The Informal Practices of Civil Servants
One area of consensus in the sea of literature on African states, governments, and public services is the significant divergence between the official norms that govern these institutions and the actual behaviour of their employees, regardless of whether the literature emanates from the field of political science, anthropology, sociology, or administrative science, and regardless of the theoretical currents present and scientific positions taken in this literature. Across the board there is acknowledgement that legislation, regulations, procedures, specifications, and organizational structures, all of which have largely been patterned on Western models, are rarely adhered to by government officials and users alike (see Erdmann; VonDoepp, both this volume).
There is no doubt that in any social institution, in any country, and at any time, divergences exist between norms and practices. However, the scope and form of these divergences vary considerably depending on the context. In the case of public sector jobs in Africa, this divergence is particularly sharp and becomes manifest in a variety of forms. Most assessments of these processes are normative and evaluative. The divergence between official norms and actual behaviour is usually critiqued on the basis of value judgements. ‘Poor governance’ is condemned, as is corruption, ethnic allegiance, or clientelism, with implicit reference being made to the democratic and technocratic model of Northern countries, which is often idealized.
However, beyond this somewhat accusatory and Western-centric subtext, divergences between norms and practices among African government officials are also the object of various scholarly works, although empirical studies have unfortunately been scarce until recently. It is true that there is a huge contrast between the literature on the sociology of organizations, which has developed grounded analysis of the actual behaviour of civil servants in Europe, and the lack of such studies in Africa, but this contrast is becoming less and less pronounced.1 For many reasons, corruption has been undoubtedly the most frequent entry point for empirically studying informal practices of civil servants: corruption is obviously ‘breaking’ the rules of bureaucracies, ignoring the law of the state, and departing from the official norms with which civil servants are supposed to comply.
Corruption
In most African countries, corruption is now systemic and omnipresent, in the form of ‘petty corruption’, which takes place between civil servants and citizens, and in the form of ‘big corruption’, which involves senior civil servants, members of parliament (MPs), members of the government, international companies, and so on. While ‘big corruption’ is opaque and quite impenetrable, to be investigated by policemen, judges, or newsmen, petty corruption is a typical job for anthropologists: it is a visible daily practice involving rank and file actors which is open to everyone, situated as it is at the interface between ‘street level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980) and users of public services. For the social sciences, the word ‘corruption’ is little more than an entry point to the study informal practices, which are against the law from a legal point of view.
In order to take into account this overlap between corrupt practices and all of the ‘real’ everyday practices of state services, we adopted the broadest possible acceptation of the ‘complex of corruption’ and one which is far removed from strictly legal definitions, i.e. all practices involving the use of public of office that is improper, i.e. illegal and/or illegitimate from the perspective of the regulations in force or from that of users, and gives rise to undue personal gain.
(Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006: 6)
Daily corruption is at the core of many of the informal behaviours of civil servants. This systemic corruption has multiple forms: commissions for illicit services (the payment of money to officials for unjustified favours that are granted to the user, most commonly at the expense of the public purse); unwarranted fees for public services (undue remuneration that is given in exchange for rendering public services to which one is anyway entitled and which are supposed to be carried out ‘free of charge’); more or less ‘required’ gratuities (gratitude has to be shown to a public official who has ‘done his work well’ by offering ‘something’); string-pulling (favouritism, cronyism, and ‘recommendations’, which result in a general exchange of favours); tributes and tolls (levies are extorted, the service supplied being legal or illegal); sidelines (the use of company materials and resources by workers for the completion of private paid work); and misappropriations (illegal appropriation – or theft – of public commodities). The list goes on. The first four forms (commission, unwarranted fee, gratuity, and string-pulling) involve transactions of either a monetary or material nature, or transactions that are based on personal or identity-based ties. This does not apply to the last three forms, which instead involve forms of extortion (toll) or privative appropriation of public goods (sideline and misappropriation). These multiple forms are often interlinked. In other words they are hybrid and ambiguous patterns frequently entangled in daily reality: the ex post gratuity may be ‘expected’ or ‘solicited’ in a way that is more akin to a form of unwarranted fee or commission; the over-billing of a medical service may involve not only a levy, but also an unwarranted fee and, similarly, the ‘toll’ may conceal a commission.
Corruption unites people in continuous business relationships and leads to a kind of ‘informal privatization’ of the state, insofar as a government official does not do his work, or any work, unless he gets a direct remuneration from the user or the colleague. Corruption structures itself according to organized and even reciprocal networks (the police officer must give ‘his share’ to the sergeant, who gives his to the police chief; the trader importing goods has ‘his’ custom officer, as well as the truck driver); it can be punctual, dyadic, and regular.
