Informality Rules
Informality Rules

Summary/Abstract: Informality is so widespread in the post-state-socialist societies of Central Europe today that conducting any business, economic or otherwise, is virtually impossible without bowing, or even succumbing, to it. Informality is the main subject of afterdinner complaint sessions in the emerging western expatriate communities of Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw, let alone St. Petersburg or Moscow. Journalistically decried and criminalized as "graft," "corruption," the "mafia business," the "patron-client system" or the "black market," its presence is immediately obvious to the traveller who approaches any country of the former state-socialist bloc through the crowds of street merchants retailing in the informal transportation, money, housing, or sex markets that surround the airports, railway stations, or border checkpoints. [...]

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