Search results for ""Author Abel Polese""

From the erosion of state legitimacy in Lebanon to the use of smartphones in Kyrgyzstan, from a Polish suburb to the music scene in Azerbaijan, this volume attempts to explain why, in a variety of world regions, a substantial number of people tend to ignore or act against state rules. We propose to look at informality beyond simplistic associations of the phenomenon with a single category such as "informal labour" or "corruption". By doing this, we propose to look for a correlation between the emergence, and persistence, of some informal practices and the quality of governance in a given area. We also suggest that a better understanding of the variety of informal practices present in a region can help conceptualising more adequate interventions and eventually improve the socio-economic conditions of its inhabitants.

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Now that academics are required to be teachers, managers, media catalyzers, analysts, fundraisers, and social media animals: How do you strike a good balance between what is expected from you and what you want to do?What conferences to attend? How to find the money to go there? Is it worth it to act as a peer reviewer? What publishers are best to target? Is publishing a chapter in an edited book worth the work?This book is intended to help scholars to design and think strategically about their own career. Beginning with How to get published in good journals, it explores a number of questions that most academics encounter at various stages of their careers.

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This book illustrates why and how informality in governance is not necessarily transitory or temporary, but a constant in most systems of the world. The difference between various administrative structures is not whether informality is present or not, but where, in which areas, it is located. The essays gathered in this volume demonstrate that, in some cases, informal mechanisms are self-protective, while, in others, they are perceived as normal responses and a set of tactics for individuals, classes, and communities to respond to unusual demands. Where expectations of the state, a company, or some commission are too far from citizens' existing models of normative behaviour, informal behaviour continues to thrive. Indeed, new tactics are adopted in order to cope with disjunctions between theory and reality as well as to serve as contrasts to values imposed by a centre of power, such as a central state, a city administration, or the management board of a large company. The focus of the papers contained in this book is two-fold and rests on an analysis of phenomena manifesting themselves "beyond" and "in spite of" the state. The first part deals with areas where the state is not always, or only marginally, active whilst the second analyses activities performed in conflict with state regulations (ie: behaviour often studied from a criminal and legal standpoint).

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The focus of the volume is on the negative factors for the establishment and consolidation of democratic constitutional states resulting from previous autocratic regimes with totalitarian features. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the one-party regimes in Central and Eastern Europe favored democratic developments in many countries. But they went different ways, and some of them abandoned the path of democratic transformation that had been taken initially after a short time. The great differences in the eastern transformations raise the question of why, at first glance, very similar starting conditions led to very different results. What role did the totalitarian hereditary burden of "actually existing socialism" play in this?

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