New OAC Online Seminar: John Conroy Intimations of the 'informal economy', 16th April to 28th April - Open Anthropology Cooperative2019-11-03T21:36:04Zhttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?feed=yes&xn_auth=noIn closing the seminar, I wou…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-29:3404290:Comment:1607052012-04-29T13:47:56.738ZJustin Shaffnerhttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/JustinShaffner
<p>In closing the seminar, I would like to thank John again for his insightful paper and measured responses to the discussion it elicited. As chair, I decided to stay out of the discussion in the last few days to make space for the newcomers to define its direction.<br></br><br></br>I would also like to thank the various participants for their thoughtful questions and interventions. Due to the fact that there were so many late newcomers, and also several others who expressed interest in joining in but…</p>
<p>In closing the seminar, I would like to thank John again for his insightful paper and measured responses to the discussion it elicited. As chair, I decided to stay out of the discussion in the last few days to make space for the newcomers to define its direction.<br/><br/>I would also like to thank the various participants for their thoughtful questions and interventions. Due to the fact that there were so many late newcomers, and also several others who expressed interest in joining in but for various reasons were unable to at this time, we've opened a <a href="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/group/thehumaneconomy/forum/topics/conroy-on-informal-economy-continued" target="_self">new thread in the Human Economy Group</a> to continue the discussion. I, for one, would like to further discuss the concept of the informal economy in PNG, especially in relation to the contemporary context and I hope others with an interest in that corner of the world will join me.<br/><br/>John, thank you again for sharing your paper, time and expertise with us.</p> Thanks to John and thank you…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-29:3404290:Comment:1608082012-04-29T12:31:07.669ZMallika Shakyahttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/MallikaShakya
<p>Thanks to John and thank you Keith for opening a new thread. Hoping to regroup there.</p>
<p>Thanks to John and thank you Keith for opening a new thread. Hoping to regroup there.</p> It is true, as Mallika pointe…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-29:3404290:Comment:1609432012-04-29T05:47:45.289ZKeith Harthttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/KeithHart
<p>It is true, as Mallika pointed out, that the late arrival of several participants left some of us wondering what might have happened if they had joined in earlier. So I have opened a <a href="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/group/thehumaneconomy/forum/topics/conroy-on-informal-economy-continued" target="_self">new thread in the Human Economy Group</a> where anyone who wants to may continue the conversation.</p>
<p>It is true, as Mallika pointed out, that the late arrival of several participants left some of us wondering what might have happened if they had joined in earlier. So I have opened a <a href="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/group/thehumaneconomy/forum/topics/conroy-on-informal-economy-continued" target="_self">new thread in the Human Economy Group</a> where anyone who wants to may continue the conversation.</p> This seminar has been a genui…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-29:3404290:Comment:1607912012-04-29T02:25:18.011ZJohn McCreeryhttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/JohnMcCreery
<p>This seminar has been a genuine pleasure. My thanks to John Conroy and to everyone else involved.</p>
<p>This seminar has been a genuine pleasure. My thanks to John Conroy and to everyone else involved.</p> Response to Knut, Mallika and…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-28:3404290:Comment:1606372012-04-28T23:17:22.036ZJohn Conroyhttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/JohnConroy
<p><b>Response to Knut, Mallika and Keith</b></p>
<p>Knut, the history of attempts to map and quantify the interactions between players in the economy go back at least to William Petty’s <i>Political Arithmetick</i> in the seventeenth century, and it is from him that economists and statisticians derive the famous generalization: the initial dominance of the agricultural ‘sector’ yields to a rising manufacturing ‘sector’, and in time to the rise of services, during the process of development. At…</p>
<p><b>Response to Knut, Mallika and Keith</b></p>
<p>Knut, the history of attempts to map and quantify the interactions between players in the economy go back at least to William Petty’s <i>Political Arithmetick</i> in the seventeenth century, and it is from him that economists and statisticians derive the famous generalization: the initial dominance of the agricultural ‘sector’ yields to a rising manufacturing ‘sector’, and in time to the rise of services, during the process of development. At the time he was impressed by the wealth of the Dutch, which he attributed to the greater relative importance of service industries, trade and transport in the Dutch economy (the East Indies, and all that). Peter Bauer and Richard Salisbury both drew on these concepts (and Petty’s generalization as refined by Colin Clark) for their accounts of the importance of services in, respectively, British West Africa and Australian New Guinea. I examined Bauer and Salisbury’s treatments of the subject in the course of making my case for them as precursors of Hart’s informal economy. You are quite right to point out the arbitrary nature of any such statistical taxonomy, the primary justification for which is the degree to which it yields helpful explanations of the phenomena which it is designed to capture. So I do agree that ‘all conceptual carving up of social life leaves a residue’, an unexplained element that the constructs cannot accommodate. Mallika’s comments are helpful in drawing the distinction between a ‘sector’ in terms of national economic accounting and as ‘as a social segregation of people who are barred from the world that is called ‘formal’. When economic theories are built on the foundations of accounting constructs it is salutary to have a Keith Hart point out the ‘discrepancies’ (a key word in his writings) between theory and reality. Mallika’s comments about the importance of history and the significance of wrenching social change in the context of changing government policies are also stimulating and I think Keith has addressed them to some degree in his response.</p>
<p>I’d like to conclude by acknowledging Justin Shaffner’s judicious moderation of this rather wide-ranging discussion. I imagine that given the spread of time zones in which the participants live he must have kept rather long and irregular hours these past two weeks. Thank you, Justin</p>
