Worlding Water Supply: Thinking Beyond the Network in Jakarta

This article draws on scholarship in Southern theory to ‘world’ the study of water’s urbanization. This means complicating scholarship by widening the focus beyond the application of Northern norms to engage with complex and diverse practices in Southern cities. For water’s urbanization, this means focusing on what water supply is for the majority: neither the centralized piped‐water network nor its absence, but the range of practices and technologies that unite people, nature and artefacts in a complex socio‐ecological politics of water. Drawing on scholarship from Southern urbanisms, urban political ecology, and science and technology studies, we illustrate how expanding water’s urbanization to include more than networked infrastructure in Jakarta draws attention to the importance of ecological connections between piped water, groundwater, wastewater and floodwater. Thinking beyond the network requires deeper engagement with the ecological connections between the diverse flows of water in and around urban environments. These produce distinct forms of fragmentation that are missed when analysis is limited to piped‐water supply. The emphasis on ecological connections between flows of water and power seeks to draw attention back to the importance of the uneven exposure to environmental hazards in cities in which neither water nor nature are wholly contained by infrastructure.     

Formalization by the State,Re‐Informalization by the People: A Gecekondu Transformation Housing Estate as Site of Multiple Discrepancies

This article demonstrates residents' transformative practices and discusses attendant outcomes to contribute to an understanding of state‐built housing estates for people affected by urban transformation projects. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a social housing estate (K‐TOKI) in the Northern Ankara Entrance Urban Transformation Project (NAEUTP). It addresses questions on why formalization of informal housing takes place today, under what conditions it is countered by re‐informalization practices, and what the outcomes of this process are. As informal housing became formalized by NAEUTP, gecekondu dwellers were forced into formalized spaces and lives within K‐TOKI, which was based on a middle‐class lifestyle in its design and its legally required central management. Informality re‐emerged in K‐TOKI when the state's housing institution, in response to the estate's poor marketability, moved out, allowing residents to reappropriate spaces to meet their needs and form their own management system. When cultural norms that are inscribed in the built environment and financial norms that treat residents as clients conflict with everyday practices and financial capabilities, the urban poor increasingly engage in acts of informality. I argue that the outcome of this informality in a formal context is a site of multiple discrepancies.     

Writing Across Contexts: Urban Informality and the State in Tallinn,Bafatá and Berlin

Urban research has long related informality to a lack of state capacity or a failure of institutions. This assumption not only fails to account for the heterogeneous institutional relations in which informality is embedded, but has also created a dividing line between states. Whereas some states are understood to manage urban development through functioning institutions, others, in this view, fail to regulate. To deconstruct such understandings, this article explores informal practices through a multi‐sited individualizing comparison between three case studies of water governance, parking regulation and dwelling regimes in Bafatá (Guinea‐Bissau), Tallinn (Estonia) and Berlin (Germany), respectively. Our approach to understanding informality starts from the negotiation and contestation of order between differently positioned actors in the continuous making of states. From this point of view, informality is inherent in the architecture of states––emerging through legal systems, embedded in negotiations between and within institutions, and based on conflicts between state regulations and prevailing norms. Tracing how order takes shape though negotiation, improvisation, co‐production and translation not only highlights how informality constitutes a modus operandi in the everyday workings of the state in all three cases, but also provides a way to talk across these cases, i.e. to bring them together in one frame of analysis and overcome their presumed incommensurability.     

Urban Informality and the State: Geographical Translations and Conceptual Alliances

Understandings of informality commonly derive from research undertaken in states perceived as lacking the capacity to regulate the practices of their populations. This Interventions forum aims to expand the geographical parameters of empirical research on urban informality. A more global approach, we argue, also necessitates questioning assumptions that undergird this concept—in particular the underlying conception of the state. In this vein, this collection of papers aims to rethink theories of the state through the lens of informality, and vice versa, to inform and refine the concept of informality through a more thorough understanding of states. In so doing, the contributions engage with concepts that have been central both to theories of the state and to the study of informality, namely governance, agency, legitimacy, sovereignty and legality. Following this introduction setting out our theoretical approach, the Interventions forum unites five empirical studies that discuss the nexus of informality and states in contexts that have been researched less extensively from this perspective, each tackling one of the above‐mentioned concepts. Based on these different entry points, the papers provide novel angles on a state‐theoretical understanding of informality. A concluding essay brings these approaches together, reflecting on the possibilities of translating concepts to different sites.     

