Informal relations as a tool for socialization and adaptation of state and municipal employees

The article proposes an algorithm for assessing the environment of informal relations between employees of state and municipal institutions. The purpose of the study is to improve management processes by assessing informal relations as a tool for socialization and adaptation of employees of state and municipal institutions. Based on a literature review, objectives for managing informal relationships were set. Further, the characteristics of the environment of informal relations are revealed, for the assessment of which the methods and techniques of domestic and foreign authors can be applied. The paper offers recommendations on the application of methods and techniques for studying the environment of informal relations between staff of state and municipal institutions. Applied methods: analysis of sources, comparison, legal method. The novelty of the work lies in the substantiation of the application of methods and techniques for assessing the psychological climate in the team, the level of job satisfaction, conflict, informal leadership to study the environment of informal relations. The practical significance of achieving the desired level of the environment lies in the ability to increase the level of retention of employees, to provide flexibility in making managerial decisions and their implementation.

Classification and Volume Coordination Tasks of Organization Activity and Behavior

Based on the process approach, the article classifes the types of coordination tasks of different complexity and forms. Factors of influence on labor intensity of coordination tasks of activities and behavior are identifed. It is proposed to group factors of influence on the standard of manageability in connection with the solution of coordination tasks. The need and composition of the tasks of using informal relations and structure in coordination are justifed.

Commensality and Individual Eating: Mediating Social Relationships during Work Breaks

Based on an analysis of eating during work hours, this article looks at the issue of maintaining informal social relations. Various forms of the gathering together of individuals are important in the maintenance of social relations. Very often, casual or leisure-time gatherings, whether they are to mark an important event or celebration, or are just a coffee or lunch break during work hours, involve eating or drinking. However, colleagues and co-workers do not always eat at the same time, especially regarding day-to-day eating during work hours. In this paper, the focus is on the relative importance of eating alone or eating in a group when researching the maintenance of informal relations. The first objective of this research is to clarify the social aspects in research on eating and to survey the scientific literature on commensality and eating alone. Second the paper looks at how eating in a group as opposed to individual eating are expressed as part of the daily eating routine with ones co-workers. By going through these objectives, the question is raised – how would ways of maintaining informal relations change if there an ever greater number of co-workers decided to eat alone?

The Financial Services Act

This chapter analyses the 1986 Financial Services Act (FSA), which complemented the Big Bang by instituting a light-touch and arm’s-length form of regulation of the City of London. In 1981, the government commissioned a legal academic—Gower—to investigate Britain’s financial regulations and make recommendations on future amendments. Gower proposed a system of self-regulation that would be directly supervised by a government body. This form of state oversight was met with disapproval by the government and Bank. However, the impending Big Bang changed policymakers’ opinions. This radical liberalization would invite global actors to operate in the City, which in turn necessitated the creation of an impartial and legally enforced system of rules. Nevertheless, the Thatcher government was concerned that Gower’s proposals would make them politically responsible for future financial crises, while the Bank worried that their informal relations with the City would be interrupted by government meddling. As such, the government and Bank worked to depoliticize Gower’s plans by inserting a private body between the government and the City, and thus insulate policymakers from legitimacy problems that would result from financial crises. FSA can thus be understood as an attempt to create a depoliticized framework of financial governance that would simultaneously provide a clear legal framework for Britain’s newly liberalized financial system and protect the state authorities from the political backlash derived from this financialized pattern of growth.

Conflict resolution practice in public procurement: evidence from Russia

Purpose This paper aims to analyze conflict resolution practice in public procurement. The specific feature of this sphere is the presence of the state and the resulting differences in assessing the chances of protecting one’s interests in court, as well as the effectiveness of judicial conflict resolution mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on the findings of a large-scale survey of suppliers conducted in 2017. To identify the characteristics of suppliers that use different conflict resolution mechanisms, probit-models were evaluated. For robustness check, combined mechanisms for resolving conflict situations were also considered and multi-nomial logistic regression was used. Findings The survey results showed that the majority of suppliers prefer to resolve conflicts in public procurement using an out-of-court negotiation with procurers while only 31% of respondents resort to judicial proceedings. At the same time, suppliers potentially involved in informal relations with procurers, are less likely to go to court and less often use negotiations. Practical implications The results of the study can be used as a justification for the development of a regulatory and organizational framework for the use of negotiations, mediation, arbitration and other alternate methods of conflict resolution in public procurement. Originality/value This paper makes an important contribution to the conflict-handling strategies of businesses and government by presenting for the first time a quantitative assessment of the prevalence of mechanisms for resolving conflicts in public procurement and factors influencing the choice of a conflict resolution mechanism.