<p>Keith, I have enough sense of the anti-climax to avoid attempting to respond to your final remarks. You may expect to hear echoes of them in my subsequent scribbling. I thank you and your colleagues for the opportunity to join the Open Anthropology Cooperative and to contribute to it, and I thank you personally for your warm and positive response to the paper.</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>Keith Hart said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?id=3404290%3ATopic%3A159237&page=4#3404290Comment160789"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>John, I am satisfied within the limits of this medium by your full, honest and illuminating answers to the questions I posed. I want to leave with a comment on how the informal economy/sector has distracted us from grounding our inquiries in the human economy of what people do in their everyday lives. This was prompted by your reflections on rural and urban livelihoods and on the tendency to classify popular economic activities, often pejoratively.</p>
<p>I did some fitful research on Rossendale in Northeast Lancashire. When coal was nationalized in the 1940s, some 50 strip mines were listed in the district usually operated by one man for personal use, but sometimes on a scale sufficient to supply an enterprise (one involved a bus driver supplying a small cotton mill by mining in his spare time). Small-scale quarrying for construction materials was also widespread. Many workers kept “pens” for domesticated animals on the hillsides, raising them for sale or family consumption. All of these activities were common before the industrial revolution, as was a lively engagement with long-distance transport, trade and catering (medieval pilgrims sustained this complex), plus theft from factories and warehouses distributed by a variety of illegal means. I will never forget being woken up to buy a TV set in its box after a truck broke down nearby.</p>
<p>Marx and Engels held that the state was an archaic institution rapidly being made obsolete by a new phase of industrial capitalism. The factory system was driven by the cumulative addition of machines to human labour, rapidly concentrating workers into new manufacturing centres. There they were better able to organize and thus to offer an effective counterweight to the power of the owners' money. The new universal class, in contrast to Hegel's idea of a state-made bureacracy acting in everyone's interest, was thus working people in general, led by the factory proletariat. The latter had no property save their labour power, but they had the potential of combination, unwittingly provided by the capitalists who bought it. They were a class separate from both the small urban proprietors (<i>kleinstädtisch</i> or 'petty bourgeois') and the dangerous classes who lacked stable employment, the <i>lumpenproletariat</i>. But they would represent society as a whole, unlike the capitalists.</p>
<p>Why did Marx and Engels think that working in a factory endowed anyone with a potential for making revolution? Somewhat after they settled in England, the Lancashire cotton famine of 1861-64 took place. As a result of the American civil war and the North's blockade of Southern ports, the supply of raw materials to the textile industry dried up, causing massive unemployment in towns wholly specialized in cotton products. The owners petitioned parliament to send battleships to relieve the blockade; the workers held demonstrations in favour of the North and the freedom of labour. People died for sure, but not as many as would have if the workers had no other resources than their factory jobs. What sustained them materially and socially at that time? The informal economy and their own home-made institutions. We know about the ideology and activism of Lancashire workers from the agitators who flourished in the 1840s at the time of Chartism. Lancashire was virtually empty before the industrial revolution and the bulk of the new proletariat came from the Celtic fringe, from Ireland, West Scotland and North Wales. We could assume that they were formed entirely by their new conditions of employment (Gluckman: “An African townsman is a townsman”); or we might suppose that they brought with them the qualities of migrants who had never suffered feudal domination. The terrain of Lancashire shares with the rest of North and West Britain a wild landscape which offered a means of escape from the dark satanic mills. The buoyancy Marx and Engels noted in Lancashire's workers might have had several sources. Subsequent experience suggests that working in a factory was unlikely to be one of them.</p>
<p>Later work by Marxist historians, especially E.P. Thompson, emphasized the contrast between rural and urban work conditions. At first the new wage labourers brought peasant attitudes into the factories. If a sheep was sick, they stayed at home to tend it. The owners could not put up with such slackness; the steam-driven machines used up fuel continuously and human work patterns had to be adapted to this. The imposition of time discipline was often brutal. Gradually it became established that workers were paid for precisely how long they worked and how much they produced. The sociologist, Neil Smelser, emphasized the institutions Lancashire workers created outside the factories to mitigate their lot, friendly societies and similar mechanisms of social insurance. Much later, Beatrice Webb reports, in <i>My Apprenticeship</i>, the shock she had when she left London for the first time to visit her Northern relatives. Used to the urban rabble depicted so vividly by Gareth Stedman Jones (<i>Outcast London</i>) -- and by Henry Mayhew of course -- she found a whole new working class civilization in the North. This was built, she says, around three institutions made by the workers themselves: the chapel, the union and the co-op. Each of these united collective and individual interests: the congregation was offset by protestant individualism; solidarity at work by private ownership of tools; combination in the marketplace by private property.</p>
<p>There is therefore a social history of working class institutions and economic practices in nineteenth century Britain which offers material for comparison with developing countries today. It is surely essential to combine studies of the workplace with the institutions people devise outside it to meet their needs. The informal economy was as much a strategy of the Lancashire factory workers as it is inside and outside the citadel of protected high-wage employment in India today. The great merit of the functionalist method has always been that it reflects what people really do in their lives, not what academic specialists choose to study.</p>
