The other day I attended the launch of a two-volume ‘Encyclopaedia of Informality’ edited by Alena Ledeneva, an impressive and valued former colleague at UCL for whom I have a lot of time. I had hoped to get there early enough to participate in one or another small-group workshop sessions on selected topics, but I couldn’t make it. But I did catch the general discussion and a word with Alena, and I undertook to pitch in with a blog. It is, I must add, the blog of an ‘outsider’. Moreover I have opted not to consult the Encyclopaedia – which I purchased for £50 on the spur of the moment – because rightly or wrongly I thought it best to write something off the top of my head.
‘Informality’ oils wheels; and it does so by time, place and institution. As Alena noted in passing, the later Wittgenstein is relevant here, ‘meaning by use by language game’, as is, I would suggest, the theory of those influenced by him, like Garfinkel. Informailty is a phenomenon worthy of, and justifying, examination in its its own right, that much I buy. If I might borrow (reluctantly, and not without embarrassment, even pain) from the terminology of variable analysis though, I’d be tempted to insist that informality is more often an intervening than an independent variable.
When I was on the tube heading for UCL’s Wilkins Building I had two thoughts. They were allied to specific concepts: Weber’s ‘social closure’ and CW Mills’ ‘tacit understanding’. Approaching informality through either of these lenses might show a return.
Weber most obviously deployed the notion of social closure in his study of the multidimensional phenonenon of social stratification (class, status, party/power); but he also alluded to its much wider relevance. Wherever the insider/outside dichotomy appears, so too do issues of inclusion/exclusion and ‘othering’. Social closure is as pertinent to postcode gangs, problem- or disease-specific internet groups, classroom cliques and so on as it is to deeper, broad-brush societal divisions. And the critical input of informal ‘rule-making’ and ‘rule breaking’ has long been home territory to symbolic and dramaturgical interactionism as well as to Wittgenstein-inspired ethnomethodology and phenomenological sociology (via Weber’s disciple Schutz). So there are prior sociological traditions that provide means as well as foci for considering informality: it is in and amongst the day-to-day minutiae and intimacies of the micro-relations of production and reproduction of the lifeworld that informality most tellingly bites. With reference to Habermas’ lifeworld/system distinction, it is in particular at the interface of lifeworld and system – and in the context of ongoing system rationalisation/colonisation – that informality can be pivotal.
Mills compares and contrasts his concept of ‘tacit understanding’ with that of ‘conspiracy’. While: (1) many a real conspiracy can be effective disguised by ideological rhetorics against ‘conspiracy theory and theorists’, and (2) elites are always ready to conspire if and when necessary, it is far more normal practice for the advantaged in general, and elites in particular, to get what they want via tacit understanding. In other words, they share an amalgam of types of capital or asset (material, psychological, social, cultural, status, spatial, maybe even biological) that give birth, naturally (no need for forceps or a C-section), to what Bourdieu calls a habitus. This is at the very core of Mills’ The Power Elite.
So what follows? In a nutshell, while informality certainly warrants investigation in its own right, and doubtless possesses properties intrinsic to it, it is also, and most frequently/saliently, an aspect of much else: to adopt critical realist terminology, it it is fertile ground for (causal) ‘generative mechanisms’ in what is ineluctably a structured, but not structurally determined, ‘open system’. As far as this ‘much else’ is concerned, context is paramount. But, to repeat, informality has its own character and dimensions and I’m sure will yield productive ideal types and typologies (witness Alena’s own studies of ‘soft power’ in Russia).
As this scatter of remarks testifies, I am a novice in this field and have yet to dip into this Enclyclopaedia. So I’m closing by tempting my arm and adding a few additional thoughts.
First, as was mentioned by more than one discussant at the launch, informality qua oiling of wheels/getting things done can service bad as well as good projects. Second, multiple sociological theories and studies are around to be mined as we move ahead (see above). Third, informality lends itself most readily to ethnographic case studies. Fourth, several foci for investigation are popping into my mind, I’m sure reflective of my own research interests. Here are a couple:
- How is Mills’ ‘tacit understanding’ informally accomplished, reproduced and elaborated amongst those – I would say, class-driven – players in the tiny hard core of a capitalist executive which is now transnational, nomadic (Bauman) and, however strong the continuity of capitalist structures, more heterogeneous in nationality and background and given to individualism and opportunism (Davis)?
- If, as I have contended, it is appropriate to suggest that stigma is increasingly being weaponised’, that is, ‘blame is being heaped on shame’ (leading ultimately to ‘abject’ subjects it is easier for states to subdue and neglect), then how does informality play into this dynamic and, at the sharp end, how is abjection ‘acted out’ in the lifeworld?
I’m getting into the swing of this and could go on and on, like many an academic; but my sympathies for readers of blogs requires me to call a halt around now. I close with my congratulations once more to UCL’s Alena Ledeneva and her colleagues. Alena’s own work on informality and the Foucault-like diffusion of power in Russia signals a paradigm. I will now turn belatedly to items in the Encyclopaedia.