Links may also exist between monetary and non-monetary transactions. For example, a commission or toll may also be paid in kind: if a ‘development project’ finances the renovation of a minister’s house, it may be interpreted not only as a form of ‘misappropriation’, but also as either a ‘commission’ that is paid so that the minister will play the role of intermediary, enabling the project to benefit from favours granted by the administration, or a toll that is paid to secure the simple freedom to operate.
Certain aspects of such transactions are more or less spontaneous, at least from the perspective of the actors involved. This is most clearly the case when corruption takes the form of gratuities and string-pulling. Others are the outcome of negotiation and bargaining, which is the case with commissions and, sometimes, unwarranted fees; and others again are an expression of an outright power relationship, for example the toll. In previous work, we also noted that all of these forms of corruption are viewed ambiguously, depending on whether the informant has a direct or indirect relationship with the practice in question. Everyone disapproves of it in some contexts, but everyone lends legitimacy to it in other contexts.2 Nonetheless, this does not prevent each individual form of corruption from occupying a specific place on the scale of legitimacy/illegitimacy.
Popular semiology conveys very well the multiple dimensions of corruption and its daily omnipresence: ‘The goat grazes where it is tied.’ ‘The one who pounds always keeps a mouthful for himself.’ One has to give ‘the money for the ingredients of the sauce’, ‘to put a stone on a file, so that it does not fly away’, ‘to lubricate the mouth’.
Corruption is also omnipresent in the perceptions of people about administrations. This leads to a vicious circle: if people assume (or are convinced) that the civil servants they have to deal with are corrupt and respond only in venal terms, civil servants are likely to react and behave accordingly, often by taking advantage of corrupt offers and therefore further reinforcing existing popular attitudes. However, this does not mean that there is a complete absence of rules and regulations, or that corrupt practices are merely a matter of the ‘law of the market’ or simple power relations. On the contrary, everyday corruption is a social activity that is regulated de facto and in accordance with complex rules and is tightly controlled by a series of tacit codes that differ significantly from public codes and official or legal norms. This is also true of other non-corrupt, informal practices of civil servants.
The Embeddedness of Corruption in Daily Practices of Civil Servants
Corruption does not take place in a world of its own and corrupt transactions can often not easily be differentiated from non-corrupt practices. For example, it may be hard to know where to draw the line between legitimate commission and tips on one hand, and illegal pots-de-vin such as bribes on the other hand. Corruption is embedded in the day-to-day routine of civil servants to such an extent that it often becomes difficult to distinguish between corrupted practices and the everyday informal practices through which the civil service operates. To see this, let us consider some key characteristics of African bureaucracies.
Clientelism
Although no administration is monolithic, and civil servants are not all alike, some informal practices are very common in most African administrations. For instance, the numerous phenomena of factional solidarity, patronage, bonds of affiliation, and partisan preference that one meets daily at all levels of African administrative services could be grouped into the category of clientelism. Thus, appointments, assignments, promotions, or pushing ‘somebody on one’s side’ often follows the rather systematic logics of network building and of individualized protection and redistribution, which has little to do with duly established profiles of positions or competence criteria.
The Formal and the Real
Organization charts, official texts, regulations, schedules, and plans are far from lacking in African administrations and suggest the contours of an integrated and functional bureaucratic world. Yet reality is different and is very far from this smooth image. For instance, the tasks carried out are not the ones that were planned; the agents do things other than those for which they are officially recruited and paid; voluntary and other informal back-up agents, not of the formal payroll, assume and perform a considerable part of the regular tasks; budgets are purely fictional; or posted instructions are never respected. The real daily functioning of any administrative service in most African countries cannot be inferred from the written guidelines governing it.
The ‘Each One for Oneself-Ism’
In spite of slogans and stereotypes praising community solidarity, African administrations are the kingdom of the ‘each one for oneself-ism’. In the administrative services, teamwork is more or less unknown: no one interferes in his/her colleague’s work. Meetings involving collective discussions aimed at improving quality or work effectiveness are extremely rare. Each acts in a kind of ‘bubble’ (two or three people can, of course, professionally live together in the same bubble) wherein no outsiders penetrate. Everyone applies the proverb ‘If you go through a village of one-eyed people, close an eye and walk!’
