Abstract
This chapter presents case studies of workers in the underground economy—as taxi drivers and cash-in-hand manual workers. Informality as a ‘normal’ response to uncertainty and contingency is explored here. Manual work in informality builds a personhood based on self-reliance, but also trust in socially equal others. Masculine spaces of leisure, sociality and work are explored where working-class ‘authentic’ manhood can be rehearsed and even experimented with. Displays of working-class skill and ingenuity ‘for their own sake’ are explored in terms of MacIntyre’s definition of ‘practice’ and ‘internal good’. DIY sustains workers, allowing a propertizing (in Skeggs’ sense) of personhood and class. These practical and ethical dispositions lead to a rejection of a simple narrative of ‘adaptation’ and the remoulding of the working self as ‘entrepreneurial’.
A small part of this chapter pertaining to skilled informal tradesmen derives from ethnographic material published previously (Morris 2014), as do some of the materials on DIY practices (2012b).
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Notes
- 1.
Zhenya’s CD collection also included a quantity of downloaded pornography, I later learnt. These CDs circulated in a way similar to the ‘economy of jars’ and were used to cement ties as men would ‘swap’ their latest downloads.
- 2.
Since 2010 two bars have opened and manage to ply a business of sorts but the nature of their clientele is unclear and they are talked of as ‘off limits’ by all my informants due to the perception that they are linked to criminal gangs and because of their exceptionally high prices. Upon visiting them they turned out to be unremarkable, if extremely expensive places frequented by local men with money to spend on their women.
- 3.
For some teenage girls there was less worry about propriety, and garages were seen as a legitimate refuge from the domestic sphere for girlfriends to go to avoid the policing of sexual behaviour. In an example of ‘strength in numbers’, groups of young women would regularly make barbeques outside garages, while more upwardly mobile women illustrated their wholesale rejection of the garages’ possibility of propriety by renting at great expense parking spaces in the private, gated car parks that were ‘guarded’ 24 hours a day. These spaces were often right next door to the traditional garage blocks, but in terms of symbolic value were as far from them as the traditional Soviet blocks of flats were from the villas of the local elites.
- 4.
By the same token the access to garages over time takes on significance in terms of socio-economic stratification within the community of factory workers. As restrictions on the further building of garages are put in place and the rental or resale cost of these outbuildings as property increases significantly, there are many younger workers ‘left behind’ who have no access to these spaces apart from as friends of those who already own them. This in turn reinforces the sense of the places as a precious resource. Those younger men with a garage are an object of envy and are something of a labour ‘aristocracy’.
- 5.
See previous chapter for a discussion of the more polychronic approach to task management in Russian production. See also Hall (1983) for a culturally differentiated discussion of polychronicity.
- 6.
Nonetheless, it is fair to say that taxi drivers inevitably were exposed to criminals and prostitutes in the town and in some respects this gave them an ‘advantage’ in finding other sources of income, whether legal or illegal. See, for example, the description of fuel theft and reselling in the town, which was facilitated by taxi drivers (Morris 2014).
- 7.
‘Mutual support’ translates ‘vzaimovyruchka’, which has more of a concrete meaning than the more standard ‘vzaimopomoshch’’, meaning ‘mutual aid’.
- 8.
Hirschman’s (1971) hermeneutic framework on responses to insecurity in organizations faced by crisis has been used elsewhere to analyse choices facing ordinary people after socialism, particularly as an apt metaphor for the ‘non’-choices that workers faced during the 1990s transition. See, for example, Ellerman 1998; Bohle and Greskovits 2007; Szabo 2009; Sippola 2014. My use of the framework draws on Crowley’s (2004) proposition of ‘exit’ into the informal economy for workers who have no ‘voice’ which in turn draws on Greskovits (1998).
- 9.
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Morris, J. (2016). Informal Economy: Going Underground but Coming Out of the Shadows. In: Everyday Post-Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95089-8_3
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