<p>I have often reflected on how a West African urban ethnography led to the discovery of a new concept and lately this has led me to regret that my own ethnographic mission was permanently diverted by the drive to communicate with development economists. One example is this piece on my blog: <a href="http://thememorybank.co.uk/2011/01/08/the-informal-economy-a-story-of-ethnography-untold/" target="_blank">the story of an ethnography untold</a>. I believe that the standard accounts of modern economic history are seriously defective in that they do not grasp how people really live. Equally, ethnographers often miss the larger point of what they are studying. This is why I have drawn so much pleasure from our correspondence and now from this exchange. Thank you, John.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>John Conroy said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?page=3&commentId=3404290%3AComment%3A160626&x=1#3404290Comment160611"><div><p>Keith, thanks for a searching set of questions. These go to the heart of my problems in drawing my larger argument together, and in imposing coherence on the ideas. I’ll try to respond to some of the issues you have raised (though some readers might think Melanesian issues are getting rather too much attention).</p>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote> John, I am satisfied within t…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-28:3404290:Comment:1607892012-04-28T16:29:51.737ZKeith Harthttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/KeithHart
<p>John, I am satisfied within the limits of this medium by your full, honest and illuminating answers to the questions I posed. I want to leave with a comment on how the informal economy/sector has distracted us from grounding our inquiries in the human economy of what people do in their everyday lives. This was prompted by your reflections on rural and urban livelihoods and on the tendency to classify popular economic activities, often pejoratively.</p>
<p>I did some fitful research on…</p>
<p>John, I am satisfied within the limits of this medium by your full, honest and illuminating answers to the questions I posed. I want to leave with a comment on how the informal economy/sector has distracted us from grounding our inquiries in the human economy of what people do in their everyday lives. This was prompted by your reflections on rural and urban livelihoods and on the tendency to classify popular economic activities, often pejoratively.</p>
<p>I did some fitful research on Rossendale in Northeast Lancashire. When coal was nationalized in the 1940s, some 50 strip mines were listed in the district usually operated by one man for personal use, but sometimes on a scale sufficient to supply an enterprise (one involved a bus driver supplying a small cotton mill by mining in his spare time). Small-scale quarrying for construction materials was also widespread. Many workers kept “pens” for domesticated animals on the hillsides, raising them for sale or family consumption. All of these activities were common before the industrial revolution, as was a lively engagement with long-distance transport, trade and catering (medieval pilgrims sustained this complex), plus theft from factories and warehouses distributed by a variety of illegal means. I will never forget being woken up to buy a TV set in its box after a truck broke down nearby.</p>
<p>Marx and Engels held that the state was an archaic institution rapidly being made obsolete by a new phase of industrial capitalism. The factory system was driven by the cumulative addition of machines to human labour, rapidly concentrating workers into new manufacturing centres. There they were better able to organize and thus to offer an effective counterweight to the power of the owners' money. The new universal class, in contrast to Hegel's idea of a state-made bureacracy acting in everyone's interest, was thus working people in general, led by the factory proletariat. The latter had no property save their labour power, but they had the potential of combination, unwittingly provided by the capitalists who bought it. They were a class separate from both the small urban proprietors (<i>kleinstädtisch</i> or 'petty bourgeois') and the dangerous classes who lacked stable employment, the <i>lumpenproletariat</i>. But they would represent society as a whole, unlike the capitalists.</p>
<p>Why did Marx and Engels think that working in a factory endowed anyone with a potential for making revolution? Somewhat after they settled in England, the Lancashire cotton famine of 1861-64 took place. As a result of the American civil war and the North's blockade of Southern ports, the supply of raw materials to the textile industry dried up, causing massive unemployment in towns wholly specialized in cotton products. The owners petitioned parliament to send battleships to relieve the blockade; the workers held demonstrations in favour of the North and the freedom of labour. People died for sure, but not as many as would have if the workers had no other resources than their factory jobs. What sustained them materially and socially at that time? The informal economy and their own home-made institutions. We know about the ideology and activism of Lancashire workers from the agitators who flourished in the 1840s at the time of Chartism. Lancashire was virtually empty before the industrial revolution and the bulk of the new proletariat came from the Celtic fringe, from Ireland, West Scotland and North Wales. We could assume that they were formed entirely by their new conditions of employment (Gluckman: “An African townsman is a townsman”); or we might suppose that they brought with them the qualities of migrants who had never suffered feudal domination. The terrain of Lancashire shares with the rest of North and West Britain a wild landscape which offered a means of escape from the dark satanic mills. The buoyancy Marx and Engels noted in Lancashire's workers might have had several sources. Subsequent experience suggests that working in a factory was unlikely to be one of them.</p>
<p>Later work by Marxist historians, especially E.P. Thompson, emphasized the contrast between rural and urban work conditions. At first the new wage labourers brought peasant attitudes into the factories. If a sheep was sick, they stayed at home to tend it. The owners could not put up with such slackness; the steam-driven machines used up fuel continuously and human work patterns had to be adapted to this. The imposition of time discipline was often brutal. Gradually it became established that workers were paid for precisely how long they worked and how much they produced. The sociologist, Neil Smelser, emphasized the institutions Lancashire workers created outside the factories to mitigate their lot, friendly societies and similar mechanisms of social insurance. Much later, Beatrice Webb reports, in <i>My Apprenticeship</i>, the shock she had when she left London for the first time to visit her Northern relatives. Used to the urban rabble depicted so vividly by Gareth Stedman Jones (<i>Outcast London</i>) -- and by Henry Mayhew of course -- she found a whole new working class civilization in the North. This was built, she says, around three institutions made by the workers themselves: the chapel, the union and the co-op. Each of these united collective and individual interests: the congregation was offset by protestant individualism; solidarity at work by private ownership of tools; combination in the marketplace by private property.</p>
