Publication details
The Sharing Economy?: Informal Economic Practices in the Post-socialist Countryside
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | In the last quarter-century European post-socialist societies have experienced some of the most profound instances of economic neoliberalisation and globalisation. While in practical terms the processes of liberalisation, marketisation and privatisation were initially externally driven by international institutions, domestically the market also enjoyed an elavated symbolic status as part of the introduction of a package of ‘civilising mechanisms‘destroyed under socialism (Holy 1996). This macro-economic restructuring occurred against the background of a set of widespread, yet ‘hidden‘ non-market economic practices at the micro-level such as sharing, caring and mutual help widespread in particular in the countryside. In some areas (household food provisioning, house maintenance and construction) these socities have developed hybrid economies in which vibrant informal economic practices intersect with market-based relatonships. The paper takes issue with dominant accounts of post-socialist informal economic geographies which tend to devalue these everyday informal practices as either relics of the past (‘economies of shortage‘) or as the current survival tactics of the poor, in particular in the post-Soviet space (Round, Williams, Rodgers 2010). Empirically, the paper draws research conducted in Czechia and Poland and builds on insights from the body of work in human geography (Smith and Stenning 2006) and social anthropology (Czegledy 2002; Acheson 2007, Thelen 2011). The paper offers a more positive conceptualisation of post-socialist informal economic practices as forms of social resilience while remaining sensitive to the importance of geographical difference for our understanding of these alternative economic spaces. Given the urgently felt need to seek global alternative economic futures, the paper raises the question whether there is a possibility for the western ‘core‘ (but possibly also for emerging ‘economies‘) to learn from the experience of the post-socialist rural periphery. |
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