GIP-Sandbox

By Alena Ledeneva

An Introduction

The first reader of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Informal Problem-Solving in Human Life, its anonymous reviewer, summed up the volume as follows:

Along with the first two volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, it sets the boundaries, rules and standards of what is shaping up to be the field of informality studies. These standards include a cross-disciplinary approach (which combines approaches and insights into political sciences, sociology, social anthropology, social psychology, organisational theory, behavioural economics, and other disciplines); the network expertise (which is a response to the problem produced by the contradictory tendencies of the growing volume and complexity of knowledge on the one hand, and scholars’ hyper-specialisation and the fragmentation of aca- demic knowledge, on the other); a bottom-up perspective (that gives voice to the witnesses of informal practices in local contexts); the means of identification of informal practices (which often escape articulation in official discourse, but must have a name in the local jargon); focusing on ‘what works’ (rather than ‘what should work’ or the reasons why public policies ‘do not work’); context- sensitive comparisons (comparisons of similar informal practices from various parts of the world, which provide a generalization of knowledge without losing sight of the local context); and keeping in mind the ambivalence of informal practices (their substantive, functional, normative, and motivational ambivalence).

I will explain why these principles are central to informality studies and why informality plays such an important role in finding solutions to twenty-first-century problems.

The problem-oriented approach

The rapid deployment of the Internet and other digital technologies in the last two decades has amplified two conflicting trends which have been developing since the second half of the nineteenth century – knowl- edge fragmentation and the need for integration. As the depth and complexity of knowledge has been increasing exponentially, the speciali- sation of scholars has been increasing at a similar rate. Because of the fragmentation of academic knowledge, individual scholars are unable to tackle complex problems which require urgent solutions (Harari 2018; Keller 2022). One clear example of this is climate change, itself only a part of the sustainability problem, which requires a multitude of scien- tific perspectives as well as an understanding of societies and their foun- dational principle – human cooperation. In his 1948 article ‘Science and Complexity’, Warren Weaver stated:

These new problems [of complexity] … require science to make a third great advance, an advance that must be even greater than the nineteenth-century conquest of problems of simplicity or the twentieth-century victory over problems of disorganized complex- ity. Science must, over the next 50 years, learn to deal with these problems of organized complexity. (1948: 540 quoted in Castellani 2014)

In order to achieve this:

an open learning environment would need to be created, where students could be introduced to new and innovative notions of complexity, critical thinking, data visualisation and modelling, as well as the challenges of mixed-methods, interdisciplinary teamwork, global complexity, and big data! In short, the social sciences would need to be ‘opened-up,’ as Weaver called for in 1948 …! (Castellani 2014; see also Byrne and Callaghan 2014)

Three-quarters of a century later, we continue to call for social sciences to develop methodologies that capture contexts in order to resolve the ambivalence of informal practices and map their complexity. Using mixed methods, cross-disciplinary teamwork and institutional architec- ture as a means of bridging intellectual boundaries remains a challenge, even if one accepts the limitations of individual expertise.

According to the cultural historian Peter Burke, historically, the challenges scattered across different fields had been addressed by indi- viduals with encyclopaedic knowledge, or polymaths, such as Da Vinci, Erasmus, Pascal, Newton, von Humboldt, Pareto and Keynes (Burke 2020: 2), but deepening specialisation and increasing complexity of knowledge have made them virtually impossible to overcome. Today’s scholars need to collaborate and overcome the limits of specialisation to reproduce a similar effect. As early as the 1920s, top-down, institutional initiatives to facilitate collaboration between different fields of study led to the creation of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and the Rockefeller Foundation programme for the social sciences (Jay 1973; Ruml 1930). In the 1920s and 1930s, leading US universities – Yale, Harvard, Chicago – attempted to unite professors from different fields. In the social sciences, extended departments, joint seminars and discussion groups were organised to enable collaboration and integration. In 1940, Chicago University set up a multidisciplinary Committee on Human Development that linked natural and social sciences (Burke 2020: 224). A new format for inter- disciplinary research under which scholars from different fields worked, conversed and collaborated under one roof – the Institute of Advanced Studies – emerged in 1931 at Princeton University. It was adopted throughout the Western world in the 1960s, mostly due to support of interdisciplinary research by Western governments in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Burke’s view, ‘in the case of humanities and social sciences … the results of these initiatives were disappointing’ and many interdisciplinary research centres, interdisciplinary committees and educational programmes ceased to exist (Burke 2020: 228). The so-called area studies, government-sponsored research collabo- ration initiatives, continue to this day. The School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) in London was founded in 1915. In the after- math of World War II, the US administration, eager to learn about its rival the USSR, joined forces with private foundations in order to establish cross-disciplinary research centres dedicated to Soviet or Russian stud- ies. Later on, similar institutions were created to study the Middle East, South-East Asia, China and Latin America, now focused on decolonising efforts to interrogate and transform the institutional, structural and epis- temological legacies of colonialism (see for example, https://blogs.soas. ac.uk/decolonisingsoas/). Area studies-based collaborations have also produced a new gener- ation of problem-centred fields and programmes: development studies, studies of women and minorities, cultural studies, global studies, media