<p>There is therefore a social history of working class institutions and economic practices in nineteenth century Britain which offers material for comparison with developing countries today. It is surely essential to combine studies of the workplace with the institutions people devise outside it to meet their needs. The informal economy was as much a strategy of the Lancashire factory workers as it is inside and outside the citadel of protected high-wage employment in India today. The great merit of the functionalist method has always been that it reflects what people really do in their lives, not what academic specialists choose to study.</p>
<p>I have often reflected on how a West African urban ethnography led to the discovery of a new concept and lately this has led me to regret that my own ethnographic mission was permanently diverted by the drive to communicate with development economists. One example is this piece on my blog: <a href="http://thememorybank.co.uk/2011/01/08/the-informal-economy-a-story-of-ethnography-untold/" target="_blank">the story of an ethnography untold</a>. I believe that the standard accounts of modern economic history are seriously defective in that they do not grasp how people really live. Equally, ethnographers often miss the larger point of what they are studying. This is why I have drawn so much pleasure from our correspondence and now from this exchange. Thank you, John.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>John Conroy said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?page=3&commentId=3404290%3AComment%3A160626&x=1#3404290Comment160611"><div><p>Keith, thanks for a searching set of questions. These go to the heart of my problems in drawing my larger argument together, and in imposing coherence on the ideas. I’ll try to respond to some of the issues you have raised (though some readers might think Melanesian issues are getting rather too much attention).</p>
</div>
</blockquote> I am embarrassed that I am jo…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-28:3404290:Comment:1608572012-04-28T14:48:22.909ZMallika Shakyahttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/MallikaShakya
<p>I am embarrassed that I am joining in just as the seminar is closing, but I see that what I had to say has been well discussed by others from which I benefit enormously, and I hope there will be an opportunity to continue this conversation elsewhere.</p>
<p>I particularly wanted to echo Knut’s point about the developmental contexts of social informalities. To begin with, I agree with you Knut, as Justin and others have also said earlier, that the idea of ‘informality’ often lives through a…</p>
<p>I am embarrassed that I am joining in just as the seminar is closing, but I see that what I had to say has been well discussed by others from which I benefit enormously, and I hope there will be an opportunity to continue this conversation elsewhere.</p>
<p>I particularly wanted to echo Knut’s point about the developmental contexts of social informalities. To begin with, I agree with you Knut, as Justin and others have also said earlier, that the idea of ‘informality’ often lives through a tension of being defined against ‘the formal.’ On John C.’s response to your calling it an ‘informal sector,’ I did not think you were actually referring to sectors in terms of national economic accounting but as a social segregation of people who are barred from the world that is called ‘formal’ but which could also be called ‘privileged,’ ‘safe,’ or even ‘honourable’ in bourgeois eyes.</p>
<p>Returning to my earlier point about developmental contexts, I wondered whether a clear policy reference may be advisable, even needed, for studying informality today. What was striking for me about both Keith’s ethnography of the Frafra and Mayhew’s discussion of the English was that they were the depictions of a certain era in history, linked to a certain local politics and a certain global order of things. Add to this what John McCreery said, that who are the ‘informal workers’ in the West now is different from what it was before, e.g., we see clear racial and ethnic dimension emerging, then we are reminded that temporality and context cannot be ignored in studying anything, including informality.</p>
<p>A good example is perhaps Jan Breman’s work -- ‘footlose labour’ of India. He studied the rapidly growing ‘informal sector’ in the peripheries of the textile towns of Ahmedabad, and showed how informalised workers suddenly began to tap on to caste- or religion-based networks and charities for sheer survival in the 1970s and 1980s, because they got pushed off the edge in the name of industrial modernisation that made massive lay off of factory workers a palatable aspect of Hindu nation-building. This era of new informalisation, if I may call it so, can very well be seen as an end of the preceding Nehruvian era, which had defined Indian independence to be about ‘roti, kapda aur makan’ (bread, cloth and housing) for ‘aam’ (common) Indians, to be achieved through state support (ie mass employment programmes). I don’t think Indian society – at least its understanding of ancient institutions like caste and religion – had changed that much just in few decades. What had changed abruptly were the government policies on industrial development, which ended up redefining the lives of the people in the margins, and with it, the construction of what could be called the world of ‘informality’….</p> Hi John,
I guess its time for…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-28:3404290:Comment:1606262012-04-28T14:06:22.899ZKnut G Nustadhttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/KnutGNustad
<p>Hi John,</p>
<p>I guess its time for wrapping up rather than to introduce new points. Let me just say again that I really enjoyed your paper and its empirical and historical richness. </p>
<p>Thanks also for the clarification on how you see the relationship between ‘the informal sector’ and other ‘sectors’ such as the ‘service sector’, ‘manufacturing sectors’ etc. You say that these are different because they can be defined in a statistical sense. But does not the conceptualisation of these…</p>
<p>Hi John,</p>
<p>I guess its time for wrapping up rather than to introduce new points. Let me just say again that I really enjoyed your paper and its empirical and historical richness. </p>
<p>Thanks also for the clarification on how you see the relationship between ‘the informal sector’ and other ‘sectors’ such as the ‘service sector’, ‘manufacturing sectors’ etc. You say that these are different because they can be defined in a statistical sense. But does not the conceptualisation of these sectors equally constitute forms that leave ‘informal residues’, i.e. parts of social life that they do not grasp? I completely agree that the ‘informal sector’ does not exist as such, but if we agree that all conceptual carving up of social life leave a residue, I would have thought that the ‘service sector’ would be as real/unreal as ‘the informal sector’? This is what I alluded to by pointing to your case on pg 21, where definitions fail to capture economic activities in specific sectors. </p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>John Conroy said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?id=3404290%3ATopic%3A159237&page=3#3404290Comment160784"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p><b>Replies to Knut, Busani and John (McCreery)</b></p>
