Populism in Moldova’s Informal Political System

The 2020 presidential and 2021 parliamentary elections in the Republic of Moldova saw a clear victory of the populist Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) of the newly elected president Maia Sandu over the pro-Russian coalition led by former presidents Igor Dodon and Vladimir Voronin. These results testify the citizens’ will to change a country with an ever-widening gap between politicians and populace. Since 2015, the political debate is centred on corruption, but the cases described draw the picture of a political landscape where practices go beyond the traditional understanding of the term. In fact, their analysis demonstrates the existence of a system of Soviet political culture which relies on informal practices of the elite, arguing that some of these practices have clear Soviet roots while others are an adaptation of the Soviet mentality to the new liberal democratic setting. The paper also highlights differences between the populist parties born either as a reaction to the system or as an adaptation of the elite response to perceived expectations of the electorate. This research took place between 2020 and 2021 utilising participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Moldovan political experts. The paper concludes that future research on Moldovan politics should incorporate analysis of this informal dimension to state politics which is core to public debate on corruption and the integrity of state institutions in Moldova.

Challenges to Formality from Formal Firms Behaving Informally: Evidence from Central America

This research explores the competitive environment for urban formal sector firms competing against peer formal sector firms behaving informally in Central America. Explored is the upper bound of the formal-informal continuum in a regional economic environment of persistent and widespread economic informality where formal firms may employ informal tactics to gain competitive advantage versus their formal competitors. The 2010 World Bank Enterprise Surveys form the basis for empirical analyses. The results suggest formal firms utilizing informal practices is widespread and is influenced by firm maturity, firm location, industry sector, firm legal status, firm organization, ownership composition, regulatory environment, international quality certification, web presence, entry into global markets, and firm size.

Novoselitsa – “An Insignificant Barrier”

This article focuses on Russian Novoselitsa, a small town on the Russian-Austro-Hungarian-Romanian border, which served as the sole border crossing between Russian Bessarabia and Austrian Bukovina. From 1893 it was also an important railway junction between the two empires. Based on diplomatic documents from the Austrian State Archives, the article discusses Austrian officials’ views of ethnoreligious communities in the region, including Bessarabian Romanians, Jews, Russian Old Believers, and Ukrainians. It also examines the activity of the Austro-Hungarian Consular Agency in Russian Novoselitsa (1869–1914). The authors analyze the attitude of the Austrian officials towards ethnoreligious groups, informal practices on the border, and revolutionary unrest. The Novoselitsa case epitomizes the fundamental difference between the supranational Habsburg Empire and the nationalizing Romanov Empire, but also highlights the similarities between the two regimes. It illustrates the notions of “shatterzone of empires” (Bartov and Weitz 2013) and “thick borders”: Novoselitsa, a periphery with regard to both Vienna and St. Petersburg, was a relatively autonomous space and had its own forms of agency, which expanded much beyond the border itself on both sides of the frontier. Cases of corruption and espionage are especially revealing in regard to the uncertainty and confusion specific to the borderlands, which reigned as much at the center as on the periphery. This case study also provides an interesting perspective on everyday life, emphasizing the peculiarities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian monarchies, as well as the entanglements between the two entities.

The Anthropology of Bureaucracy and Public Administration

Anthropology is a latecomer to the study of bureaucracy. Nonetheless, the anthropological study of organizations—of which bureaucracies are a subtype, as larger organizations are always bureaucratically organized—was initiated by anthropologists as early as the 1920s. Since the 2010s, the anthropology of bureaucracy has slowly consolidated into a discernible subfield of the discipline. It brings to the study of public administrations a double added value: (a) a specific concern for the informal aspects of bureaucracy, (b) the emic views of bureaucratic actors and their pragmatic contexts, based on long-term immersion in the research field, as well as (c) a non-Eurocentric, global comparative perspective. Anthropologists have focused on bureaucratic actors (“bureaucrats”), the discursive, relational, and material contexts in which they work, the public policies they are supposed to implement or to comply with, and their interactions with the outside world, in particular ordinary citizens (“clients”). A foundational theorem of the anthropological study of bureaucracies has been that you cannot understand organizations on the basis of their official structures alone: the actual workings of an organization are largely based on informal practices and practical rules; there is always a gap between organizational norms and “real” practices; large-scale organizations are heterogeneous phenomena; and conflicts, negotiations, alliances, and power relations are their core components. Thus, one of the major methodological achievements of the anthropology of bureaucracy has been to focus on the dialectics of formal organization and real practices, official regulations, and informal norms in organizations “at work.”

Networking 101 for Graduate Students: Building a Bigger Table

ABSTRACT Although the importance of networking often is emphasized to graduate students, straightforward guidance on how to approach this task is typically reliant on individual advisors who both know and can demystify the discipline’s hidden and informal practices. This article provides concrete, point-by-point tips for both junior scholars and their supporters, building on our experiences in creating an online communication forum for early-career scholars on the job market. Specifically, we suggest a model of community networking focused on robust, cross-rank engagement along dimensions of similar experiences and similar interests. Community networking moves beyond individuals angling to obtain a seat at the table and instead builds a bigger, more inclusive table. Although junior scholars must focus primarily on their research rather than expansive service commitments, community networking is ultimately both a service to the discipline and a fruitful strategy for raising a scholar’s profile and finding coauthors, colleagues, friends, and allies.

Flexibility in the Gig Economy: Managing Time on Three Online Piecework Platforms

Gig economy platforms seem to provide extreme temporal flexibility to workers, giving them full control over how to spend each hour and minute of the day. What constraints do workers face when attempting to exercise this flexibility? We use 30 worker interviews and other data to compare three online piecework platforms with differing histories and worker demographics: Mechanical Turk, MobileWorks, and CloudFactory. We find that structural constraints (availability of work and degree of worker dependence on the work), as well as cultural-cognitive constraints (procrastination and presenteeism), limit worker control over scheduling in practice. The severity of these constraints varies significantly between platforms, the formally freest platform presenting the greatest structural and cultural-cognitive constraints. We also find that workers have developed informal practices, tools, and communities to address these constraints. We conclude that focusing on outcomes rather than control is a more fruitful way to assess flexible working arrangements.

Everyday experiences of digital financial inclusion in India's ‘micro-entrepreneur’ paratransit services

Self-employed labour in transportation is a notoriously precarious form of employment that occurs throughout many developing countries. In order to offset high-cost and insecure vehicle procurement arrangements, paratransit fare structures are formulated on the basis of a set of logics designed to maximise revenues. Although entrepreneurial, when these logics occur in conflict with public fare legislation, they are undertaken illegally, or informally, and are perceived as undesirable by policy makers and transport users. However, the underlying structures that necessitate these practices are seldom examined despite their significant effect on mobilities and the livelihood experiences of male entrepreneurs. This paper engages with critical literatures on the financialisation of poverty reduction to present financialisation as a class-based mechanism that, with the rapid increase of digital payment and ‘alternative’ credit scoring, structures micro-entrepreneurship and precarity in the neoliberal context of India. The paper argues that digitally enhanced financial inclusion techniques may steer low-income workers toward mainstream finance institutions modelled on the global economy. They enable profit to be generated by investors and private microfinance companies. However, new financial technologies do not do little to reduce the risk and expense of microfinance, nor do they increase micro-entrepreneurs' profit margins. Moreover, they threaten the informal practices entrepreneurs use to self-manage their financial precarity.