Juggling Legitimacies: Informal Places for Burials and Worship in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong government's neoliberal approach regarding land development and urbanization affects not only the housing market but also burial places, increasing inequality for both the living and the dead. The urgency of tackling the issue of places for burial is all the more pressing given current demographic changes and an existing backlog of public burial places in inner‐city locations. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on the cultural practices around burial and worship among the inhabitants of Hong Kong, and on their struggle to maintain these practices. It illustrates various forms and means of legitimacy (e.g. pragmatic, normative and cognitive) being applied by all actors, and shows how the continuing practices around worship and burial lead to the production of informality. The main argument is that socially constructed legitimacy can be gained and lost by various actors in a dynamic negotiation process based on belief systems, rules and norms (following Suchman, 1995). Thus, it should be understood as a strategic mode both within and outside the state. This perspective of legitimacy provides a better understanding of how and by what means resources and power are being negotiated in order to draw lessons from informal dynamics.     

Pollution and informal economy

In this study, we investigate the relationship between the size of the informal economy and the level of environmental pollution/energy use. To this end, we first use different indicators of environmental pollution along with a measure of energy use intensity in a panel dataset consisting of 152 countries over the period 1999–2009 and empirically examine the relationship between pollution and the shadow economy. The estimation results show that there is an inverse-U relationship between the size of the informal economy and environmental pollution, that is, small and large sizes of the informal economy are associated with lower environmental pollution and medium levels of informality are associated with higher levels of environmental pollution. Next, we build a two sector dynamic general equilibrium model to suggest an economic mechanism for this observation. Our model identifies two channels through which informality might affect environmental pollution: The scale effect, whereby a larger (smaller) informal economy size is associated with a lower (higher) level of environmental pollution, and the deregulation effect, whereby a larger (smaller) informal economy is associated with higher (lower) pollution levels. As these two effects work in opposite directions, the changing relative strength of one with respect to the informal sector size creates the inverted-U relationship between pollution indicators and informality.     

Muslim Hoedowns,Tenuous Language and the Uncertain Lives of an Urban Majority

Drawing upon diverse elements of Islamic thought, this essay examines the notions of gathering and footwork to think through the elaborations of a material sensibility embedded in the everyday navigations of contemporary urban life. From reflections on the surreptitious encounters of African Americans in various contexts of subjection, to zar practices in Amman and to popular orientations to megacomplex residencies in Jakarta, the essay attempts to address what it means to think and act collectively in urban contexts that fragment, track, evict and erase long‐relied‐upon forms of collaboration. How might we discover in the seeming contraction of urban sociality something else besides intensive individuation, and what kinds of vernaculars and rhythmic encounters, of bodies moving towards and away from each other, might turn the peripheral forms of the urban into sites of new generativity?     

Urban Commoning as a Vehicle Between Government Institutions and Informality: Collective Gardening Practices in Tampere and Narva

This article examines the processes of urban commoning and its co-produced features of urbanity, making the claim that, through these processes, informality becomes translated into institutionalized city planning. Commoning is analysed through a comparative study that utilizes contingent features of urbanity and three modalities accommodating the informality–formality meshwork during urban change. The article contributes to research on urban transformations by integrating commons, informality dynamics and the constitution of state institutions. This focus is elaborated with reference to collective gardening practices in the context of two of the less studied European cities, Narva in Estonia and Tampere in Finland. The results of the study indicate that urban commoning takes place through delegating a public mandate and enacting uncertainty, two processes that informalize city government practices. Particular differences appeared in regard to the institutional porosity that enables unregulated spaces of collective gardening to be mobilized as part of urban politics. We argue that networked movements appear as an essential part of the urban logic of action producing meaningful connections in an informal–formal meshwork and bringing together multiple sites in the commoning process.     