<p>To Knut: thanks for your intervention. Not for the first time in this exchange, I feel like an overmatched prize-fighter who is furiously back-peddling around the ring while he works out what punch to throw next. I raised issues of development policy and planning in my last comment and you have placed emphasis on this area as well. You allude to the difficulty of defining the informal ‘sector’ in an operationally useful way for the purposes of planning and target-setting. Here it is necessary to realize that the informal ‘sector’ is not really a sector at all. We can have agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors. Each of these can have its various ‘subsectors’ (say, coffee, copra, cocoa, food crops – all within agriculture). But the informal ‘sector’ is not a sector in this statistical sense. Rather, there are informal elements <b>within</b> each of the economic sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, services, etc). That’s why the informal <i>economy</i> concept (a cross-sectoral concept) is a better one to use, especially when attempting to educate officials. It’s also fruitful to be able to conceptualize formal/informal interactions <i>within</i> an economic sector (say, agriculture), whether one’s interest is anthropological, economic or political. </p>
<p>Where attempts are made to incorporate the informal economy into economic planning, there is the danger (you are quite right) of attempting to ‘formalize the informal’ in a counterproductive way. Suppose a government is convinced, finally and despite the pervasive prejudice of the political and bureaucratic classes, to take action to support the informal economy. The goal may be framed in terms of ‘raising the productivity of informal sector activities'. The Planning Ministry looks around to see who should be given carriage of this new (and possibly rather uncomfortable) initiative. Should it be the Department of Community Affairs, or possibly the Department of Small and Medium Enterprise (itself often a subset of the Ministry of Industry)? Here (and this is going to get me into trouble) the choice is between an agency likely to ‘genderize’ the issues, and another likely to ‘formalize’ them. In either case there is likely to be a top-heavy program of seminars, trainings and interventions based on inadequate understanding of the nature and dynamics of the informal economy.</p>
<p>Busani: Thank you for reminding us that the historical record in many places gives us examples of popular economic activity which we recognize, only in retrospect, as having characteristics of the informal. You speak of ‘bureaucracy’s attempts to trivialize the growth of the sector’ and appear to suggest that the non-enumeration of such activity by colonial officials (as described by Bauer) or contemporary officials (as perhaps in the case of Zimbabwe) was/is deliberate. Bauer put it down to the decision to record only one ‘principal’ occupation for individuals, with the result that almost everyone was recorded as a ‘farmer’. This may have been made necessary by technical or financial constraints – the census was probably hand-tabulated in 1948, or at best data would have been sorted on an 80 column card – though of course the official perception of which activities were worth counting also played a part. In the case of modern Zimbabwe (I’m really guessing here) the decline of the formal economy must have multiplied the numbers hustling in the informal economy and no doubt the Mugabe regime had concerns about ‘the mob’ congregating on the streets – perhaps leading to repression of urban informal activity. If so, this would be an example of the ‘ambiguities associated with those who operate outside state-approved enterprises’.</p>
<p>Finally, John (Mc Cleery): I did suggest that (as you put it) ‘the richness of relationships is more likely to be found on the production side’, but I’m not emphatic about it. It’s just that, in crowded places where the informal economy may operate, the nature of exchange is often quite impersonal and so the informal operator may have more important relationships to maintain with suppliers, supporters, rivals and protectors than with the general public. I do take your point about the often frequent and cordial nature of the relationships a resident may have with neighbourhood shopkeepers (and don’t forget the barkeepers). I do take your point however about the ‘relatively thick connections’ occurring within even so large and complicated a nodal point as Tsukiji market. But let's not forget that Tsukiji is a wholesale market, so we're not talking about 'thickly connected' relationships with local shopkeepers, but with fellow professionals, for the most part.</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>Knut G Nustad said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?page=3&commentId=3404290%3AComment%3A160776&x=1#3404290Comment160606"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>Sorry for joining the conversation so late, but I have been offline for the last week. I have had an ongoing conversation with Keith on ‘informality’ from the time when he supervised my Phd work in the mid 1990s, and I had been looking very much forward to this seminar. There are several topics already being discussed, but could I address one issue that I see in the paper and that many of you have commented on?</p>
<p>In much writing on informality there is a tension between treating ‘the informal’ as a specific domain of social life, and, on the other hand, realising that informality is negatively defined as the conceptual opposite of some kind of form (in this and most other cases state bureaucracies). As several of you have pointed out, this latter point makes it difficult to arrive at useful definitions of ‘the informal sector’.</p>
<p>But this also carves out a specific topic of study: the relationship between forms, interventions based on forms, and those realities that are not captured by these forms. Keith addressed this topic in one of his replies when he listed possible relationships between the formal and the informal. I have in mind such examples as you mention on page 21 of your paper, John, where census data (based on a form) does not capture that which it seeks to capture – modes of practices of economic activity that are more fluid (imperfect specialization/fluidity).</p>
<p>One of my research interests has been to study what happens when interventions, such as development plans, which are necessarily based on forms, meet a messy reality such as you describe. I’m aware that this moves the focus away from ‘informal sectors’ toward informal politics, but I would still be interested to hear whether this resonates with your experience of writing development plans. When development plans seek to incorporate informality they necessarily, to an extent, formalise ‘the informal’ at a conceptual as well as policy level, and this often leads to contradictions. </p>
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</blockquote> Replies to Knut, Busani and J…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-28:3404290:Comment:1607842012-04-28T01:04:29.287ZJohn Conroyhttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/JohnConroy
