Ideas for Future Research

Globalizing knowledge

"Globalizing knowledge" is today a popular catchphrase in academic circles and the title of Michael D. Kennedy’s ground-breaking book on knowledge and change. How does the Global Informality project contribute to the globalising of knowledge? How local knowledge feeds into wider frames of thought? How is wisdom embedded in informality maintained and transmitted? What are the prospects of ‘network expertise’ assembled in the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality? Can we overcome the limitations of understanding local knowledge, unwritten rules, and hidden practices in societies other than our own? How can we use the interconnectedness of present-day academia to produce novel analysis within and beyond academic circles? Can we facilitate public engagement for expanding our dataset? What are the implications of local knowledge in the global context? Specific ways in which knowledge, images, and symbols are shared globally are only an illustration of universal patterns underlying the workings of informality. Looking at our case studies in the Encyclopaedia, do they facilitate the globalising of knowledge and in which ways? Have we managed to supersede geographical borders and area studies divide in our dataset?"

Learning commons

Is the Global Informality Project network a community? Wikipedia defines learning commons, also known as scholars' commons, information commons or digital commons, are learning spaces, similar to libraries and classrooms that share space for information technology, remote or online education, collaboration, content creation, and meeting. Can the Global Informality Project website become a virtual learning common? What do we need for it? How would you be able to use the dataset? How to facilitate growth of entries? How to engage with related projects? How can it be used for teaching? For research proposals? For publishing? How can the users rearrange the data for their own use? What does it miss? Do we want to set up an International Board and an annual meeting? A lot of authors have worked with policy-makers, would it be a good idea to share experience? To share training materials and research findings?

Building on resistance capacity

Just as seismic capacity of high-rise buildings, informality constitutes a resistance capacity of modern societies. Strategies of survival can be subversive but J.C. Scott argues they are also serve as ‘weapons of the weak.’ Hernando de Soto has shown how informality can not only being a problem but also a solution. The functional ambivalence of informality is essential to understand for devising policies and managing crises. Informality tends to be stigmatised, yet it is a powerful resource, if one focuses on ‘what works’, rather than what should work (increasingly, the funding bodies are interested in policy oriented and problem-solving approaches that require integrating top-down policies with bottom-up analysis of their effectiveness). Can informal practices help tackling natural disasters, serving as default mode in crisis circumstances, where institutions fail people. Do we know enough about security implications of informality?

Theory and practice of ambivalence

"Ambivalence," identified and developed by Zygmunt Bauman and Robert K. Merton as major sociological conceptual tools, is a key structuring concept for the Global Informality project and its Encyclopedia. Characterizations of particular practices as consisting of doublethink, double standards, double deed, double incentives and/or situated in grey zones, blurred boundaries, and fringes evoke new framings of what we encounter in our own varied research contexts. What other kinds of doublings and spatial metaphors help us to identify, discuss, and newly understand these practices? The Encyclopaedia also presents a typology of "ambivalence:" substantive, normative, functional, and motivational. How does this help us work through and draw connections across the materials of various researchers and research projects? Are there other types we might fashion and use?

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?

Brainstorming session from the Brainstorming Workshop, 22 March 2018, UCL, London

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.

Superseding dichotomies

Anthropological and sociological theories are often based on purpose-made dichotomies. Chris Jenks’ Core Sociological Dichotomies critically assesses the principal types. Christian Giordano, in his recent article, argues that for the past 150 years dichotomies have been a fundamental aspect of sociological and anthropological thought. He illustrates how dichotomies, aside from the risk of essentializing, i.e. of creating static constructs of reality, are useful if not indispensable for a social analysis and for the creation of theoretical conceptions in social and cultural sciences. Do they help or impede our grasp of grey areas and blurred boundaries?

Brainstorming session from the Brainstorming Workshop, 22 March 2018, UCL, London

In the session:

• Dr Mark Pyman, Senior Fellow, Institute for Statecraft, London, Honorary Research Fellow, Strategy and Security Institute, University of Exeter
• Prof Tony Fang, Stockholm Business School
• Yuri Tsarik, Head of Supervisory Board, Center for Strategic and Foreign Policy Studies
• Dr Abel Polese, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction, Dublin City University
• Prof Christian Giordano, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Fribourg

The definition of dichotomy was “Two terms with opposite meanings”.

