Read more
Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare.
Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.
List of contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Note on transliteration
Introduction PART I: PERSONHOOD Chapter 1. Creating Knowledge about Others: Locating, Knowing "by Sight", and Ethnography
Chapter 2. Favors Reproduce Social Personhood
PART II: CITIZENSHIP Chapter 3. Local Community and Ethical Citizenship: Neoliberal Reconfigurations of Social Protection
Chapter 4. Pursuing Favors within a Local Community
PART III: POWER Chapter 5. Managing Ambiguity in Social Protection
Chapter 6. Navigating Ambiguity: the Moveopticon
Conclusion: Morality, Interest, and Sociality in the Global Postsocialist Condition
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Čarna Brković is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg. She co-edited Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and won the 2015 SIEF Young Scholar Prize.
Summary
Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Challenging widespread views of favors as means of survival in transitioning contexts, this volume demonstrates that these contemporary globalized forms of flexible governance are not contradictory to one another, but often mutually constitutive.