studies, religious studies, post-colonial studies, cognitive studies, liminal- ity studies and so on. These have evolved bottom-up in response to social issues, as opposed to the top-down efforts to promote cross-disciplinarity. According to Burke, the problem-solving focus has been much more pro- ductive. Development studies grounded in neo-institutional theory have led the way. One example of success is Elinor Ostrom’s project on gov- erning the commons, which was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The evidence compiled by Ostrom supported the theory that local communities are best at managing their own natural resources as they are the ones who use them, and she argued that the resources should be regulated at a local level, rather than a higher, cen- tralised authority without a direct access to the resources. However, when bureaucracies adopt these results for their own use, the outcomes may differ significantly (Hart 2009). Urban studies ‘hold the record for the number of disciplines involved in its programs in different universities – anthropology, archaeology, architecture, economics, geography, history, literature, politics and sociology – held together by a concern with major urban problems such as poverty and violence’ (Burke 2020: 233). Due to the visibility of issues of informal settlements, urban studies takes the lead in research on informality and sets the policy agenda on urban development around the globe. Similar to how formal institutions command more attention than informal ones on the subject of solving complex research problems, top- down institutional approaches to interdisciplinarity receive the most cov- erage. However, it has always been complemented and even preceded by bottom-up, informal ways to overcome the fragmentation of knowledge and enable collaborations between scholars from different fields. Burke describes ‘The Club’ established in London by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds in 1764 as an early example of such cross-fertilisation. Members of The Club who represented different professions met at a London tavern and discussed matters of shared interest. Similar informal groupings pro- liferated in London, Boston and many European cities towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the most famous being the Vienna Circle; History of Ideas Club, Baltimore; Ratio Club, London; Parisian salons and the like (Burke 2020: 233). Most informal groups had a limited life (from 5 to 15 years), included a small number of participants with different backgrounds and managed to make significant advances in understanding specific problems as opposed to producing breakthrough scientific discoveries. Their strengths lay in the strong motivation and cognitive diversity of the participants, as well as flexibility of interaction free from any formal constraints or obligations. Their weaknesses were limited resources,

including time and lack of a specific research agenda or a need to deliver (the case of the off-the-record Bilderberg club, established in 1954, might be an exception here). Both top-down and bottom-up efforts to facilitate some interdisci- plinary collaboration demonstrate the potential of these groups as well as their limitations. Both require a unifying force that holds the partici- pants together. The format of a high table at Oxbridge colleges gener- ates cross-discipline discussions and exchange of perspectives. However, it is only when the researchers cooperate to address a specific problem that their collaboration becomes sustainable and produces remarkable outcomes (Burke 2020: 228). Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson argues that effective collaboration between professionals with diverse backgrounds takes place when they face a challenge that is equally important to all of them but cannot be resolved without oth- ers who have complementary skills and knowledge (Edmondson 2012). The ‘network expertise’ assembled within the Global Informality Project (GIP) somewhat matches Edmondson’s idea of ‘teaming’. First, it would not be possible to assemble this global collection of informal practices without the collaboration of researchers across cul- tures, disciplines and methods. Hundreds of scholars from all over the globe, willing to capture, map and describe informal practices, were united by the challenge of shedding light on informality and its role in the world. Second, most informal practices of problem-solving described in this encyclopaedia are themselves based on the teaming principle – peo- ple face challenges which they are unable to overcome simply by relying on existing, top-down, formal mechanisms, so they turn to other people with whom they have no formal bonds but whose help is indispensable. By combining resources, they overcome the challenge and find a solution. Third, the ‘network expertise’ approach relies on the classics: the strength of the weak ties (Granovetter 1973), activated by the ‘network leadership’ (Shekshnia and Matveeva 2019a, 2019b). Finally, there are wider forces at play that sparked interest in informality studies in the search for alter- native solutions to societal problems and sustainability. One example is the ‘Strategic interactive map of informality’, set in motion by the World Economic Forum (WEF) strategic intelligence team (WEF 2022).