Informality in developing economies: Regulation and fiscal policies

This paper proposes a unified theoretical framework where formal and informal firms coexist and face the same type of product and labor market imperfections: they have monopoly power in the goods market, they are subject to matching frictions in the labor market, and wages are determined by bargaining between large firms and their workers, through either individual or collective bargaining. Our model matches the main stylized facts on informality for developing countries and appears to be a good candidate for policy analysis. In this framework, we study the impact on informality, wages and unemployment of policies that may be used to reduce informality. We consider changes in product market regulation (PMR) and in two types of fiscal policies, labor taxes and formality enforcement. We find that lessening PMR decreases informality and unemployment simultaneously, indicating that there is not necessarily a tradeoff between informality and unemployment. The tradeoff appears when fiscal policies are used, though. Moreover, the impacts of PMR on unemployment and on wages are larger under collective than individual bargaining. With respect to wage inequality, lessening PMR reduces it, while lower taxes tend to increase the formal sector wage premium.     

Entanglements of Periphery and Informality in Mexico City

Mexico City is a well‐known case of urban expansion. Most of the growth has been in its peripheries, occurring during two phases of housing privatization: a predominantly self‐built urbanization by residents establishing irregular settlements (starting in the 1930s); and a relatively recent surge of mass‐produced small‐scale single‐family housing built by state‐sponsored development companies (underway since the year 2000). Informality, we argue, should not be understood as a mode of housing production setting in opposition self‐build practices against industry‐led and/or state‐sponsored processes, but rather as a dialectical urbanization logic shaped by the entanglements of in/formal processes in governance practices, land privatization and regularization, and urban infrastructure and services deficits. We are particularly interested in a dominant narrative whereby the embeddedness of informality is constantly underplayed and irregular settlements are cast as a residual category, a problem to tolerate or in need of intervention, or the inevitable combination of demographic growth and housing shortage, rather than the direct outcome of urban policies and development processes. Conversely, recent housing policy in Mexico is officially narrated as an economic stimulus, a means to control and order (irregular) urban expansion, and an impulse to democratize homeownership. Our discussion of the entanglements of informality in Mexico City is based on an extended literature review of academic articles and official reports (predominantly in English), supplemented by a series of street and neighborhood explorations (in the summers of 2012 and 2013) across the metropolis.     

The Political Ecology of Virtual Water in Southern Spain

What does virtual water conceal? This article synthesizes political ecology with ecological economics to question the understanding of the scientific concept of virtual water as part of an independent objective reality, rather than as a construction supported by pre‐existing ideas. The discourse promoting both the concept of virtual water and the methodologies used to estimate virtual water flows is structured according to some underlying ideas that are framed within market logic and the rationality of international trade. Consequently, it produces a representation of water as a factor of production that does not challenge the hegemonic construction of water scarcity in nature, and proposes a water management system the main purpose of which is to maximize efficiency in the use of the resource. We reveal the ideas underlying the virtual water concept to show how a critical approach to ecological economics can be complemented by political ecology theories. In this article, we use epistemological reflection as a starting point, with the specific objective of contrasting this reflection with the reality of water in the horticultural sector of Almería (southern Spain), in order to bring to light those aspects made invisible through the use of the virtual water indicator in a concrete case study.     

Futures of Crisis,Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

Coastal megacities across Asia have experienced devastating floods in recent years. Studies project dramatic increases in populations prone to chronic flooding and potential permanent inundation of densely populated urban areas in future decades. The uncertainties presented by future flood risks disrupt prevalent state visions of globalization‐driven prosperity. The emerging reality of a shift in relationship between water and urban settlements has begun driving recalibration of power relations around a range of issues, including longstanding contestations over infrastructure delivery, housing, land rights and political representation. Flood mitigation efforts have played out in debates over displacement and eviction, and distributional concerns about the costs and benefits of these initiatives. This article develops a conceptual framework for assessing the implications of projections of flood risk for urban political theory. The article begins by identifying political contestations that emerge around the varied ways water intersects with urban processes—through dynamics of permeability, flow and drainage, aquifers and pipes, and coastal defense. It then explores how projections of the crisis of flooding have reshaped three contemporary debates in urban politics: those around property rights and the question of ‘informality’; around neoliberalization and financialization; and around the rescaling of the state. Finally, it briefly deploys this framework to examine the case of Jakarta.     

