Newsletter 3 INFORM

The “INFORM mandala”

As a part of building our effort to understand how informal practices and structures shape political and social relations, we created a heuristic device (in the group we fondly called it the “INFORM mandala”) which included all the factors which needed to be taken into account, the sequence of steps, as well as an overview of the gaps that impede institutional change in the societies of South-East Europe. The model tries to account for, on one hand, forms of capital and habitus of the actors, and on the other formal and informal constraints which limit and enable practices.

Our research focused on informal practices – ones that from the standpoint of formal institutions are regarded as illegitimate and/or treated as illegal. In the field of economy we studied the constellations of integrative practices that make up the informal economy and the practices of economic networking; in the political field we studied the practices that are at the core of political clientelism (such as voting practices, business practices, media practices, governance practices), as well as governance practices related to the phenomenon of neopatrimonial rule. In the sphere of everyday life, we monitored practices of employment, of obtaining medical treatment, practices of education, of resolving cases in the courts, as well as practices of citizens in their dealings with public offices, along with the use of gifts or other inducements as means for realizing goals in these fields.

If the initial step in our research was always the detailed description of informal practices, then the next step was the identification of the motivations standing behind the use of informal practices. We classified motives into four groups: perceptions of the state, value orientations and ideology, inability to satisfy needs, and material and symbolic interests. We attempted to correlate these motives with belonging to gender, age, residential, educational groups and social classes.

The final step was identifying structural factors which encouraged these types of practices. Most structural causes revolved around 1) the resources to which the carriers of practices (individuals, households, networks, organizations) have access (economic, political, social, cultural and symbolic capital), and 2) influences from other fields (primarily the political field and economic field).

One question we wanted to explain is how it is that rules (both formal and informal) do not automatically become constraints. In order for them to become effective in practice, they must pass through what we have called an ‘enforcement belt’ – the process of interpretation, of designing mechanisms of implementation and of positive and negative sanctions which enable their effectiveness. The salience of rules depends not only on people’s willingness or unwillingness to comply, but also on resources people have available to them and influences from other fields. At some level, despite these social influences, social practices can be seen as essentially improvisational, making room for agency – the respect for or avoidance of formal rules, following informal rules, combining formal and informal rules, using resources which are not typical/acceptable in certain fields – in the attempt of social agents to achieve their goals. This improvisational character of social practices is to a great extent enabled by a set of gaps between social factors that affect the practices: • Gap 1: Between rules and constraints (formal rules and formal constraints, and informal rules and informal constraints) • Gap 2: Between constraints and practices (formal constraints and everyday practices, and informal constraints and everyday practices) • Gap 3: Between formal constraints and informal constraints • Gap 4: Between pressures that formal constraints and informal constraints put on social agents and the resources social agents have at their disposal • Gap 5: Between social values that are imposed top-down and popular norms in SEE societies.