies, and cyber-informality. Full version is online (SCROLL to 6:13min for a start):
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/live/the-global-encyclopedia-of-informality-book-launch
Many authors have helped celebrate the publication around the world: David Jancsics has publicized the book at the 50th anniversary of San Diego State University’s School of Public Affairs on March 9th 2018; Eduard Klein has helped promote Encyclopaedia at a think tank event in Berlin; Rustam Urinboyev and Abel Polese have organized a launch at University of Lund. Photos and videos will be on www.in-formality.com.
PUBLICISING YOUR ENTRY
Your entry can be included in your email signature and to your profile on you university website; social media (Facebook; Twitter; Linkedin); and various research gates (Academia; ResearchGate; SSRN). 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.
So you can then add that to the URL to give: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10041172/1/The-Global-Encyclopaedia-of-Informality-Volume-2.pdf#page=386
PURCHASING YOUR PAPER COPY
On request from some of you, I include the contact if you would like to purchase a discounted copy (a third OFF the retail price) – email to uclpresspublishing@ucl.ac.uk, and the UCL distributor will invoice you. Name of book: The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality. Volume X Format: Paperback/Hardback Your name: Delivery address: Email: Contact tel # Invoice name/address/email (if not the same as above).
PLANING NEXT LAUNCH EVENTS
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 Skopje, Macedonia (FYROM) / April date tbc/ contact Misha Popovikj Bazel, Switzerland - 24 April/ contact Lucy Koelcin and Claudia Baez Camargo Belgrade, Serbia/ date tbc/ contact Ivana Spasic and Predrag Cveticanin Moscow, Russia /7-8 June Tokyo, Japan /date tbc/ contact Yuko Adachi Riga, Latvia /22 October/ contact Klāvs Sedlenieks IAS Paris, France / November date tbc/ Boston 50th annual ASEEES convention --New York, NY--Washington / December 2018
WELCOME TO THE TEAM
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 At it happens this time of year, we are joined by the UCL Digital Humanities intern Orla Delauney. Warm welcome to both!
Many thanks to all authors and enthusiasts again!!! We have done a great job on the Encyclopaedia, now let us make the website work!
Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society, University College London
Newsletter No 4 - 7 August 2016
Dear Authors,
I am writing with an update on the progress of the Global Informality project.
Number of entries: Under the leadership of Sheelagh Barron, who took over from Anna Bailey in June, the editorial team has made terrific progress and we are happy to report 163 completed and fully edited entries. We expect to be able to reach 200 entries in 2017.
Online version: Since June 2016, the development of the online version has been undertaken by UCL Digital Humanities interns Yang Liu and Adriana Bastarrachea Santez, to whom we are most grateful for updating and upgrading the database, and making it searchable. They have run into a number of technical difficulties with the sheer volume of tagging required for the entries. Yet we are still firmly on course to launch the online version of the Encyclopaedia in 2017, simultaneously with the publication of the print version, in order to maximise impact. The website will organize entries alphabetically and have an option for authors to add keywords.
Publication: In compliance with the UCL University Press contract, we will be submitting the first volume of our Encyclopaedia on the 1st of October. Once submitted, it will be sent to reviewers. Subject to positive reviews, the publication will take place in 2017. We aim to assemble 60 colourful images for the print volume and are grateful to our Web Wizard Anastasia Shekshnya, who has taken the lead on assembling the images in a variety of formats for both the print version and the website. Anastasia has also managed to secure copyright permission to use an image by Pavel Filonov for the cover of the book.
The complexity of this picture, The Formula of Spring, from the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, hints at the number of challenges for the volume:
Visualising Invisibility We thank all authors who have taken care (and time) to find images in order to visualise the invisibility of informality. See some further discussion on invisibility at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/2015/12/
Dealing with complexity You will appreciate that we have undertaken a bottom-up approach to collecting research findings related to informality. The call for submissions was open and all entries will be included in the online version of the Encyclopaedia. To select material for the print version in a meaningful way has been perhaps the most challenging task. We will of course take into consideration suggestions from anonymous reviewers and the Press.
