ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘informality’ has become a trendy topic of research in the scholarly literature about post-Soviet societies. The amount of literature focusing on informal practices, institutions and networks in the post-Soviet space has grown rapidly over the last two decades, producing theoretically and empirically grounded accounts of different forms and manifestations of informality, such as clans and regional patronage networks, clientelism, blat networks, bribery, embezzlement, cronyism, kickbacks. In this connection, the review of existing research shows that the distinct focus on ‘post-Soviet informality’ highlights at least nine main themes: (1) economic informality (Alexeev and Pyle 2003; Wallace and Latcheva 2006); (2) blurred boundaries between informality and corruption (Werner 2000; Polese 2008; Urinboyev and Svensson 2013a); (3) informal political institutions and practices (Gel'man 2004; Hale 2011; Ledeneva 2013); (4) informality as a mixture of cultural and economic practices (Misztal 2002; Smith and Stenning 2006; Urinboyev and Svensson 2013b); (5) informality as a reflection of broader sociopolitical and sociocultural traditions (Ledeneva 1998; Collins 2006; Hayoz 2015); (6) the relationship between formal and informal economies (Round et al. 2008; Williams et al. 2013); (7) the (dis)continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet informal economies (Kurkchiyan 2000; Rodgers and Williams 2009; Aliyev 2015a); (8) informal practices of redistribution as an alternative to state-driven welfare distribution (Urinboyev 2013, 2014; Morris and Polese 2014); and (9) definitional, conceptual and terminological ambiguity surrounding the concept of informality (Williams et al. 2013; Aliyev 2015b; Polese 2015).