From capturing to mapping informality

Visualisation of informal practices and their impact helps to accomplish what The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality attempts to achieve: to cap- ture specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way, to map the patterns of informality around the world and to document the ambiva- lent impact of informal practices on people engaged in them, societies in which they take place, and global public goods (www.in-formality.com). The critical role of informal practices as a means of solving problems that people face at various stages in their lives has been neglected for centuries. Most commonly, informality has been associated with its vis- ible and measurable types: informal settlements and informal economy. However, the last two decades witnessed a successful effort to capture and map less visible practices. Social network analysis (SNA) has produced major breakthroughs (Butts 2008). This shift was also due to the qualita- tive research produced by a new generation of scholars who use mixed methods and innovative approaches to record less observable aspects of informality such as informal networks, informal governance, informal exchanges and informal currencies (Giordano and Hayoz 2013; Morris and Polese 2013; Henig and Makovicky 2017; Polese et al. 2022a).

Transformation map of informality: from informality through migration to gender inequality CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. © World Economic Forum Strategic Intelligence

Figure 1	Figure 2	Figure 3

A WEF strategic intelligence team working on strategic insights and contextual intelligence monitors forces that drive transformational change across economies, industries and systems. When approached to create an informal economy map, the GIP team sought to integrate social and cultural complexity into strategic thinking, with a particular emphasis on those invisible and less measurable aspects of informality that make the latter so pervasive and omnipresent. In cooperation with doctoral students funded by the EC Marie-Curie innovative training net- work, and WEF tech specialists, six key constituents of informality were established (WEF 2022). Each one is associated with global issues and contexts, links to other interactive strategic maps and gets updated by new resources pulled by the AI algorithm. The interactive map comes to life when you select one of the six nodes. The blue lines in Figure 0.1.1 illustrate just one of the multiple tracks linking informality to the world’s strategic policy agenda. Let us examine the key issues traditionally associated with infor- mality, starting with the informal economy, the area that perhaps has attracted the most attention (Morris 2019; Polese et al. 2019). Forming part of the national economy, the informal economy, however, escapes direct regulation and is not registered for tax purposes. According to Eurostat, the size of the informal economy ranges from 1 per cent of the whole economy in Norway to 28 per cent in Romania. Survey-based indi- ces of the informal economy in emerging markets report much higher estimates of the share of shadow economies in the gross domestic prod- uct (GDP) (Putniņš and Sauka 2015; Polese et al. 2022b; see also Colin Williams’ conceptual introduction to Chapter 8 in this volume). Like most informal practices, informal economic activities are ambivalent. On the one hand, they create value for entrepreneurs and additional goods and services for consumers, and they create jobs for employees and put otherwise idle resources to productive use. On the other hand, they lead to the loss of public revenue, which undermines the financing of social security systems and the sustainability of public finances and erodes public trust in formal institutions. The strategic map links informal economies to economic progress, corruption, inequality, employment, sustainability and public finances, as depicted in Figure 0.1.2, while urban informality, perhaps counterin- tuitively, is related to real estate development business and civic partici- pation, urbanisation and international security, migration and corporate governance (see Figure 0.1.3). Urban informality embraces everyday tactics that people use to appropriate and claim space, cope with scarce resources and strategically bypass or bend official regulations. It can be readily observed in the form of unregulated occupation of public or private buildings (squatting), land grabbing, construction of buildings for residential and commercial pur- poses without permits, establishing of slums and shantytowns and the

Types of ambivalence and the structure of this book

The collection of entries is organised in two volumes, four parts and eight chapters.

Part One explores the substantive ambivalence and interplay between sociable and instrumental in relationships – the ‘instrumentality of sociability’ and the ‘sociability of instrumentality.’ The relationships tend to be seen as social (or based on sociability) by participants but as instrumental (or based on interest) by observers. The substantive ambivalence of informal exchanges – where one cannot agree or disagree with either participants or observers – means that a single categorisation of the way in which gifts, favours, transfers and transactions are given, taken or exchanged is impossible.

Figure 1: Substantive ambivalence

The difficulties of categorisation or tensions of substantive ambivalence are discussed in more detail in the preface to Part I. Here they are illustrated (see Figure 1) as a crossover between predominantly sociable and predominantly instrumental exchanges: neither gift nor commodity; neither gift nor payment. One can observe from the case studies in Chapters 1 and 2 that some relationships are more sociable than others (and the entries have been organised in order of decreasing sociability), while others are more instrumental than others (so the entries are organised in order of increasing instrumentality). For example, social networks are used to obtain something that one is entitled to, but with greater ease and in less time than would be the case without them and in a spirit of friendship (compadrazgo), whereas the custom of informal payments in Nigeria seems to be a euphemism for a bribe or a levy (dash).