<p><b>Replies to Knut, Busani and John (McCreery)</b></p>
<p>To Knut: thanks for your intervention. Not for the first time in this exchange, I feel like an overmatched prize-fighter who is furiously back-peddling around the ring while he works out what punch to throw next. I raised issues of development policy and planning in my last comment and you have placed emphasis on this area as well. You allude to the difficulty of defining the informal ‘sector’ in an operationally useful way for the…</p>
<p><b>Replies to Knut, Busani and John (McCreery)</b></p>
<p>To Knut: thanks for your intervention. Not for the first time in this exchange, I feel like an overmatched prize-fighter who is furiously back-peddling around the ring while he works out what punch to throw next. I raised issues of development policy and planning in my last comment and you have placed emphasis on this area as well. You allude to the difficulty of defining the informal ‘sector’ in an operationally useful way for the purposes of planning and target-setting. Here it is necessary to realize that the informal ‘sector’ is not really a sector at all. We can have agricultural, manufacturing and service sectors. Each of these can have its various ‘subsectors’ (say, coffee, copra, cocoa, food crops – all within agriculture). But the informal ‘sector’ is not a sector in this statistical sense. Rather, there are informal elements <b>within</b> each of the economic sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, services, etc). That’s why the informal <i>economy</i> concept (a cross-sectoral concept) is a better one to use, especially when attempting to educate officials. It’s also fruitful to be able to conceptualize formal/informal interactions <i>within</i> an economic sector (say, agriculture), whether one’s interest is anthropological, economic or political. </p>
<p>Where attempts are made to incorporate the informal economy into economic planning, there is the danger (you are quite right) of attempting to ‘formalize the informal’ in a counterproductive way. Suppose a government is convinced, finally and despite the pervasive prejudice of the political and bureaucratic classes, to take action to support the informal economy. The goal may be framed in terms of ‘raising the productivity of informal sector activities'. The Planning Ministry looks around to see who should be given carriage of this new (and possibly rather uncomfortable) initiative. Should it be the Department of Community Affairs, or possibly the Department of Small and Medium Enterprise (itself often a subset of the Ministry of Industry)? Here (and this is going to get me into trouble) the choice is between an agency likely to ‘genderize’ the issues, and another likely to ‘formalize’ them. In either case there is likely to be a top-heavy program of seminars, trainings and interventions based on inadequate understanding of the nature and dynamics of the informal economy.</p>
<p>Busani: Thank you for reminding us that the historical record in many places gives us examples of popular economic activity which we recognize, only in retrospect, as having characteristics of the informal. You speak of ‘bureaucracy’s attempts to trivialize the growth of the sector’ and appear to suggest that the non-enumeration of such activity by colonial officials (as described by Bauer) or contemporary officials (as perhaps in the case of Zimbabwe) was/is deliberate. Bauer put it down to the decision to record only one ‘principal’ occupation for individuals, with the result that almost everyone was recorded as a ‘farmer’. This may have been made necessary by technical or financial constraints – the census was probably hand-tabulated in 1948, or at best data would have been sorted on an 80 column card – though of course the official perception of which activities were worth counting also played a part. In the case of modern Zimbabwe (I’m really guessing here) the decline of the formal economy must have multiplied the numbers hustling in the informal economy and no doubt the Mugabe regime had concerns about ‘the mob’ congregating on the streets – perhaps leading to repression of urban informal activity. If so, this would be an example of the ‘ambiguities associated with those who operate outside state-approved enterprises’.</p>
<p>Finally, John (Mc Cleery): I did suggest that (as you put it) ‘the richness of relationships is more likely to be found on the production side’, but I’m not emphatic about it. It’s just that, in crowded places where the informal economy may operate, the nature of exchange is often quite impersonal and so the informal operator may have more important relationships to maintain with suppliers, supporters, rivals and protectors than with the general public. I do take your point about the often frequent and cordial nature of the relationships a resident may have with neighbourhood shopkeepers (and don’t forget the barkeepers). I do take your point however about the ‘relatively thick connections’ occurring within even so large and complicated a nodal point as Tsukiji market. But let's not forget that Tsukiji is a wholesale market, so we're not talking about 'thickly connected' relationships with local shopkeepers, but with fellow professionals, for the most part.</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>Knut G Nustad said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?page=3&commentId=3404290%3AComment%3A160776&x=1#3404290Comment160606"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>Sorry for joining the conversation so late, but I have been offline for the last week. I have had an ongoing conversation with Keith on ‘informality’ from the time when he supervised my Phd work in the mid 1990s, and I had been looking very much forward to this seminar. There are several topics already being discussed, but could I address one issue that I see in the paper and that many of you have commented on?</p>
<p>In much writing on informality there is a tension between treating ‘the informal’ as a specific domain of social life, and, on the other hand, realising that informality is negatively defined as the conceptual opposite of some kind of form (in this and most other cases state bureaucracies). As several of you have pointed out, this latter point makes it difficult to arrive at useful definitions of ‘the informal sector’.</p>
<p>But this also carves out a specific topic of study: the relationship between forms, interventions based on forms, and those realities that are not captured by these forms. Keith addressed this topic in one of his replies when he listed possible relationships between the formal and the informal. I have in mind such examples as you mention on page 21 of your paper, John, where census data (based on a form) does not capture that which it seeks to capture – modes of practices of economic activity that are more fluid (imperfect specialization/fluidity).</p>