‘Areas of Suspicion’
Any form of collective action immediately gives rise to considerable suspicion, rumours, and accusations, from inside as well as from outside. There is hardly a head of department who is not potentially corrupted, partial, or partisan in the eyes of his collaborators and subordinates. Similarly, any decision of a judge is automatically suspected of having been taken to please X, or because Y offered a bribe-containing ‘envelope’. We cannot say anything about the truthfulness of all these accusations: some are probably unfounded or slanderous. What remains confirmed, however, is the extent of these ‘areas of suspicion’ in the administrative service; significantly, they militate against the construction of the minimal relations of trust or safety that are necessary to the satisfactory delivery of public services.
‘Privilegism’
Any position in the public services is first and foremost valued in terms of the access to privileges that it permits. Since the wages are derisory and never increasing almost anywhere, and as the commitment to the work itself is weak, the privileges – formal or informal, licit or illicit – make the difference. The goal is, to some extent, to extend these privileges to the utmost, as far as possible, sometimes immoderately, either because of the material interest, or because of the prestige they provide. The advantages of one’s position are thus genuine markers of status and operate as signs of ‘distinction’ (in the sense of Bourdieu 1979) vis-à-vis colleagues, subordinates, and users.
Contempt for Anonymous Users
Whether in a public service, a post office, a registry office, a police station, or a medical centre, the anonymous user will make a bad start, likely finding himself in a hostile field. He believes he has to go round an assault course and nobody will help him, whereas in reality it is often quite the contrary. The civil servants regard him as an intruder and troublemaker, even as prey, and intend to be as little disturbed by him as possible. His ignorance of procedures does not invite help, but rather reprimand. Whereas the external social world privileges the values of propriety, hospitality, and respect, the bureaucratic universe, on the contrary, seems to be based on the contempt of the user and, in particular, of his time.
The Generalized Exchange of Favours
However, this contempt stops where the recommendations (for example, from a superior, a neighbour, or a family member) start. Any person directly or indirectly recommended is, on the contrary, rather well served, often at the expense of waiting anonymous users. For a relative or an acquaintance, the civil servant improves politeness and will ease the access to the required service, readily leaving his place to guide his host. The ‘recommendation networks’ are multiple: members of the extended family, neighbours, people originating in the same region, colleagues, former schoolmates, leisure mates, party comrades, and so on. The favour rendered won’t necessarily be returned by the debtor, but by other acquaintances that will render services: this is why we can talk of a ‘generalized exchange of favours’. You have to know somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody, in order to survive in an administrated territory. Faced with an administrative problem that needs to be solved, one does not try to find out about the procedure to be followed, but whom to see – who could pull the strings for you.
The ‘Culture of Impunity’
The absence of real penalties for serious professional misconducts (such as embezzlement or corruption) is confirmed by empirical studies. The worst that can generally happen is re-assignment, a change of working place. Many heads of department told us they were unable to sanction an incompetent, negligent, or venal subordinate because any sanction immediately raises a flood of protestations and interventions in favour of the sanctioned agent. Such defences are mounted either in the name of solidarity or are a form of power struggle for patronage or clienteles, whether or not bound to political parties. We should add the fact that the indelicacies of each offender are well known to the other offenders and thus, vertically or horizontally, ‘everybody has a hold over everybody else’. This helps us to understand why such a culture of impunity prevails nowadays.
Other Logics
Of course, the above informal practices are not the only ones that can be identified. Individuals may also intervene on the basis of other logics (charity or pity, for instance) and of course African civil servants sometimes follow official norms and behave partly in conformity with bureaucratic rules. The acknowledgement of competence, merit-based promotions, legal-rational logics, deference to professional ethics, and respect for procedures are not uncommon – even if they are exceptions – or are mixed with opportunistic strategies. Also, ‘islands of effectiveness’ (Crook 2010) may be noticed here and there. We must keep in mind that as far as logics of action among civil servants are concerned, pluralism, code switching, and straddling are the rule. So we need new theoretical tools in order to understand more acutely how civil servants ‘play’ between formal practices and informal ones. Here the concept of ‘practical norms’ may help.
Practical Norms
Let us begin with this starting point: the informal professional practices of public actors are neither anarchic nor random. Africa is not the continent of anomia; it is not ‘Ubu’s kingdom’. We should distrust the expression of ‘failed states’, too hastily used about Africa, which implies a world without structures and regulations. African states are true states, and informal practices of civil servants are structured and regulated. When informal practices lead individuals away from following official norms, they are following other norms. We term them practical norms. Practical norms are informal regulations, tacit or latent, underlying actors’ practices when they do not follow official norms. They help to understand why and how informal practices converge and are not anarchic.