Part Two explores practices linked to identity, belonging and solidarity. The double standards grounded in the fundamental divide into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ or normative ambivalence, account for divisive identities and the associated performance of inclusion and exclusion. Focus on normative ambivalence enables us to reveal the open secrets of identities, moulded by lineage, community or consumption (whether religion, music or art) as well as to explain multiple identities emerging in complex societies with their constellations of coexisting rural, urban, local and global mind-sets. The entries in this part are organised according to strength of obligation within social circles, termed the ‘lock-in effect’: from the traditional grip of kin ties and the obligation of customary laws to the more fluid norms of reciprocity and voluntary belonging; from traditional values to forms of self-expression; from norms generating conformity (Chapter 3) to those that generate non-conformity and protest (Chapter 4). As presented on Figure 2, on the left there are strong institutions of the

customary law in the Caucasus (adat) and godparents in the Balkans (kumstvo).

Figure 2: Normative ambivalence

These practices are the most venerated and significant for sustaining conformity and informal order in societies. Just like blood relatives, kumovi are supposed to help each other and in most cases they do so in spite of formal roles, just as adat may come in direct contradiction with the law. The norms of conformity are equally powerful in Scandinavia: one should never try to be better or different, or consider oneself more valuable than others (janteloven). These norms are embodied in informal practices that confer negative attitudes towards individuality, self-expression and measures of success. In contrast, practices of non- conformity, associated with subcultural languages (see mat, padonki and verlan) or cross-cultural forms of rebellion (graffiti), are aimed at the power of mass media, authorities and political regimes (as in the cases of self-production practices of Roentgenizdat and samizdat in the Soviet Union).

The entries in Part Three illustrate the functional ambivalence of informality – supportive of participants yet viewed as subversive by observers; subversive of formal constraints (such as geographical borders, shortages, all kinds of regulations) yet also supportive of them; bending the rules yet also complying with and reinforcing them. The gleaning practices (known as pabirčenje in Serbia) enable the community to benefit from the crops remaining in the fields (need but also greed) and build the landowner`s reputation for generosity, while at the same time sustaining and supporting a clientelist network that could potentially serve to support his political ambitions. By allowing the poor to glean on his field in the short run, the landowner prevents potential social unrest and acquires stable political support among the local population in the long run, thus ultimately

reinforcing the hierarchy and inequality.

Figure 3: Functional ambivalence

The blurred boundary between need and greed is the

key theme and an underlying principle by which the material is organised in Part 3: from practices fuelled by the need for bare necessities in the beginning of Chapter 5 to those driven by greed, ambition and passion to challenge the constraints by the end of Chapter 6. For example, UK regulations regarding expenses incurred by Members of Parliament (MPs) exempt second-home sales from capital-gains tax and create an incentive for gaming the system. An MP can choose which home is registered as his or her official ‘second home’ with the apparent aim of maximising financial gain. A number of MPs were alleged to have made substantial profits by selling taxpayer-funded second homes at the market rate and excluding any profit from capital-gains tax (flipping). Other key themes in Part Three include the role of the state, the enabling power of constraints, and the sources of effectiveness of informal systems emerging in response to an over-controlling centre.

Motivational ambivalence is a central theme in Part Four: whatever the declared motivation in a legal case or anti-corruption campaign, some hidden interests may also be

served in the process.

Figure 4: Motivational ambivalence

In most cases, it is impossible to establish with certainty whether the

public motive takes precedence over the private, or the private over the public. Similar to the order of entries in the other parts – from more social to more instrumental in redistribution, from more binding forms of solidarity to non-conformist practices, from more of a need to more of a greed in market behaviour – the entries in Part Four are arranged according to the incentives used for domination: from ‘more of a carrot’ to ‘more of a stick.’ ‘Carrots’ (albeit with strings attached) are aimed at co-opting various groups into compliance by satisfying their needs whatever they might be: from a financial loan to a certain degree of impunity. Thus in India, beside the profits involved in adopting a political career path and the impunity that such careers grant, there is also a particular aura of prestige and status that goes hand in hand with political public posts in South Asia (see mafia raj). ‘Sticks’ illustrate how the system can punish people informally by using formal institutions selectively as ammunition (telefonnoe pravo in courts, kompromat in the media, psikhushka for the opposition), or by using informal leverage in formal contexts and resorting to the instruments of informal power.

The ambivalence of informal practices, multiple moralities, inconsistent legitimacies and blurred boundaries makes it possible to solve private problems on a daily basis. At the same time, however, this ambivalence also creates obstacles, or filters, that in the longer term impede the efficient implementation of public policy and may accordingly be harmful to society in general. Societies do differ, as argued in the concluding remarks to the second volume, but the question of whether some countries are more informal than others should be answered with reference not only to modernity but also to ambivalence.

