Shifting Landscapes: Informal Economic Practices in Georgian Port City of Poti

The dominant religions in Southeastern European countries (Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania), Orthodoxy, Islam, and Catholicism, contain social teachings, which include several norms that deal with certain forms of economic practices. These post-socialist societies develop various forms of informal practices, some of which are contrary to elements of religious social teachings and religious ethics. In the process of the revitalization of religiosity after the fall of socialism in this region, the question can be posed as to whether the attitude towards informality and the application of certain informal economic practices, which range from the illegitimate to the illegal (getting things “done” through informal connections, tax evasion, corruption), correlates to some extent with the level of religiosity and the type of religion. The results of the research show that there is a connection between belonging to a certain confession or religion, self-declared religiosity and level of religiosity, and approving of informal practices and engaging in them. At the state level, a specific dynamic was developed even when it came to approving of and engaging in informal practices depending on whether the members of certain confessions were a minority or a majority at the level of the observed country.

During the process of development of remote regions of Russian Empire, the state played the most important role, legislatively regulating the resettlement process and penal colonization. Despite the efforts of the state, in-formal economic practices became the means of adaptation of migrants to the new climatic and social circum-stances they were exposed to as a result of migration. The variety of the practices was most vividly manifested during the years of large-scale peasant resettlements to Siberia at the turn of the 19th — 20th c. This phenomenon was reflected in the reports, essays and travel diaries of officials, which supervised the land management matters of the resettlement, which made possible the comparison of informal economic practices in different climatic zones — the taiga and the steppe. The methodological basis of the study is the concept of the informal economy by T. Shanina, which considers the informal practices as a universal restorative mechanism that makes it possible to “soften” the most acute social and economic contradictions. That mechanism provides survival in such condi-tions when other social mechanisms fail. The resettlement households of the taiga regions were characterized by primitive methods of deforestation and felling for sale to the steppe districts, which prompted chances in the na-ture of urmans. As a consequence of the informal economic behavior of late settlers in the areas with abundant forests, the building density of homesteads became high, which resulted in that even newly formed settlements appeared as solid wooden walls. Such dense building development contradicted the directives of the resettlement officials, which appealed to the building statute regulations. In the southern steppe regions of Western Siberia, the settlers used land holdings on the basis of a seizure right using shifting cultivation system and seeding the fields mainly with wheat without applying crop rotation. In the settlements located at the bitter-salt lakes, hydraulic engi-neering works were carried out. However, the late settlers ignored such improvements; they denied the suitability of the filters, did not monitor their condition, and even contributed to the pollution of the water reservoirs arranged for drinking. The adaptive result of the informal practices is the increased stability of the peasant economy. De-pending on the yields, the new settlers was able to transfer the center of economic operations to and survive diffi-cult times. The development of promysels saved peasant families from hunger and financial collapse, yet contrib-uted to the spread of non-progressive, backward forms of land and resource use, which were based on extensive agriculture and a predatory attitude towards nature.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine three explanatory perspectives in the academic literature on informal economies that seek to account for agents’ engagement in informal economic practices. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology to interrogate the existing perspectives and to provide a conceptual rethinking of informal economies and informal economic practices. Findings The paper reveals an inherent scholastic epistemocentrism in the established perspectives. By privileging either an objectivist or a subjectivist viewpoint, these accounts do not examine the practical knowledge and logic that constitute agents’ knowledgeable engagement in informal economic practices. By making use of Bourdieu’s thinking tools of “field”, “capital” and “the habitus”, the paper offers a conceptual rethinking of informal economic practices as the product of a dialectic relationship between socially objectivated structures and subjective representations and experiences. Originality/value The paper introduces a reflexive rethinking of informality that draws on but also develops an emergent literature on informal economic practices as relational and context bound.