<p>One of my research interests has been to study what happens when interventions, such as development plans, which are necessarily based on forms, meet a messy reality such as you describe. I’m aware that this moves the focus away from ‘informal sectors’ toward informal politics, but I would still be interested to hear whether this resonates with your experience of writing development plans. When development plans seek to incorporate informality they necessarily, to an extent, formalise ‘the informal’ at a conceptual as well as policy level, and this often leads to contradictions. </p>
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</blockquote> Keith, thanks for a searching…tag:openanthcoop.ning.com,2012-04-27:3404290:Comment:1606112012-04-27T11:55:49.242ZJohn Conroyhttp://openanthcoop.ning.com/profile/JohnConroy
<p>Keith, thanks for a searching set of questions. These go to the heart of my problems in drawing my larger argument together, and in imposing coherence on the ideas. I’ll try to respond to some of the issues you have raised (though some readers might think Melanesian issues are getting rather too much attention).</p>
<p>First, #6, concerning the imposition of moral judgments: I touch on this area in my paper when comparing Mayhew’s attitude (as a nineteenth century ‘social improver’) with…</p>
<p>Keith, thanks for a searching set of questions. These go to the heart of my problems in drawing my larger argument together, and in imposing coherence on the ideas. I’ll try to respond to some of the issues you have raised (though some readers might think Melanesian issues are getting rather too much attention).</p>
<p>First, #6, concerning the imposition of moral judgments: I touch on this area in my paper when comparing Mayhew’s attitude (as a nineteenth century ‘social improver’) with your own neutral stance, simply charting the occupational landscape of Nima, whether ‘legitimate’ or not. But if moral condemnation is sometimes an impediment to social analysis, I think an even bigger issue is its role as a barrier to good policy. The moralistic stance of policymakers in contemporary developing countries leads to attitudes of shame or embarrassment whenever the topic of the informal economy is broached to them. The ‘modernization’ paradigm lives on, if not in intellectual circles then as part of the instinctive mental equipment of many developing country officials. I have seen this repeatedly in international forums (for example, APEC – the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation process) where I have been active in the past. There, efforts to encourage more enlightened policies for the ‘micro-enterprise’ sector have been met with a mixture of incomprehension and dismissal, even sabotage.</p>
<p>Issue #2 concerns the ‘transition’ from subsistence to exchange. This is essentially an economist’s construct and was a central theme for Peter Bauer, and has supported my own view of the development process for a long time. But if, as Gregory says, ‘the subsistence economy is a misconception’, and if (as you say) the ‘subsistence/market opposition’ is ‘insidious’, one ought at least reconsider. In your study of West African agriculture you contended that, historically, warfare and slavery had exerted pressure on social groups to exercise a degree of self-sufficiency greater than would occur in a peaceful world (for such groups had both desire and capacity to engage in trade if circumstances permitted). This African local self-sufficiency corresponded to some degree with that perceived in colonial New Guinea in the 1960s by some Australian economists, which was associated with the notions of ‘subsistence affluence’, and ‘pure subsistence’ in supposedly autarchic communities. The economist E K Fisk theorized the ‘transition to market exchange’ in a manner having much in common with Bauer (and which found some support in the writings of the modern classical economist Hla Myint, himself drawing on Adam Smith). These ideas were taken up by a number of anthropologists active in Melanesia, including Scarlett Epstein. Marshall Sahlins’ notion of ‘original affluence’ had some kinship with these ideas, though it proceeded from very different premises. If it’s not too shameless, I’ll repeat here my link to other work I’m doing in this area at the moment, at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ips.cap.anu.edu.au/ssgm/events/seminar_details.php?searchterm=cra_166996359&semyear=2012">http://ips.cap.anu.edu.au/ssgm/events/seminar_details.php?searchter...</a> This is all closely related to your issue # 3, concerning ‘how the balance of economic pressures/benefits is perceived’ in explanations of rural-urban migration: whether the rural situation is seen as one of ‘affluence’ or of land shortage, and whether urban income opportunities are sought out of desperation or from a more careful calculus of improvement. What I can say is that the population of PNG has trebled in the 50 years since Fisk wrote, and more than doubled since you were there, so that the ‘calculus’ is now conducted in a more desperate situation. This is the most relevant consideration to be taken into account for your issue # 1, dealing with contemporary concerns of PNG development. </p>
<p>Your issue # 4 touches on the question of how far it is legitimate to extend the notion of the informal economy into rural areas. If informality is so closely connected with illegality or irregularity, then how does this apply in the countryside (as distinct from the town where its relevance is pretty clear). For the moment this is for me a work in progress. I see validity in the idea of rural informality when observing rural-urban interactions which clearly involve informality at the urban end of the transaction. I see also that many rural attempts to engage in ‘modern’ economic activity fall far short of what would be recommended by agricultural extension officers or business development advisors. There are strong elements of ‘hybridity’ in such embryonic business ventures but how this characteristic relates to ‘informality’ I’m not completely sure at present.</p>
<p>Finally, I’m gratified that my discussion of how the role of services in development has been theorized appears to have struck a responsive chord. The dismissal of the informal economy by many officials appears to be based on the notion that only agriculture or industry is ‘really’ productive, whereas the reality in modern advanced economies is very different. A thriving informal economy (including a substantial 'service' component) can contribute substantially to the international competitiveness of a developing economy by providing goods and services appropriate to the consumption baskets of urban formal workers, many of them engaged in the export sectors. You touch on this when you describe the informal economy as consisting of ‘self-generated urban markets covering a vast range of needs that the formal economy cannot reach’. I tend also to agree with your view that ‘the main point of the informal economy is as a holding operation allowing migrants to exist in cities when the latter have not developed more stable means of absorbing their work’. Gareth Stedman Jones wrote rather ruefully that, instead of generating a revolutionary dynamic, the wretched of London’s underclass were largely absorbed into the formal workforce by the 1920s, where they entered instead the constituency of the British Labour Party. This absorption of excess labour is what the W. Arthur Lewis model, ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’ might lead one to expect. Incidentally (and illustrating the versatility of the Lewis model) the Chinese economy appears recently to have passed the 'turning point' in the model where surplus labour is largely absorbed and wage levels start to rise, which is even now reducing the competitiveness of Chinese exports. The Chinese managed to do this without a very obvious urban informal sector through the expedient (not available in a democracy) of imposing rigorous controls on internal migration.</p>