Let us sum up the four types of ambivalence and outline their implications for social and cultural complexity (see Table 2).

Table 2: Types of ambivalence and their implications for social and cultural complexity

Types of ambivalence of informal practices	Modus operandi	Implications for analysing complexity	The continuum that proved useful in understanding grey zones and blurred boundaries	Associated concepts
Substantive ambivalence	Doublethink: relationship vs use of relationship	Multiple categorisation, impossibility of 'either-or' oppositions	From sociability to instrumentality in social relationships	Gift, Favour, Transfer, Transaction, Tribute
Normative ambivalence	Double standards: what we allow ourselves vs what we accept from another, denying but also practising	Multiple identities, Multiple moralities, Norms are contextual, Us and them are context-bound	From strong ties to weaker forms of solidarity	Identity, Solidarity, Particularism, Resistance capacity
Functional ambivalence	Double deed: supportive vs subversive in dealing with constraints that shape practices	Ambivalent functionality relativises 'good'/'bad' qualifiers	From need to greed in personal consumption	Survival strategies, Gaming the system, Part-time crime, Parallel societies
Motivational ambivalence	Double purpose: declared vs hidden agendas in co-optation and control	The public/private borderline is porous and contextual, Motive is camouflaged as its opposite, Co-optation and control are co-dependent	From co-optation by carrots to control by sticks, From material to non-material, From codified norms to oral commands	Patron-client relations, Power networks, Informal governance

Tackling complexity

The informal patterns, identified in this collection, are not simply an outcome of organising material or advancing comparative agendas. What the evidence highlights is that, despite their banal nature, marginal significance and under-the-radar scale, informal practices are central to the workings of human societies, their resilience and stability. Moreover, informal patterns, emerging from the comparative look at informal practices occurring in different contexts, point to the novel dimensions of our understanding of social and cultural complexity. I argue that ambivalence is one of the key determinants of social and cultural complexity – it allows informal practices to remain overlooked in research and policy, while also being the key know-how and a widely shared open secret in societies. Ambivalence (not ambiguity) enables one to master multiple identities, to navigate multiple moralities, and to make a smooth crossing between sociability and instrumentality (enacting friendship that observers would categorise as a use of friendship – see amici, amigos).

The ambivalence of informal practices is reflected in the majority of individual entries to the Encyclopaedia, so it is fitting that ambivalence – substantive, normative, functional and motivational – should also be reflected in the structuring of the encyclopaedia. Structuring complexity is a challenging task: entries cannot be organised consecutively, the structure must reflect the co-present, overlapping, and intertwined patterns of informality.

The inspiration comes from Slavoj Žižek’s thesis of the 'return to the economy of gift' and his discussion of the structures of world history, theorised by Kojin Karatani, whose basic premise is the use of modes of exchange (rather than modes of production, as in Marxism) as the tool with which to analyse the history of humanity. Karatani distinguishes four progressive modes of exchange: (a) gift exchange, which predominates in pre-state societies (clans and tribes exchanging gifts); (b) domination and protection, which predominate in slavery and feudal societies (here the exploitation is based on direct domination, but the dominating class has to offer something in exchange, such as protecting its subjects from danger); (c) commodity exchange of objects, which predominates in capitalism (free individuals exchange not only their products but also their own labour power); and (X) a further stage to come, a return to the gift-exchange at the higher level. This X is a Kantian regulative idea, a vision that has assumed different guises in the history of humanity, from egalitarian religious communities reliant on communal solidarity to anarchist cooperatives and communist projects, Zizek argues. The relevance of this vision of history lies, however, in the complexity of the architecture that Karatani introduces to his categorisation:

At the level of exchange, the ‘pure’ gift co-exists with the complex web of gift and counter-gift. In the passage from stage to stage, the previous stage does not disappear; although it is ‘repressed,’ the repressed returns in a new form. With the passage from A to B, gift-exchange survives as part of B, with the passage of B to C, A survives as nation/community and B (domination) survives as the state power. In this model, capitalism is not a ‘pure’ reign of B, but a triad (or, rather, a Borommean knot) of Nation-State-Capital: nation as the form of communal solidarity, state as a form of direct domination, capital as a form of economic exchange. All three of them are necessary for the reproduction of capitalist society.

An important aspect of Karatani’s iterative, unfolding structure of world history is his depiction of the increasing complexity of human societies in history. The complexity is expressed in co-existing, multi-layer, multi-stage, multi-mode assemblages of solidarity, domination and economic exchange. In other words, the modes of community, power and market – of giving, protecting and transacting – are all co-present, intertwined and resisting clear categorisations. Žižek postulates the return of the gift economy and other ‘repressed modes’ in the form of the radicalisation of religion.