Silence and Voice in Nigeria's Hybrid Urban Water Markets: Implications for Local Governance of Public Goods

This article highlights how the governance of the water sector affects the strategies and tactics urban residents use to gain improved access to water for household consumption in cities with limited networked infrastructure. A framework of exit, voice and loyalty (EVL) is used to characterize the actions household decision makers take in neighborhoods across metropolitan areas. In Nigeria, Lagos and Benin City are rapidly growing metropolitan regions with urban water markets competing with a state‐run utility. Scholars have documented informality and hybridity between state and non‐state actors, but there is less understanding of variables associated with citizen behavior in urban water markets across different types of households and communities. This article places Nigeria in the context of African mobilization around water provision, using interviews, observation and findings from fieldwork, household interviews and surveys undertaken between 2008 and 2015 to show how access to water is shaped by the interplay between state and non‐state sources of water. This access is filtered through differently regulated service providers and the perceived authority of each actor involved in water delivery, which can lead to what I call structural silence. Findings show the need for a grounded understanding of factors influencing voice and participation in local governance.     

Organisational flexibility and HRM in the hotel industry: evidence from Australia

The hotel industry is renowned for its poor pay and employment conditions and a low take‐up of HR practices. It is generally believed that the industry has relied on a lowcost, numerically flexible and disposable workforce. Recently, however, there has been debate concerning the extent to which managers in the hotel industry are embracing high commitment HRM and functionally flexible work practices. This study seeks to shed light on this question by analysing large‐scale survey and interview data on the hotel industry in Australia. While hotel workplaces in general continue to be associated with high levels of numerical and temporal flexibility and greater informality of HR policies, it was apparent that larger luxury hotels were adopting more systematic employee management techniques and strengthening their internal labour markets through functional flexibility initiatives. Such firms were also pursuing numerical and temporal flexibility strategies, although in rather different ways.     

Co‐evolution in an Institutionalized Environment*

abstract This paper examines the extent to which co‐evolution can take place within a heavily constrained environment and how changes in the degree of institutionalization are relevant to opportunities for exercising strategic choice at the level of the firm. It addresses these questions through a detailed case study of a major Brazilian telecommunications company, Telemig, covering its life span of 27 years from 1973 to 2000. The insights obtained advance the theory of co‐evolution by incorporating a political dimension of how organizations are transformed into new forms. In the case studied, new forms arose with radical changes in the rules affecting competition and with de‐institutionalization of the economic regime by coalitions of actors who were strategically located in networks that crossed system levels. Although the Telemig case presents circumstances different to those usually addressed by studies of co‐evolution, it nevertheless points to the virtues of combining a strategic choice approach with one that focuses on the isomorphic effects of institutional constraints.     

Urban Waterscapes: The Hydro‐Politics of Flooding in a Sinking City

The threat of flooding in cities is often compounded by political and economic decisions made on watershed management, land development and water infrastructure and provisioning. It has also become a point of conflict between cities’ objectives for development and modernization, and the struggles of marginalized residents living in low‐lying coastal and riverine areas to remain in place. Flooding takes on different forms depending on one's point of view. It is a biophysical issue, involving geology, geography, meteorology and ecology. It is one of urban governance, involving planning and maintenance of infrastructure and land use. And it is sociopolitical, involving historical social and spatial marginalization and contestation. This article, based on mixed‐methods research in Jakarta, Indonesia, traces the conceptual and physical contours of urban waterscapes across these conflicting ideas and narratives. It brings into dialogue theories of urban political ecology, landscape ecology and environmental ethnography to explore the interrelationships between biophysical and sociopolitical factors behind urban flooding. In the article the focus is on the varying materialities and scales involved, including the ecological scales of the watershed, the infrastructural scales associated with flood protection, and the urban scales of planning, governance and social activism. The article concludes with a proposition for a multidimensional approach to thinking and acting on problems of urban ecological change.     