After the breakdown of the Soviet Union new cultural and economic practices emerged out of the fragments of the collapsed state. Exploring economic activities in the Russian Far East, this book focuses on new informal economic practices and non-regulated commercial organizations and seeks to understand the emerging roles of entrepreneurs, organized crime, and the state in post Soviet Russia. Based on anthropological fieldwork in the Russian Far East, especially in the port city of Vladivostok, Holzlehner focuses on large open-air markets, on so-called shuttle traders that cross the Russian-Chinese border on a regular basis to import cheap consumer goods for local markets, and on different organized crime groups, which evolved during the transition period in the Russian Far East. Based on the analysis of social networks and focusing on different qualities of relational ties, the boo proposes a methodological and theoretical apparatus to understand the mechanics and dynamics of informal economic networks more thoroughly. Tobias Holzlehner earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is currently a senior lecturer at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin Luther University Halle Wittenberg.

Formal and informal employment have traditionally been perceived as separate. This division usually has a social, geographical and temporal character. However, it has also been argued that formal and informal economic practices are not necessarily distinctive and often coexist within the same spaces, firms or even jobs. This article explores the blurring boundaries between formal and informal work. By using examples from four sectors of the Irish economy, we demonstrate how some employers ‘informalise’ working conditions of their formal employees. As we show, such informalisation is mainly focused on cutting employment costs and setting earnings below the minimum wage. This has resulted in a further erosion of the formal–informal division in some sectors of Ireland's post‐recession labour market.

Discussing the case of institutional change and its discontents in the Georgian context, this article critically engages with one of the most influential perspectives on informal economic practices, namely the new institutionalist perspective. The examination of the responses to the new-institutionalist remedies reveals counterintuitive outcomes to allegedly successful market-enhancing reforms. The reforms were resisted and they failed to deliver the promise of improved entrepreneurial opportunities and eased social vulnerability. I suggest that the new-institutionalist prescriptions result in counterintuitive outcomes as they are based on two misleading assumptions. First, they read informal practices as a priori market-like and second, they see the transition to a market economy as a relatively harmonious process. I argue that, informal economic practices are not necessarily market-like, nor is the establishment of market-enhancing reforms uncontested by informally operating actors. Instead, the persons operating informally draw on non-commodified resources and suffer significant social and economic losses when the state-supported process of marketization deepens. The process of adjusting to marketization and coping with its costs inevitably involves elaboration of practices and interventions that defy and contradict the market logic. Precisely, this dismissal of the need for non-market-based solutions in current theory and practice leads to informalization of the resistance against marketization.

This chapter explores dynamics of informality in the post-socialist Hungarian context by focusing on low-level corruption and informal economic practices and employing a socio-legal perspective. It looks at the interactions between people, state officials, and institutions, searching for disconnects between the law as it is posited by the state and law as it is lived, disconnects thus resulting in plural normative orders. The chapter draws on data collected between April and May 2015 including 20 in-depth interviews and observations. The participants were recruited from—and connected to—the state sectors which are most influenced by informal economic practices: police, health care, education, local government, and handling the European Union funds.

This study investigates how social networks influence informal work practices in the workplace. Employee communication, teamwork, and knowledge sharing are greatly impacted by informal networks, which are made up of connections that do not fall under official organisational structures. This study uses the framework of social network theory to investigate how strong and weak relationships support information sharing, creativity, and problem-solving within an organisation. The impact of technology and remote work on social networks and informal practices, as well as the role of social networks in the workplace, are all highlighted in the study. The study also highlights possible issues that may occur in informal networks, like exclusion and information silos. To improve collaboration and innovation, organisations are advised to balance formal and informal practices, leverage informal leaders, and cultivate inclusive networks. In the end, social networks can be used to comprehend and maximise informal work practices, which can enhance employee engagement and organisational performance.