In that vein, I propose the fourth dimension to Karatani's triad – re-distribution – that stems from the work of Karl Polanyi, Pierre Bourdieu, Janos Kornai, Jeremy Rifkin and others. Volume 1 starts with the discussion of the much under-researched subject of economies of favours and a wider range of practices of redistribution, and follows up with human dependence on identities/solidarity, transacting/markets and power/domination. The structure, emerging bottom-up rather than imposed top-down, devoid of chronological or geographical borders, has been an outcome but also a tool in organising the complex and ever-growing database of the Global Informality Project.

The method of knowing smiles

If Foucault’s Order of Things started from laughter, this encyclopaedia has grown out of a knowing smile – the smile of acknowledgement of an open secret about how things work. Informal practices escape regular attention by being the most routine aspect of societies’ social and cultural lives. Similar to Hannah Arendt’s formula of the ‘banality of evil’, it is the banality of informality that causes informal practices to be taken for granted by insiders and to remain unnoticed by outsiders. These are everyday practices associated with patronage, nepotism, favouritism, clientelism as well as the use of social connections to find employment and secure promotions, to influence official decisions, or to bypass formal procedures. Yet these practices stay in close proximity to some of the key challenges of the contemporary world – corruption, terrorism, illegal immigration, trafficking and cyber- crime. In other words, micro-practices and patterns of human interdependence often remain under the radar, while shaping large-scale phenomena. Such practices channel personal interest but also facilitate the resilience capacity in the world – its default modus operandi.

It is often assumed that the hidden nature of informal practices makes them difficult and even dangerous to research. Yet where there is a will, there is a way: in studying sensitive subjects associated with informal institutions, networks and practices, researchers encounter not only unwelcoming attitudes from respondents, but also methodological challenges associated with measurability and comparability, as well as pressures to move beyond disciplinary borders. And yet, research into informal practices is a growing field.

Every entry in this collection has its own methodology and disciplinary grounding. The conceptual entries – introductions and conclusions to the clusters – offer methodological insights and generalisation, but the Global Informality Project overall addresses the following methodological puzzles: how to trace practices that are elusive, how to overcome the limitations of disciplinary perspectives and border-bound area studies. As Gerald Mars notes in his conclusion to Chapter 6, practising fiddlers tend to act covertly, thereby creating an area of research most of which is not open to direct enquiry. Before any research on part-time crime can proceed, it is vital to suspend (without necessarily abandoning) one’s own moral standpoint: impartial understandings can be achieved only if, like anthropologists, one lays one’s own values aside. Only then can the field be assessed from the standpoint of the actors involved.

My own ethnographic work started with the puzzle of distinguishing friendship from blat (use of friendship). I tried to draw a line between the relationship and the use of the relationship, but stumbled instead upon grey zones, varying significantly depending on whether the relationship was best defined by regime of affection, regime of status, or regime of equivalence, on what kind of favours were involved, at whose expense and in which context. With time, it became possible to identify, articulate, measure and compare blat practices in Russia, and to explore sensitive subjects and open secrets by the method of knowing smiles in other societies.

Knowing smiles are partly about smiling, partly about knowing. Knowing open secrets is partly about knowing, partly also about not knowing and not questioning. It is a sign of awareness of transgression but also of recognition that it does not need to be spelt out. Masked hostility—expressed through ribbing—towards the researcher ‘daring’ to articulate this is indicative of these tensions. The semi-taboos against knowing, the complicity to leave things unarticulated, the ambiguities hidden behind open secrets are all pointers to sensitive subjects that invite innovative research.

The Global Informality Project open call included an invitation to participate in such an innovative endeavour and to contribute a short authored entry to the first Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (1,500 words including bibliography). Each entry focuses on a single practice (under its colloquial name) and includes at least some of the following:

• Name, definition, etymology and its translation into other languages
• How widely is it used?
• In which countries/regions/sectors is it found?
• Identify analogous practices, named differently in different countries (if possible).
• How does it relate to other informal practices (discuss similarities and differences if possible)?
• What are the implications of the chosen practice for politics/economy/society?
• Which method was or can be used for researching this practice?
• Give examples of this practice.
• How can the practice be measured?
• How does it develop and migrate?
• Which channels are currently available to policy makers to integrate expertise on informality?
• Cross-reference and recommend reading.