<p><br/> <br/> <cite>Keith Hart said:</cite></p>
<blockquote cite="http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/new-oac-online-seminar-john-conroy-intimations-of-the-informal-ec?page=3&commentId=3404290%3AComment%3A160606&x=1#3404290Comment160761"><div><div class="xg_user_generated"><p>John Mc's latest observation is highly relevant to the comparative task that John C set himself here, as was Justin's observation that we should question the apparent ability of the informal economy concept to link so many disparate historical and regional settings. If the seminar paper's length and complexity may deter some from entering into direct engagement with the paper itself, I would suggest two tactics that might help to animate our last few days and push the discussion towards a more focused conclusion.</p>
<p>The first would be to read the concluding short section 5 and comment on that (which I will below); the other might be to address the relvance of this paper to PNG to day and 40 years ago when John and I met there in the context of framing a development strategy for the country' s independence. Justin launched the seminar with reference to this particular context and perhaps we could return to it. In my turn I am happy to reflect more specifically on my own thinking then, but only in response to any interest shown by others. Richard Salisbury's work does provide an interesting bridge to the PNG context for discussion of informal economy and to the work of Gregory, Strathern and others. The question here would be whether or not John's compendious researches illuminate pressing contemporary concerns for PNG's development.</p>
<p>My own take on the concluding paragraphs is first that a model of development as being from subsistence agriculture to market and increasingly urban economy needs to be interrogated. Second, all four authors reviewed emphasise the importance of services in this process. Third, rural-urban migration is central to the informal economy literature and it matters how the balance of economic pressures/benefits is conceived (rural affluence, land shortage, urban livelhoods as a source of improvement or just desperate etc); my own work has always stressed the interdependence of city and countryside in West Africa, but the article that launched the formal/informal pair did not. Fourth, the idea of informality is linked to state laws and bureaucracy and is often illegal; it is questionable whether its extension to traditional rural economy is relevant. Fifth, as Mac pointed out, it is easy for ethnographic nuance to be reified as contrasted social objects, whether conceived of as classes, areas or stages of development (subproletariat, urban poor etc). Sixth, moral attitudes are often imposed on the social phenomena being discussed (the dangerous or not respectable classes, economic backwardness vs development).</p>
<p>When I mentioned earlier a tendency to discuss these questions in metaphysical terms, I meant that most participants usually bring to the discussion non-negotiable assumptions about a lot of this: whether informality is good or bad, progressive or retrogressive, whether PNG societies are generally just like any other or organized by wholly distinctive principles of their own, whether markets and money are universal or erupt as transforming forces in particular times and places. I am not immune to this, but I do hold that such assumptions should be exposed to theoretical and empirical discussion rather than being merely asserted, especially when interdisciplinary exchange is at stake. This isn't easy of course.</p>
<p>Of the six points I raised above, perhaps the most insidious is the subsistence/market opposition. I wrote a book once, <em>The Political Economy of West African Agriculture</em>, which I believe is better than anything Bauer wrote on the region's economy, but I would, wouldn't I? In it I replaced the idea of subsistence with a pressure towards local self-sufficiency which was never divorced from commerce. Mauss and Polanyi both held that local societies may aspire to self-sufficiency, but they never achieve it, so that markets and money (often taking forms quite unlike ours which in Mauss's case included the kula ring and valuables) are necessary to extend the reach of such societies for purposes of trade with foreigners. In this reading gift and market are closer than they are held to be by some Melanesianists (but not all), both in "archaic" and modern capitalist societies. This point could be disputed with textual and historical/ethnographic reference, but probably not here.</p>
<p>Services or cultural commodities like entertainment, education, media, information services etc are the fastest growing sector of world trade, not least as a result of the digital revoluton in communications. An older emphasis in development economics on agriculture and manufacturing must eventually take this into account. So the focus on services that is highlighted so prominently here is important for that reason alone. Once economies had as their object the reproduction of human beings, but this was replaced for a time by the production and circulation of things; maybe the focus of economy is becoming once more a matter of what we can do for each other and these cases throw some light on the issue. In any case once telling stories, singing songs or running races are seen to be economic in some sense, the focus on food production in rural economies is thrown into question.</p>
<p>The last two centuries have seen the land as a matrix for human production largely replaced by the city. I have long felt that the main point of the informal economy is as a holding operation allowing migrants to exist in cities when the latter have not developed more stable means of absorbing their work. But its contemporary application is much wider than that. If informality is by definition negative, what could the urban informal economy be said to be positively? I would say mainly self-generated urban markets covering a vast range of needs that the formal economy cannot reach. The issue then becomes, as John insists, what the relationship is between such activities and sustained economic development. This topic is vast...</p>
<p>I have touched on the fourth question earlier when discussing the dialectics of form. The fifth and sixth likewise underpin some of my earlier remarks. So I will quit here for the time being.</p>
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