Interview with Prof. Alena Ledeneva: Thriving on the Fringe

INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED EXPERT ON INFORMAL GOVERNANCE IN RUSSIA, PROFESSOR ALENA LEDENEVA, IN CONVERSATION WITH SLOVO’S EXECUTIVE EDITOR BORIMIR TOTEV. Alena Ledeneva is a Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Her research interests include corruption, informal economy, economic crime, informal practices in corporate governance, and role of networks and patron-client relationships in Russia and around the globe. Her books ‘Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange’ (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ‘How Russia Really Works: Informal Practices in the 1990s’ (Cornell University Press, 2006), and ‘Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance’ (Cambridge University Press, 2013) have become must-read sources in Russian studies and social sciences. She received her PhD in Social and Political Theory from Cambridge University. Currently, she is the pillar leader of the multi-partner ANTICORRP.eu research project and also works on the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, The Global Informality Project, and the FRINGE CENTRE: Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity

Corruption studies for the twenty-first century: paradigm shifts and innovative approaches

The key question currently driving innovations in corruption studies is why anti-corruption reforms do not work. The explanatory factors for the disappointing outcomes of anti-corruption interventions over the last twenty-five years include those associated with: 1) understanding and modelling of corrupt practices; 2) measurement and monitoring; and 3) policy design and implementation

Managing Business Corruption: Targeting Non-Compliant Practices in Systemically Corrupt Environments

This article focuses on strategies of ‘managing business corruption’ at the firm level and offers insights for practitioners in systemically corrupt environments. Our study of 110 CEOs and owners of companies operating in Russia tested a new, ethnographic approach to managing corruption at a firm level. We conceptualize ‘managing business corruption’ as devising and implementing strategies that mitigate corruption-related risks in an effective way. We argue that such strategies have to target specific non-compliant practices, identified bottom-up, yet also amount to a pragmatic, problem-solving framework at the firm level, implemented top-down. Leadership is a key factor which defines effectiveness of corruption management in systemically corrupt environments. While the latter are generally conducive to tolerance and passive attitudes to corruption among business leaders, we identify proactive modes (preventive and controlling) and possible channels (formal hierarchy and informal networks) for leadership action. The proposed approach can also be used for leadership training

Commonwealth of Independent States: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan

Throughout the region, anti-corruption initiatives begin, characteristically, from the top and, despite the increasing role of democratic institutions, independent media and NGOs, the speed of implementation is determined and controlled by political heads of states. Pressure from international lending agencies and donors is undoubtedly significant: the governments of Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia and Turkmenistan all adopted anti-corruption rhetoric in 2002. What are absent are more effective ways of translating the rhetoric into consistent and effective programmes that address corruption

Informality: a shortcut

This paper summarises my reflections on a decade of practice: since 2014, I have been collecting data for the Global Informality Project (in-formality.com) and editing three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (UCL Press, 2018, 2024). The data on the informal ways of getting things done comes from 5 continents, over 90 countries and over 600 researchers. The framing of this reflection paper is based on the questions that emerged at the very beginning of the project, during the weekly seminars held at IEA-Paris in 2013-14: What is informality and what is it the case of? So what are the implications of the project findings? How would you know if you were wrong? (see Figure 1). In this paper, I make extensive use of hyperlinks as shortcuts to avoid excessive references, long passages and self-plagiarism, while allowing the reader to expand on key points with a single click. It makes the text easier to follow, but also to unfold and perform, enacting what it describes. I experiment with this format of referring to the project outcomes, made possible by the digitisation of the data and the open access publication of the three volumes of the Encyclopaedia. This paper follows the 'shortcut' pattern that it explores, allowing the reader to open some hyperlinks and skip over others, thus contextualising each reading and allowing a deeper dive into the contributors' entries, as well as accessing the wider literature on informality. I use illustrations and maps as shortcuts to grasp and convey the complexity of informality and to offer perspectives that make connections between disciplines, fields and policymaking. The inclusion of the artwork illustrates both the limitations of visualising the tacit knowledge embedded in informality and the limitless contexts in which it can emerge

A Critique of the global corruption “paradigm”

