Authors

Discussion

In both popular understandings and scholarly work, entrepreneurship during the transformation from socialism to capitalism in post-socialist countries has often been associated with sidestepping legislation or outright criminality. In order to grasp these opaque practices, this paper suggests private enterprise during the transformation period can be productively analysed through the prism of informality, defined as an activity of an individual or a group based on circumventing state or other norms regulating social life. This can include a very wide spectrum of human behaviour, from small exchanges of favours, support for oppressed political opposition, to mafia. The different meanings of informal practices have recently been systematized in the Global Informality Project (2018), in which they were classified in terms of their functions of redistribution, solidarity, market orientation and domination. In our paper, we draw inspiration from this framework to analyse the "unwritten rules" in the social practices of small-scale entrepreneurs in their professional lives during the Czech (and Slovak) transformation at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Based on a corpus of biographical and semi-structured interviews, the interpretive frame of informality avoids the pitfalls of classifying business practices in a binary mode as either legal or illegal. Instead, it allows us to analyse how small-scale entrepreneurs transferred a spectrum of previously acquired informal business practices into the post-1990 capitalist era, what purposes these practices served, and how such a culture of informality from below shaped local understandings of what it means to "do business".