For now, we have been working in stages. We clustered similar patterns together, asking ourselves ‘what is this practice the case of?’ and then tried to organize entries according to the differences within the cluster. The outcome of such bottom-up structuring has been shaping up slowly (the work continues), but I am happy to report that the structure of the first print volume has emerged and we now have clusters of entries that we offer for conceptual and comparative analysis (according to the reviewers’ recommendations I shared with you In Newsletter 3).
The list of conceptual pieces (some of them already commissioned) will include:
The FRINGE Series: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY
THE GLOBAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF INFORMALITY: TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY.
PART I REDISTRIBUTION: relationship vs use of relationship
Substantive ambivalence (gift vs commodity)
Chapter 1 Neither Gift Nor Commodity: The Instrumentality of Sociability Introduction: Economies of
Favours by Nicolette Makovicky and David Henig
Conclusion: Managing favours in the global economy???
Chapter 2 Neither Gift Nor Payment: The Sociability of Instrumentality Introduction: Interpretations of gift and reciprocity by Florence Weber
Conclusion: Languages of informality by Nicolette Makovicky and David Henig
PART II MARKET: need vs greed
Functional ambivalence (supportive vs subversive)
Chapter 3 The System Made Me Do It: Strategies of Survival
Introduction: Conclusion:
Chapter 4 Gaming the System: Strategies of Camouflage
Introduction: Gaming the system by Phil Hanson Conclusion on the Enabling Power of Constraints
PART III SOLIDARITY: us vs them
Normative ambivalence (double standards)
Chapter 5 Conformity: The Weakness of Strong Ties
Introduction: Eric Gordy on the transformation of solidarity, identity politics and traps of belonging
Conclusion: Approached Christian Giordano???
Chapter 6 Self-Expression: The Innovative Power of Non-Conformity
Introduction on resistance capacity by Jan Kubik
Conclusion: On Us and Them by Zygmunt Bauman
PART IV DOMINATION: carrots vs sticks
Motivational ambivalence (public vs private)
Chapter 7 Cooptation: Recruiting Patrons and Clients
Introduction: Carrots vs. sticks in patron-client relationships by Paul Heywood
Conclusion: Informal Governance and Hidden Constitutions by Scott Newman
Chapter 8 Control: Informal Governance
Introduction: Politics of Fear by Vladimir Gelman
Conclusion: Klaus Segbers Freie Universitat Berlinen
This structure allows us to make the print version (also going into the open access online from the date of publication) distinct from the website.
Handling Ambivalence
A feature that has come up as the most striking in our collection is the fact that each entry can be related
to almost any structural part, and be characterised by all four types of ambivalence. Looking at our entries
from the comparative perspective has allowed us to identify four types of ambivalence and the role they
play in the blurring of boundaries and grey areas: double think, double deed, double standards and double
purpose are all essential for the workings of informality.
Defining Informality
Given the cross-discipline and cross-area nature of this project, it will probably be impossible to agree on a
definition of informality agreeable to all. Please let me know if you have good definitions or great texts on
the definition of informality. In the Encyclopaedia, we should probably acknowledge that we are using the
word as an umbrella term for a variety of social and cultural phenomena that are too complex to be
grasped in a single definition. However, to introduce the in-formality.com website I have come up with the
following paragraph:
We invite you on a voyage of discovery of the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules and hidden practices.
Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done,’ these invisible, yet powerful informal practices tend to
escape articulation in official discourse. We have identified unique research on such practices across
disciplines and across areas and created the first Global Map of Informality. The database is searchable by
region, keyword or type of practice. Do explore what works: how, where and why.
Do send me your thoughts and suggestions on the notion, definition, history, or theory of informality. If
you have a favourite citation, author, typology, please do let me know.
World Map of Informality: The map continues to develop with the increasing number of entries submitted
to the project. Do spread the word – we do need more!
The Informal Practices MA course is likely to further contribute to the map.
The FRINGE connection
In association with the FRINGE Centre, UCL Press is launching a new series of collective volumes, of which the Encyclopaedia is likely to be the first. To become a member of FRINGE to receive the Centre’s newsletter, sign up at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/fringe-centre.
More on the UCL Press FRINGE series: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/series
We look forward to receiving the remaining entries promised for our 1st September deadline. Thank you for all you help in this tough period before the submission.