The open secret about informality is the gap between colonial, ideological or global official discourses (top-down) and the ways in which things are done or viewed in practice (bottom- up). Exploring that gap between the declared principles (say, the principles of accountability, equality, fairness, zero tolerance) and the pragmatic shifts the emphasis to the ways this gap is bridged in specific domains (see Potemkin villages). Highlighting grey zones and blurred boundaries between top-down and bottom-up perspectives points to the key challenges for both researchers and policy-makers. Commonplaces and micro-practices can sometimes reveal profound features of societies that elude us when tackled directly.

The method of knowing smiles can be illustrated by Sigmund Freud’s celebrated example of art forgery. To discover whether a painting is a forgery, the most effective way is to focus on minor details, such as how the painter depicts fingernails or the slope of a thumb. Most forgers can fake the major aspects of what is portrayed—it is the tiny details that give them away. Freud argued that the same is true of ‘trivial’ aspects of day-to-day life, such as slips of the tongue. The apparently trivial elements are key to understanding core dispositions of the personality, and I am making the same argument about the ‘disclosure’ of open secrets that the knowing smile represents – in Freud’s words, ‘secrets that we all know and the knowledge of which we always try to conceal from one another’.

In developing this point, our authors draw upon a variety of ‘masters of suspicion’—Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Erving Goffman, Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu—and seek to bring their insights together in revealing daily routines that can be branded as societies’ open secrets, commonly smiled at knowingly when brought up in a conversation. So far, neither knowing smiles nor open secrets have been analysed in a comparative way, so this encyclopaedia provides a unique opportunity to 'compare the incomparable', or at least see them in various contexts.

Main (ambivalent) findings

Informality is fringy but central

The evidence assembled in the project shows that informality matters in the workings of modern societies. We emphasise the key importance (if not predominance) of informality in the world, its variety and complexity, as well as the possibility to identify key patterns used in informal interactions. We have created the first world map of informality, where the entries are shown in their local habitat and identified in their language of origin. In the encyclopaedia, however, they are clustered with similar practices from all over the world, and thus are explained in both local and global contexts.

Informality is universal but can be invisible

Poverty and development correlate with the scale of informality, and certainly make informal practices more visible. The more developed societies are, the less visible (and hidden behind the facades of formal institutions) are their informal norms. It is not that informality does not exist in developed societies, rather that the norms developing in these societies have pushed it out of sight. Such invisibility stems partially from legal norms – informal practices tend to go either under or above the radar of the law – and partially from practical norms – the banality of informality that enables people to engage in behaviour that they do not necessarily find acceptable.

Informality works but it is elusive

It is common for people living under the pressure of systemic corruption to point out the effectiveness of peer pressure, solidarities and informal shortcuts, both to legitimise the informal ways of getting things done and to euphemise the terms. For the outsiders, their behaviour is an exercise in double standards: they criticise corruption, but also engage in corrupt practices routinely. This is the ambivalence that Giorgio Blundo and Jean-Paul Olivier de Sardan have termed ‘an incessant alternation between condemnation and tolerance’ while researching the ‘semantic fields of corruption’.

Informal practices are ambivalent but not necessarily hybrid

Forms of ambivalence include: substantive (when transactions are seen as substantially different by participants and observers); normative (i.e.. when others do it – it is wrong, when I do it – it is right); functional (informal shortcuts are both a problem (subversive) and a solution (supportive of actors and systems); and motivational (whereby public or private motives are camouflaged as the opposite). For example, if a gift is seen as a bribe, it does not necessarily become a hybrid entity (a ‘brift,’ if we use Abel Polese’s term), but it remains ambivalent: a gift for one and a bribe for another, enabled by the tension it produces. The ambivalent nature of informal practices makes the borders between relationships and the use of relationships, between need and greed, between us and them, between public and private easy to cross. In this collection, the ambivalent nature of informal practices becomes articulated in each entry, but also emerges from the clusters of entries that highlight the tensions outlined above.

Constraints are disabling but also enabling

The variety and complexity of informal practices around the world illustrate not only the creativeness (or non-conformism) of human beings, but also the enabling power of constraints. In other words, just as informal practices can be viewed as both a problem and a solution, constraints can be seen as both a restriction and a resource. The multiple examples of cross-border activities and non- conformist behaviour included in this encyclopaedia substantiate this point. The perspectives on informality that focus on the subversive impact it has on formal institutions and political or economic regimes often lead to predictions of the dissipation of informality and the rise of effective formal institutions.