Practical norms always coexist with official norms. So, the informal practices of civil servants in Africa are not the product of a lack of norms, but of an excess. Of course, practical norms are not formalized, they are not even necessarily conscious and are scarcely expressed as such by social actors: they are more often than not automatic and routine, existing in a vein more implicit than explicit. One could even say – to use Bourdieu’s (1992) expression – that these practical norms are incorporated into a habitus,3 in that they are not directly seen. They are at times similar to linguistic norms. It is therefore the responsibility of the researcher to isolate, identify, and analyse them, based on the practices and views of the actors.
Such an approach, involving a multiplicity of practical norms coexisting with official norms, runs counter to the unifying interpretation of norms that has pervaded all social sciences since Durkheim’s time, according to which members of the same society necessarily share common norms, either official or social. This conception is even more common where Africa is concerned: there are plenty of clichés and stereotypes about the absence of individuality and the pressure of community in Africa, and the weight of a so-called traditional African culture. This is the ‘culturalist-traditionalist’ argument. For many people, the informal practices of civil servants ignore official norms and actually follow social norms inherited from the African past, but practical norms are much more diverse, innovative, and syncretic than social (traditional) norms; they are more often than not modern outcomes, produced inside the African administrative world through interactions between civil servants and users and between civil servants themselves as the product of a contemporary history in which colonization looms large.
There is no shortage of examples in which it is not possible to attribute the current practices of public officials (which are not in line with professional norms) to surrounding social norms and ‘African cultures’. Take, for example, a very topical case. Virtually everywhere in Africa nurses are well known for the disdain they show toward patients from poor backgrounds. This attitude has been highlighted in numerous studies (Jaffré and Olivier de Sardan 2003; Jewkes et al. 1998). The odds are very high that in a hospital in Bamako, Niamey, or Conakry, a young nurse who receives an elderly female patient in a threadbare pagne (loincloth) from the rural area will show no consideration for her, will not greet her, or even ask her to take a seat. Such an attitude is completely at variance with the respect accorded to the elderly in ‘African cultures’, in other words with traditional norms of decorum. It also represents a departure from what is taught in medical faculties and from the respect that should be accorded to the sick.
In the same vein, what we have termed ‘each one for oneself-ism’ is a practical norm. This widespread lack of teamwork in public services norm is not a social (traditional) norm. Indeed, it seems quite difficult to incorporate ‘each-for-oneself-ism’ into traditional African culture. Thus when the practices of public officials in Africa do not follow official norms, they do not necessarily follow social (traditional) norms either. Practical norms in the public sphere should not be confused with social norms in the private sphere, even if some links of course do exist. Social norms (as moral norms, kinship norms, and propriety norms) are visible and openly prescriptive. They are present in social relations just as official norms are in the public space. They are publicly told and taught in the framework of institutions and organizations (for instance churches or brotherhoods for religious norms, or family for courtesy norms), so they are not informal at all. They are formalized in teachings, dogmas, codes, moral standards, precepts, and so on. By contrast, practical norms are truly informal because they are absent from the public discourse and absent from official moral rhetoric and teaching. They informally regulate practices that diverge from both official and social norms.
In Africa, the school of legal pluralism (Moore 1978; Benda-Beckmann 1981) has rightly underlined the multiplicity of norms, but it has been only concerned by the coexistence of official laws with various social norms, used in daily life as quasi laws, and highly formalized. Legal pluralism has been most widely illustrated in the context of land tenure: thus, in the Sahelian countries, one observes the coexistence of ‘Western’ land law, Islamic law, and various customary rights (cf. VonDoepp, this volume). This is an example of pluralism of norms, where official bureaucratic norms coexist with social norms, the latter being sometimes recognized by the state. However, the school of legal pluralism ignored both the gap between official norms and informal practices in the public domain and the gap between social norms and real practices in the private one.
This is why the concept of practical norms is useful and important. Practical norms can never be separated from official norms: we should always remember that civil servants ‘play’ between official norms and practical norms, according to contexts, personal options, and the type of interactions. To navigate this terrain, civil servants may develop opportunistic strategies as well as follow ethical precepts, or may react to ‘taken-for-granted expectations’, and adopt what March and Olsen (1984) have called rules of appropriateness (to behave in a way that seems appropriate to the context). Practical norms are resources for actors as well as constraints.