Informal International Relations

There has been a proliferation of works on informal dimensions of international relations. Putting the scholarship under the banner of informal international relations (IIR), [A1] the value preposition of research and publications on informal aspects of international political life is critically explored in order to chart promising pathways to further research in this growing field of study. Three generations of IIR scholarship may be identified. The first-generation scholarship took the IIR approach without explicitly acknowledging it. The second-generation scholars treated it primarily as an anomaly that ought to be explained. The third-generation scholarship seeks to give IIR a conceptual clarity, theorize it, and show the analytical utility of the concept. Although the IIR scholarship has given us a new outlook into international political life, the IR literature on informality is biased in at least three ways. First, it focuses mostly on informal politics in international organizations (IOs) housed in Western Europe and North American states. It is insightful and informative in the discussion of informality in member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) but lacks similar cutting-edge analysis when it comes to informal aspects of international life in the rest of the world. The IIR scholarship neglects the rich tapestry of materials and insights from the Global South and Eastern Europe. Second, it is dominated by studies of informal governance. Other aspects of informal relations, namely, informal practices, processes, norms, and informal rules, have received little attention. Third, it is dominated by rational choice approaches. Perspectives such as critical constructivism, practice theory, intersectionality, neocolonialism, decolonial perspective, and postcolonialism, among others, are rarely used by third-generation scholars to explore informal international life. Finally, IIR ideas are deployed primarily as a last resort or as something used to explain negative political outcomes. IR scholars turn to the informal as a unit of analysis when traditional issue-areas such as formal state structures, formal IOs, official processes, codified norms, and written rules cannot help, and they deploy informal ideas only when well-known variables including state power, powerful registered domestic groups, and legalized nonstate actors are unable to explain a given political problem. But as those who have studied the issue carefully observed, the informal rather than the formal should be the baseline for IR analysis. The discipline of IR will be improved considerably if informality is prioritized and all facets of informal international life are explored in a systematic manner.

Factors of formation of the professional subculture of legal professionals in modern Russian society

The phenomenon of professional subculture in modern society is associated not only with the increasing differentiation of labour, but also with the attempts of people who work in any communities to separate themselves from other professional groups. The specifics of the professional subculture of legal professionals are determined not only by the peculiarities of legal activity and the uniqueness of professional knowledge and skills, but also by social engagement, the specifics of functioning social institutions that reproduce the subculture. The use of systemic and structural-functional approaches allows to single out objective and subjective factors that influence the formation of the professional subculture of legal actors, to consider the institutionalisation of informal legal practices as a cause of professional deformation of professionals. The process of legalisation and legitimisation of informal relations, which are outside of the public control, takes the form of various types of corruption. A new set of values, norms and rules is the changing content of the most important component – the professional culture. An analysis of empirical data obtained through the sociological research methods allows to conclude that the moral degradation of society, impunity, corruption, and a low legal culture of Russian citizens contribute to a negative transformation of the professional culture of the law professionals.

Between Innovation and Dogmatism: ‘Party Economic Functionaries’ as an Actors of Interaction between Regions and Center in Context of Transformation of Socio-Economic Sphere of USSR in 1970s — Early 1980s

The ideas of heads of Soviet enterprises from different regions of the country concerning the socio-economic development of the USSR, expressed at a meeting in Moscow in 1983, are analyzed. The socio-psychological characteristics that were inherent in the Soviet economic leaders at the regional level, who were involved in discussing the problems of ‘improving the economic mechanism’, are studied in detail. The source base of the study includes documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History and the Center for Documentation of the Recent History of the Yaroslavl Region, oral history data (interviews with representatives of the regional authorities of the 1970s-1980s, which were personally conducted by the author of the article) and scientific literature. It is argued that the opinions of directors of the largest enterprises were perceived by party officials with the same level of trust as the opinions of representatives of the scientific community. It is concluded that the ideas of the party and economic activists intertwined the innovative nature of thinking with the dogmatic patterns of Soviet ideology. It is noted that the activities of the party and economic activists contributed to the formation of a kind of proto-bourgeoisie in the USSR in the 1970s-1980s. It is emphasized that the ideas of the party active on expanding the rights of enterprises and material incentives were a manifestation of latent capitalist tendencies. It is concluded that the main factor in the effective interaction of the regional ‘party economic functionaries’ with Moscow was close informal relations.

Friend or Patron? Social Relations Across the National NGO–Donor Divide in Ghana

The article examines the institutions governing relations between grant using national NGOs and grant giving international donors in three regions of Ghana (Upper West, Northern and Greater Accra Region). Formal procedural rules and professional norms can be viewed as necessary to minimise opportunities for informal patronage, rent-seeking and corruption made possible by the unequal access to resources. However, semi-structured interviews, life histories and observation highlight the positive role informal networks, connections, personal contacts and friendship play in enhancing collaboration between donors and national NGOs. Friendships originating in kinship and ethnicity, school links and past collaboration offer opportunities for influencing and resource mobilisation, but can also weaken NGO sustainability. Informal contacts and face-to-face interactions also build trust and strengthen lines of accountability, with non-adherence to shared norms resulting in sanctions and reputation loss. These findings affirm the positive role of informal relations, and highlight how they can complement formal rules and professional norms governing NGO–donor relations rather than undermining them. It throws a very different light on the role of informal institutions than that fostered by a discourse of clientelism and provides a more nuanced conceptual foundation for assessing ‘formalisation’ as a normative strategy.