Alena
Alena Ledeneva
Professor of Politics and Society
University College London
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 report 121 completed and fully edited entries. We have completed our 2015 target of 100 entries and expect a steady flow of new entries in 2016.
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 have waived royalties and taken responsibility for acquiring copyright for images. We are allowed 60 colourful images. All authors are invited to submit colour images to accompany their entries. We will email out further details once we have the Press’s requirements (file type, minimum resolution, instructions for seeking copyright permission etc.)
Our proposal received extremely encouraging feedback. One of the anonymous reviewers stated:
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.
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 contributors. We plan to release the online version of the Encyclopaedia in 2017 alongside 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.
FRINGE: as part of the FRINGE Centre (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/fringe-centre), the Global Informality Project has been housed at the new UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. On 17 March 2016, the editorial team launched the In- formality.com website with a dissemination event at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. The World Map of Informality can currently be viewed on the website. Encyclopaedia entries are being uploaded but will not be publically viewable until launch in 2017. We would like to make entries viewable by our authors prior to the public launch, so you can use them as a resource in your own teaching and research, but we are still looking into what is technologically possible. We will keep you updated on this.
Alena Ledeneva
7 April 2016
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.
Publications and publishers
We are still waiting for Cambridge University Press to inform us about their decision on the book proposal that I have submitted as part of the list of publications from the FP7 ANTICORRP project. You may remember that we were expecting an answer from the Press by September, but unfortunately we have not received it yet. We anticipate being able to submit a near final selection of entries related to corruption to CUP in February. In the meantime, as I reported earlier, we have approached UCL University Press and received extremely encouraging feedback and a positive decision. We will be working on a volume for the UCL Press as well. The UCL Press is a new publisher 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.
Website
The online version of the encyclopaedia on the basis of WIKI software has been developed as well. Thanks to Sharon and Max, we have experimental pages with images and entries that are tagged, categorised and are searchable. Now that Sharon and Max have completed their degrees and moved on, we need more funding and help to continue this work. We are thinking of possibilities of crowdsourcing for new ideas of practices and of finding ways of assessing them: visibility, familiarity, frequency, ambivalence, and impact. We are likely to take up on this dimension of the project once we have completed submissions to the publishers. Due to the lack of qualified staff, we have not yet enabled access for authors to the construction site, but we are working on grant applications that would allow us to do so. Please be patient with us, as our editorial team works very hard on a very modest budget. 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. An interesting fact that Philipp has shared with me recently is that Russia only has two dots, despite us having a lot of entries on Russian practices. It turns out that all Soviet entries are listed if you click on Moscow, whereas Russian entries are listed if you click on the dot in Eastern Siberia.... I wonder how it works for India and China, and whether we can actually make the map crowdsourced as well. 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.
FRINGE
As part of the FRINGE Centre, the Global Informality Project has been housed at the new UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. It was launched among other FRINGE projects at the IAS on 3 December 2015, together with Eric Gordy's project on Closing the Gap between Formal and Informal Institutions in West Balkans (Horizon 2020). Very soon we will be posting blog reports about the launch and constituent projects. We are keen to establish an international network of Friends of Fringe, if you would like to receive our news please send your email address to the Centre Coordinator Akosua Bonsu at a.bonsu@ucl.ac.uk. Read more at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ah-shs-office/digital-communications/joint-faculty-internal-communications/staff-profiles/alena-ledeneva
People
We would like to thank Maximilian Lambertson and Sharon Lin for their excellent work. They are now in their respective employments. We would like to welcome Sheelagh Barron to the team and thank the Project Manager Dr Anna Bailey, Costanza Curro, and Elizabeth Teague for their dedicated effort. Dr Roxana Bratu, the FP7 ANTICORRP Research Fellow, will be working with the editorial team on the links of the Global Informality Project with the WP6 Media and Corruption. Dr Philipp Koeker, the FP7 ANTICORRP Research Fellow will be helping with website updates.
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!
We include for your attention the entries that have been finalised or very near completion:
|
Salam credit (Afghanistan) |
Stroman (Hungary) |
Obshchak (Russia) |
Veza (Serbia) |
Kind regards,
Alena Ledeneva
Professor of Politics and Society
University College London