Theorising informality and social embeddedness for the study of informal transport. Lessons from the marshrutka mobility phenomenon

ABSTRACTThe Trailer Park Boys series has received academic attention, much of which has been overtly critical. This study utilizes Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies framework to evaluate the show and its film adaptations. It argues that the show exemplifies alternative and informal economic practices which include alternative (non-capitalistic) businesses; substitute employee payment modes; alternative currencies; unpaid labor; and varying non-market practices, the most common being theft. These resident-led practices aid characters with multiple identities and worker roles in surviving a life bound by limited opportunity of formal work. In chorus with illegal and legal economic schemes, the community economy of Sunnyvale Trailer Park stimulates ethical decision-making in character interactions and in decision-making around topics such as surplus labor and profit management. Ecologically, various characters have reconstituted their relationship with their waste-filled area of residence, and some have gone as far as to provide provisional public goods to other park residents.

This chapter contributes to an understanding of the role of Lebanese political elites in molding state institutions and distorting Lebanon’s public finances, which severely skew Lebanese citizens’ attitude toward informal economic practices as Lebanon plunged into a sovereign debt crisis in 2020. While it faults elites for nurturing an unsustainable political-economic model that builds on state debt, harms the balance of payments, and structures the economy around unproductive sectors that benefit a privileged few, it gages the impact of these institutional shifts on citizens’ embracement of informality. It finds that central bank restrictions on citizens’ access to their U.S. Dollar bank deposits, coupled with monetary dislocations that create multiple currency exchange rates on the market, spawn a set of informal economic practices. It reveals that citizens’ adoption of this informality helps them salvage part of their frozen assets, challenge state regulations of the market and national currency as a larger volume of business activity now occurs outside formal channels, and, quite significantly, contest the political-economic model undergirding Lebanon’s sectarian system. In so doing, citizens’ espousal of informality helps them implicitly negotiate a new social contract with the state and Lebanese elites by shifting the old economic model that underpinned this dominant sectarian system.

Reviewed by: Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice Samantha King Rebecca Prentice, Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015. 248 pp. There has been growing recognition in recent years that the pressures associated with neoliberal governance models are actually promoting and expanding participation in alternative, illicit, and informal economic practice in a variety of social contexts. This dynamic has raised new and reinvigorated enduring anthropological questions related to the cultural meanings of economic practice and the role of hegemonic formations in both shaping and being shaped by local livelihoods. Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice offers a significant and nuanced contribution to these debates. This book presents an engaging ethnographic exploration of how women garment workers are negotiating neoliberal economic restructuring from the particular cultural and historical perspective of the Caribbean—a region often characterized as being on the losing side of globalization. In Trinidad, IMF-backed restructuring began opening protected national markets to intense global competition in the 1990s, a process that substantially reconfigured production requirements and employment opportunities in the local garment industry. As production became more unstable and demanding, a significant portion of garment work shifted to the informal sector. Today, Trinidad’s garment industry is comprised of a variety of dispersed, heterogeneous sites including factories, illegal sweatshops, independent workshops, and home-based enterprises. In Thiefing a Chance, Prentice demonstrates how the agency and flexibility of women has facilitated these transitions and in many ways enabled the local garment industry to endure. Her conclusions and analysis [End Page 975] are based upon 15 months of ethnographic research in Trinidad, which included nine months working on the shop floor at Signature Fashions, a pseudonym for a local garment factory that produces high-end fashions for the regional clothing market. What Prentice uncovers in the factory is a hidden world of productive labor through which illicit and informal practices have become integral, yet unacknowledged, aspects of the neoliberal order of work. Through such practices, known collectively by workers as “thiefing a chance,” women utilize the factory as a resource to surreptitiously engage in entrepreneurial activities such as training themselves on new machines, professionally finishing homemade garments, and copying Signature Fashions patterns for outside use. These types of covert strategies reference a cultural discourse common throughout the Black Atlantic that valorizes opportunistic and flexible economic practice as an expression of individual independence and creativity. Such endogenously derived forms of economic self-expression are intimately informed by the persistent need for Caribbean people to continually negotiate and adapt to capitalism’s enduring influence in the region—from plantation slavery through neoliberal economic restructuring. Yet recent anthropological work has also noted a substantial overlap between this historically informed subaltern expression of flexible self-reliance and the entrepreneurial ethos venerated by the contemporary neoliberal order. In this important book, Prentice seeks to ethnographically document this convergence and consider what it means. Thiefing a chance, she argues, represents a metaphor for local life under neoliberalism as the “expression of an individualistic, enterprising subjectivity” embraced and embodied by workers that “both subverts and con-firms” contemporary capitalist discipline (90). The book is organized into eight chapters, each of which draws upon rich ethnographic detail to further the anthropological analysis. The introduction highlights the main arguments of the text (as described briefly above) and outlines the theoretical and methodological approaches of the book. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the Signature Fashions factory and brand. Prentice begins by situating Signature Fashions within the political economic history of the garment industry in Trinidad and then moves to an analysis of the relations of production in the factory. This discussion interrogates the nature and practice of industrial flexibility, or the ability of production to respond to dynamic market conditions. While this has generally been theorized as a crucial achievement of the neoliberal [End Page 976] firm, Prentice convincingly demonstrates how, at Signature, flexibility is a complex and contested process that is often facilitated by the coordinated, covert actions of workers as opposed to the formal structure and deliberate planning...

