Suchergebnisse

Power, knowledge and the informal economy as interwoven practice -- Rethinking informal economies through symbolic power -- Logic of exclusion put into practice -- Genesis of a logic of inclusion -- Rearranging the power of the informal, and the informal of power -- Informality here is everywhere -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

AbstractPeacebuilding debates increasingly revolve around questions about knowledge and expertise. Of particular interest is what (and whose) knowledge(s) ends up authoritative in interventions. This article addresses a problem in the literature on the epistemics and epistemic authority of peacebuilding interventions: the acknowledgement of but lacking attention to plural knowledges, the transgressive character of expertise, and knowledge struggles. It does this by discussing recent suggestions that peacebuilding epistemic authority can be fruitfully analysed as a Bourdieusian field. The article identifies a tension in Bourdieu's own thinking about fields, which has shaped some of these recent proposals. This tension, nevertheless, also enables a reconsideration of fields and struggles, and thereby an analysis that takes plurality and transgressiveness into account. By developing such an alternative conceptual position, the article sees peacebuilding epistemic authority as object- and struggle-bound; conditioned and dependent on dynamics that go beyond peacebuilding as a distinct field of practice. This position is illustrated in an analysis of the emergence and (temporary) establishment of epistemic authority in peacebuilding interventions on informal economies.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine three explanatory perspectives in the academic literature on informal economies that seek to account for agents' engagement in informal economic practices.


Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology to interrogate the existing perspectives and to provide a conceptual rethinking of informal economies and informal economic practices.


Findings
The paper reveals an inherent scholastic epistemocentrism in the established perspectives. By privileging either an objectivist or a subjectivist viewpoint, these accounts do not examine the practical knowledge and logic that constitute agents' knowledgeable engagement in informal economic practices. By making use of Bourdieu's thinking tools of "field", "capital" and "the habitus", the paper offers a conceptual rethinking of informal economic practices as the product of a dialectic relationship between socially objectivated structures and subjective representations and experiences.


Originality/value
The paper introduces a reflexive rethinking of informality that draws on but also develops an emergent literature on informal economic practices as relational and context bound.

The World Bank has for over a decade tried to formalize the informal economy in Kosovo. However, local journalists and businessmen among others provide an alternative understanding of informality that problematizes the World Bank's view and actions. Against this backdrop, the article analyses the constitution and the constitutive effects of the World Bank's anti-informality operations in Kosovo between 1999 and 2014. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's power analytics, the article claims that the Bank's agenda, and the economic ideas enacted through it, does structure and shape informal economic practices on the ground. Yet this structuring involves two forms of misrecognition. As a result, informality is paradoxically constituted (in novel ways) and reconstituted through the World Bank's imposed anti-informality agenda. The article concludes with a discussion of how this underlines the need for policy solutions that depart from liberal peacebuilding's subject–object distinction to form instead around an acknowledgement of informality as emergent and transforming throughout international interventions.