I love this encyclopaedia. We discussed four examples of how this encyclopaedia helps:

1. Language is how we construct our realities. Having a more sophisticated understanding of all these words that expose in detail the unspoken rules of how we engage with each other is revelatory, and it materially deepens our ability to understand difficult policy issues.

2. It enables new way of thinking about the language of policy-making that is more sophisticated than choices between opposites. This encyclopaedia starts to show us how the space between the two ‘opposites’ is filled with many words that have ambivalent meanings, or are deliberately unclear, or have multiple meanings depending on the context. Example Chinese mandarin language, which has no word for dichotomy. Example: Chinese has words for East and West but does not suggest them as opposites. The language reality is saying that opposites always co-exist.

3. This work will change some of the core concepts of governance. Such an example is of the dichotomy between the ‘Good governance model’ of economic development and the economic growth model (laissez faire approach; corruption s implicitly OK) of economic development. Research now saying that some countries have developed as an intricate, co-existing mixture of the two, not as one or the other (See Yuen Yuen Ang, 2017). Some of the space in between is filled by informal language. Another example is between corruption in aid giving: 'results or receipts' Charles Kenny 2017) and the informal words that donors use to mask what is inevitable but cannot be said: The development agencies have developed phrases that represent tolerance of corruption whilst seeming to mean the opposite. Legitimising discussion of what is really happening (it’s not bad, just inevitable and politically difficult to admit to) by being open about what these phases really mean is a big deal.

4. Deepen understanding of what constitutes corrupt relationships. The analysis of corruption is much more than what is legal or illegal; and this encyclopaedia helps move is forward. Not just on informal words and euphemisms for corruption. One of the toughest question in corruption and good governance work/research is the question of relationships. People in each society have a very sophisticated understanding of which sorts of relations which are corrupt, and which are not. This is an area which has been filled up with informal words to express the complexity of these relationships. This research deepens the understanding how the norms of acceptable corruption are expressed and communicated. It may also allow us to track how the meanings of these words change – or are manipulated - as part of active efforts to change the norm.

Cyber-informality

What are the implications of practices involving the digital, cyber, virtual? Technologies like the internet and cryptocurrencies have been imagined, designed, and used as explicitly open-access spaces that obliterate distinctions between formal and informal to facilitate horizontal relations, while they have also been experienced as profoundly dystopic in their potential to make the private public and unsettle identities. What kinds of boundary-crossing and boundary-creation, freedom and restraint, crime and commerce, do cyber-technologies enable?

Informal governance

Systems of network-based governance become entrenched because they are effective at “getting things done”. Patterns of informal governance are useful to identify because they promote elite cohesion, nurture bases of support, weaken opponents, and provide access to services, resources, contracts and rent seeking opportunities. Informal governance works through both incentives (carrots) and disincentives (sticks) that are not exclusively top-down or bottom-up. Practices of co-optation, co-dependence and informal control are often diffuse. They may be exercised through provision of access to material resources (privileges, allowances or loans) or to more symbolic resources (such as access to decision-makers). Can we learn from effectiveness of informal governance?

Area studies without borders

How can we making connections with other conventionally-defined areas in the interest of crosschecking relevance and/or bridging disconnected discussions. For example, how does the unification of Germany compare with unification of Korea? Economies of favours are often associated with post-communist and post-socialist contexts, how do we compare their workings with those in other places?

Migration of informal practices

What kinds of movements are informal practices involved in? How do they transform in diasporas, do diasporas transform their contexts of arrival and departure? What are the implications of international and transnational institutions and their formalizing as well as informalizing practices?

Cross-disciplinary analysis

What possible links and additional angles and discourses could make research relevant for other disciplines? What are the methodological approaches that we use to study informal practices, what are the methodological approaches we are using when they appear? How do these practices look through the lenses of various disciplines?

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

Looking at the clusters in the table of the contents, which entries are the odd ones out? What are the implications of these cases?