Informality as Structure or Agency? Exploring Shed Housing in the UK as Informal Practice

Recent attention to the phenomenon of ‘beds in sheds’—outbuildings used illegally for residential accommodation—suggests that shelter informality is increasing in the UK. Reflecting concerns about its apparent proliferation, the issue has been increasingly prominent on government and media agendas, framed in terms of illegal immigration and rogue landlordism, with policy announcements accompanied by high‐profile police and border agency raids. While little firm evidence exists on the scale, nature and causes of this type of informal shelter provision, this paper takes as its starting point the discursive construction of informality in the specific context of the UK, exploring the role of key agentic and structural factors therein. It suggests that an emphasis on agency in government and media accounts may risk obscuring the structural factors (including state policies) involved in the production of informality, as well as the interaction between agency and structure. The case of shed housing demonstrates how informality is produced by a complex interplay of structural and agentic factors characteristic of many global Northern cities, captured by the notion of ‘informality as practice’ which derives from debates focusing on Southern cities. At the same time, it shows how discourses around informality may be mobilized in the service of specifically context‐driven ideological agendas, in this case relating to immigration and welfare.     

Socio-demographics,political attitudes and informal sector employment: A cross-country analysis

In this paper, we empirically investigate the relationship between informal sector employment and micro-level socio-demographic characteristics, political acts and attitudes, and individual norms. Using self-reported individual micro-level data from the World Values Survey for seven developing countries (China, Ecuador, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Yemen), our cross-country regressions and principal component analysis reveal that socio-demographic characteristics of individuals are strong predictors of their informal sector employment. Our estimations further document that individual preferences for an economically strong, interventionist and egalitarian state and confidence in state and political institutions are positively and significantly correlated with informal sector employment, whereas variables associated with confidence in free market institutions and support for competition are negatively and significantly correlated with informal sector employment. We also show that individuals who participate either actively or inactively in peaceful and lawful political processes are significantly less likely to work in the informal sector. Finally, we document that individual norms, such as religiosity and tax morale, are negatively correlated with informal sector employment. Throughout our analysis, instead of having to rely on ad-hoc informality categorizations of third parties, we base our measurement of informal sector employment directly on the self-evaluation of individuals, who have the best information on the degree of their informality.     

Quality and cost? The evolution of Walmart's business strategy and human resource policies and practices in China and their impact (1996–2017)

This study responds to calls for more in‐depth and qualitative studies, the return to a focus on external factors, and the inclusion of business strategy and industrial relations in human resource management (HRM) research, as well as more research in the retail sector in the Chinese context. We examine the coevolution of the business strategy and HR strategy of Walmart (China) in the last two decades and identify tensions in the context of intensifying competition in the Chinese retail market. We highlight the interactive effect of business and HR strategies through a historical lens. Our study reveals a shift from the original employee‐oriented win–win strategy through rent sharing between the firm and the employees to a win–lose strategy through the introduction of more cost conscious HR policies and practices. Findings of our study challenge the conventional wisdom that firms adopt either the cost or quality strategy and, along with it, the suggestion of matching the quality strategy with employee‐oriented HR policies and practices, and cost leadership with a transactional approach to HRM. We argue a cost and quality business strategy may be adopted, which requires the support of employee‐oriented, rather than cost‐oriented, HR policies and practices.     

Legitimation and institutionalization of managerial practices. The role of organizational rhetoric

This paper analyzes how rhetoric is associated with the legitimation and institutionalization of managerial practices. Since rhetoric both shapes and reflects an actor’s legitimacy assumptions, rhetoric can be used as an indicator of the institutionalization or cognitive legitimacy of managerial practices. Drawing on and expanding previous research on rhetorical theory and verbal accounts, this paper links argumentation structure and form with processes of institutionalization. The empirical analysis draws on a large text corpus of data from two German banks, both of which implemented drastic downsizing measures. The results show that the process of institutionalization is related to both a decline in argument diversity and a shift from defensive to acclaiming arguments.