Authors

Alberica CameraniTommaso Aguzzi³; Margherita Gobbat⁴; Binazirbonu Yusupova¹; ²; Gian Marco Moisé¹; ²;  ¹ Dublin City University, Ireland;  ² Dublin City University, Ireland;  ³ Tallin University of Technology, Estonia;  ⁴ Center for Social Science, Georgia

Discussion

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the pervasiveness of informality has attracted the attention of many scholars, who often have conceptualised it in terms of strategies to overcome everyday difficulties in the former socialist republics. However, little research has been conducted on the key role that informal practices play in specific sectors, such as business. Such an in-depth focus is needed to have a greater understanding of the business dimension, where formal rules make up just a small part of the institutional environment. Accordingly, the purpose of this roundtable is to discuss and compare the functioning of informality in different contexts of everyday life in post-socialist societies. Firstly, Tommaso Aguzzi (TalTech) will look at informal entrepreneurship in the context of the Central Asian bazaars as emerging from the institutional asymmetry between formal and informal institutions. This will be followed by Alberica Camerani (DCU), who will explore the interplay between gender and informality in SMEs in Kyrgyzstan, by examining how informality enables and constrains female entrepreneurship. In a similar vein, Binazirbonu Yusupova (DCU) will apply a gender perspective to understand how gender shapes the creation of informal practices in the context of bazaars in Uzbekistan. To conclude, Margherita Gobbat (CSS, Tbilisi) will depict how Europeanization mechanisms interact with informal practices in the case of Georgian wine production for the EU market.