The repatriation and inclusion of Muslim Meskhetians, forcefully displaced by the Soviet government from Georgia to Central Asia during the 1940s, is still ongoing. In 1977, some Meskhetian families settled in the village of Nasakirali in western Georgia. The Soviet Georgian government built houses for the repatriates in a separate district, referred to as the “Island.” The location acquired a symbolic meaning for Meskhetians. After 40 years of repatriation, Meskhetians still remain “islanders:” isolated from the majority population, speaking a different language, practicing a different religion, and facing different employment opportunities. This study explores the coping mechanisms used by Muslim Meskhetians to sustain themselves and their families and improve their social conditions in a strictly Christian post-socialist country where “Islam is taken as a historical other.” The study primarily asks how employment/seasonal migration in Turkey changed the lives of Meskhetians by adapting their social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capital and became the only viable solution for overcoming social marginalization. The study explores how informality allows social mobility, changes gender attitudes, and helps “islanders” reach the “mainland” by becoming“Halal”—truthful and reliable. The study applies Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of “capital” and “symbolic power” for understanding Meskhetians' informal economic practices.

In rural Russia, local economic complexes are, as a rule, a symbiosis of formal and informal relationships and practices. Ignoring this fact entails an incomplete understanding of the real processes taking place here and often leads to incorrect conclusions about ways to solve key problems at the local level. On the empirical materials of local studies, the article reveals the features and trends of the development of informal economic relations and practices in rural areas of post-Soviet Russia, reveals the essential causal relationships that determine the content and nature of the changes taking place here. The informal sector occupies a significant place in the rural economy of Russia, which creates significant difficulties both in its scientific research and in its practical management. Although this topic is quite extensively presented in the scientific literature, it is not yet necessary to assert regarding the countryside that we have a complete picture of the processes taking place in the informal economy. Particular attention is paid to the transformation of the household sector and mutual assistance in the context of a deeper penetration of rational individualism into the relations of rural residents. The positive and negative consequences of these changes are shown, as well as the conditions under which the evolution of the informal rural economy can follow a path that meets the interests of sustainable development of rural territories.

Informal economies' relevance for peacebuilding is widely acknowledged. By providing an alternative interpretation in relation to the view that informality emerges in post-conflict environments due to the state's institutional weakness, this article contends that in Kosovo the principles of informality and its reproduction are inherent to informality itself. The article turns to the analytics of Pierre Bourdieu in order to reveal aspects of Kosovar informality left unexamined by established approaches. It illustrates how intrinsic inequalities and power relations constitute and reproduce informal economic practices throughout a circular rationale. Rather than a direct function of state weakness, informality in Kosovo is an effect of agents' engagement in knowledgeable and everyday practices. Agents' susceptibility contributes to the temporary fixing of meanings and doings that enable differentiations yet also interdependencies between relatively powerful and relatively powerless businesses. The article reflects on the implications of an intrinsic rationale for the politics of informality within peacebuilding operations.