While the decline of communism in the late twentieth century brought democracy, political freedom, and better economic prospects for many people, it also produced massive social dislocation and engendered social problems that were far less pronounced under the old regimes. The fall of state socialism led to enormously complex political, economic, social, and cultural transformations, and while political liberalization was a lofty goal, it was neither uniform in its effects nor unqualified in its benefits. Postcommunism from Within foregrounds the diversity of the historical experiences and current realities of people in the postcommunist region in examining how they are responding to these monumental changes at home. The original essays in this volume lay out a bold new approach to research on the postcommunist region, and to democratization studies more broadly, that focuses on the social and cultural microprocesses behind political and economic transformation. Thematic essays by eminent scholars of postcommunism from across the social sciences are supported by case studies to demonstrate the limitations of current democratization paradigms and suggest ways of building categories of research that more closely capture the role of vernacular knowledge in demanding, creating, and adapting to institutional change. A novel approach to understanding one of the greatest political and social transformations in recent history, Postcommunism from Within explores not just how citizens respond to political and economic restructuring engineered at the top but also how people enact their own visions of life, politics, and justice by responding to daily challenges

Venäjän epävirallinen hallinto

Nyky-Venäjällä korruptio voidaan jäljittää traditionaalisiin käytänteisiin, patrimoniaalisen vallan malliin ja neuvostoaikaisiin hallinnon välineisiin – jotka kaikki laiminlyövät ja rutiininomaisesti ylittävät julkisen ja yksityisen välistä rajaa. Hämärtynyt julkisen ja yksityisen välinen raja muodostaa tilan henkilökohtaisiin verkostoihin perustuvalle hallinnolle, johon nykyisin usein viitataan nimellä ”Putinin sistema”. ”Kestityksen”, ”jaetun vastuullisuuden” ja ”Potjomkinin kulissien” mallit ovat tunnistettavissa tavassa, jossa johtajuus on riippuvaista instrumenteista kuten ilmoittamattomat palkkiot, epäviralliset kytkökset, piilotetut agendat ja varoitusviestit, jotka voidaan nähdä tehokkaina hallinnon mekanismeina. Tiettyjen toimijoiden henkilökohtaisen vaikutuksen avulla Putinin sistema antaa voimaa hallituksen taloudellisille ja poliittisille projekteille ja pitää järjestelmän alamaiset varpaillaan. Samaan aikaan järjestelmän avoimuuden ja vastuullisuuden vastainen luonne tarjoaa hedelmällisen maaperän korruptiolle ja tekee sen torjumisesta vaikeaa. En suoraan samaista epävirallista hallintoa korruptioon, mutta väitän, ettei korruptiota kyetä Venäjällä kunnolla torjumaan, elleivät maan johtajat sitoudu ”reflektiiviseen modernisointiin” ja tunnusta ylläpitämänsä epävirallisen hallinnon seuraamuksia, joista yleinen korruptio on yksi vahingollisimmista maan toiminnan kannalta

Interview with Alena Ledeneva: To Control a Level of Informality You Need the Targeted Therapy of Informal Practices

In the interview, Professor Alena Ledeneva discusses her research experience, current projects, and plans, and essentially presents her own programme for studying the worlds of informal economies through context-sensitive comparative ethnographic analysis. Beginning in the mid-1990s with a PhD dissertation on the role of blat in the functioning of the planned Soviet economy, today this research programme forms the basis of a unique empirical project for compiling the Encyclopaedia of the Informal World, involving 223 scholars from various countries. The case database collected in the Encyclopaedia… describes national versions of particular shadow practices, includes a list of the latest sociological and anthropological literature for analysing such practices, and is freely accessible to researchers. The interview makes it clear how sensitivity to the methodological challenges of ethnography allows the author to move from retrospective study of a local empirical phenomenon to theorising. The conceptual insights that Professor Ledeneva reaches help to evaluate the quality of liberal reforms, including anti-corruption measures. She shows that when rigidity and double standards lie behind the façade of formal institutions, informal practices simultaneously contribute to both the formation and the destruction of social systems. Until the conflict between rules imposed from above and the responses from below is properly accounted for in socio-political transformations, speaking about minimising corruption will remain very difficult