Informality is context-bound, but the contexts are not necessarily country- or culture-specific

The literature on informality is grounded in geographical, socio-cultural and political-economic areas, with its most recent peak in post-socialist societies. As the concluding remarks to the second volume show, the question of whether some countries are more informal than others is not as simple as it seems. A cross-discipline analysis and a ‘network’ perspective are essential to answer it. We took the case of Russia to illustrate this point. On the one hand, Russia has a reputation for informality, complexity and unpredictability and, after all, has been the area of origin for the Global Informality Project. Russia offers a comprehensive range of practices that can be examined both in historical perspective and in contemporary contexts, which can only be represented by the multi-disciplinary network of researchers. It would not be possible to achieve a similar coverage for each country in equal measure in one publication, but a detailed coverage of one country points to where open secrets might be found in others. On the other hand, our take on whether some countries are more informal than others is that one should downplay geographical borders when dealing with informal patterns (the bottom-up structure of the volume seeks to convey this point). Understanding informal practices, tensions and paradoxes might be more important for grasping local contexts than national stereotypes.

The dichotomies present both a problem and a solution for categorisation

‘Neither–nor’ or ‘both–and’ patterns of ambivalence dwell on dichotomies but also aim at circumventing them. For example, normative ambivalence, associated with the double standards embedded in identities, solidarities and the fundamental divide into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ makes it possible to turn constraints into opportunities. In his concluding remarks to the first volume, Zygmunt Bauman identifies the implications of the organising forces of modernity and argues that the divisive nature of dichotomies must give way to a cosmopolitan mindset in order to confront tendencies toward radicalisation and fragmentation, driven by divisive identity politics and religious beliefs. It is the potential of ambivalence that can be integrated into such policy thinking.

Visualising the invisible has proved very difficult

How does one visualise something that is supposed to go unseen, unnoticed and undetectable? Most practices in this Encyclopaedia are hidden from the public eye, shared as an open secret and left unarticulated or unacknowledged in official discourse. And yet this volume contains pictures. Even if a photograph can hardly portray a practice or convey the ‘practical sense’ or ‘feel for the game’ associated with informal practices, it nevertheless depicts a particular context and negotiates the boundary between what can be made visible and what will remain as imagined, inferred or implied. As with the punch-line in a joke, some things are articulated while others are left to the imagination; it is perhaps no accident that a few images come from satirical sources. The kaleidoscope of images assembled in the volume depicts at least some of the daily circumstances in which such practices occur and illustrates the often mundane nature of their context. One could attribute some value to the regularity and frequency of images throughout the volume, had their number not been limited and had it been easier to secure permission to reproduce copyright material. As things stand, we had to select images according to criteria that do not allow the reader to speculate on any correlation between the visibility of informal practices and their visualisation.

Stigmatisation of informality is counterproductive in policy - integrating complexity into policy will work

Let us outline assumptions about informality in Table 3 (on the left) and counterintuitive ways (on the right) in which informality can be taken into account in policy-making.

Table 3: Assumptions and counterintuitive implications for policy

Assumptions	Counterintuitive implications for policy
Poverty and survival strategies	Entrepreneurship and innovation
Underdevelopment of institutions	Informality dwells in grey zones and helps reproduce ambivalent patterns, but underdevelopment of institutions is only part of the story. The strength of social networks for building trust (back-up), survival kits (redistribution), safety-nets (solidarity, cohesion) and connectivity should be factored in
Socialism and post-socialism	Informality is present in all societies under certain constraints and in particular contexts
Oppressive states and 'weapons of the weak'	Gaming the system and 'weapons of the wealthy' are common in mature democracies
Formal is good, informality is bad	Formal is an enabler of the informal, including the conniving state. Informal is an enabler for the formal and should be used for channeling policies
There is good informality and there is bad informality (informal governance, informal networks, informal institutions can all be good and bad)	Informality can help produce measurable indicators for assessing models of governance
Social capital can be positive and negative	Social capital is ambivalent
Informality is about freedom	Informality is an enabler but it also imposes limitations; informality is the basis of resistance capacity
Policies tend to rely on laws, written rules and norms	Policies can also rely on oral commands, tacit agreements and in-group relationships
Informality is about conformity	Informality is also about non-conformity

Overall, we claim novelty of this collection of practices that has never been seen together, yet also includes an impressive cross-discipline and cross-area bibliography on informality around the globe - a brilliant find in itself.

Notes

Further reading

Bauman, Z. 1990. ‘Modernity and Ambivalence’. Theory, Culture and Society 7(2): 143–69.
Borges, J. L. 1941/1975. ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’ (1941) Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Christiansen, T. and Piattoni, S. (eds) 2003. Informal Governance in the European Union. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Meyer, G. 2006. Formal Institutions and Informal Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Hungary, Poland, Russia and Ukraine (ECPR series). Leverkusen: Verlag Barbara Budrich.
Rifkin, J. 2000. Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience. New York: Penguin Putnam.