Many combinations of practical norms and official ones are to be found in Africa, from complementarity or substitution to antagonism. In the bureaucratic world in which we are interested, three types can be distinguished:
So what are official norms and practical norms about? To answer this question we must consider the core administrative tasks and duties in order to link civil servants’ practices with their institutional settings.
Bureaucratic Mode of Governance and Professional Cultures of Civil Servants
Civil servants are supposed to provide public goods and services, directly or indirectly. Most official norms are professional norms revolving around this service delivery. Most informal practices concern service delivery, and so do practical norms, but in Africa there are in fact many configurations of service delivery, many configurations of official norms (many institutional settings), and, of course, many types of games that can be played between official norms and practical norms in the course of service delivery. In other words, official norms and practical norms are embedded in different modes of governance. The complex articulation of a multiplicity of modes of governance is with no doubt a specificity of the African context.
Taking the concept of governance in a purely descriptive and analytical sense, we can define a mode of governance as any organized method of delivering public or collective services and goods according to specific set of norms (official and practical), and to specific forms of authority and legitimacy. This definition of governance enables us to complete the traditional social anthropological approach to the state in Africa, which, most of the time, has ignored the role of the state as the deliverer of goods and services and as the manager of this delivery (or more specifically as co-deliverer and co-manager alongside other institutions) in favour of a focus on other functions of the state that are already well known, most notably the despotic or repressive functions (typically Foucault or Scott are abundantly quoted). However, even in undemocratic Africa the ‘repressive state’ does not exhaust all the functions of the state. We must also consider the African state as a provider of services (the ‘delivery state’). This approach is much more productive when considering the actual practices of civil servants. Of course, this is not a statement on the quality of service delivery. In fact, according to most users, the services delivered are of bad quality. This definition of governance has another advantage: it takes into account the diversity of modes of governance in Africa. Today, thanks to structural adjustment, neo-liberal policies, or commitment to ‘civil society’, more and more public or collective goods or services are delivered in Africa by other institutions than the state and its bureaucracy: development agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations, chiefdoms, the private sector, and so on.
There is no longer any public service in Africa whose deliverance does not include the greater or lesser involvement of the four following instances: the state administrative services, the development administration (NGOs and international agencies), the ‘community-type’ organizations (from associations to the municipal council), and private operators.
(Blundo and Le Meur 2009: 15)
The coexistence of many modes of governance, on the local level as well the national, is a central characteristic of African countries. The process of ‘stacking up’ modes of governance in local arenas has become generalized: when a new form of political authority or type of management is set up (either by the state or by development agencies) it does not substitute for the layers of institutionality already in place but adds to them. None of them has truly disappeared, but all have been recycled and reconstituted, interlinked and interwoven.
The consequence is that the bureaucratic mode of governance coexists and interacts today with many other modes. Civil servants have lost the monopoly of delivering public goods and services and should collaborate with other actors (development agents, activists, local ‘big men’, NGOs’ leaders, chiefs, entrepreneurs, and so on), whose behaviour is regulated by other patterns, formal or informal.
Empirical studies show that at least eight modes of governance may be distinguished in African contexts today (Olivier de Sardan 2011): the bureaucratic mode (services provided by the state apparatus); the municipal mode (services provided by local governments and city councils); the associational mode (services provided by management boards, cooperatives, community-based organizations, local associations); the chiefly mode (services provided by traditional or neo-traditional chiefs); the project-based mode (services provided by development projects); the sponsorship-based mode (services provided by ‘big men’); the religious mode (services provided by churches or brotherhoods); and the merchant mode (services provided by private operators).
This diversity of modes of governance can be apprehended not only externally (several ‘modes of governance’ coexist), but also internally (a single mode of governance involves different players, institutions and rules of the games). Inside the bureaucratic mode of governance we have a multiplicity of professions, each one with specific competencies, knowledge, and duties, delivering very different services. In rural Africa, for instance, there is a strong distinction between, on the one side, very diverse technical professions (nurses and doctors, teachers, hydraulics specialists, and agricultural extension agents), and, on the other, the official actors representing the state sovereignty (from governors and district administrators to policemen).
Each profession within the bureaucratic mode of governance has its own professional culture, which includes official norms specific to this profession as well as local practical norms, but also reflects the training process, division of labour, management patterns, international connections, and tricks of the trade. It follows that informal practices in African administrations are shared to some degree by more or less all civil servants, whatever their domain of activity (they are common to the bureaucratic mode of governance), but are also specific to particular professions and vary according to professional cultures and local settings.4 For example, the contempt toward anonymous users is widespread among bureaucrats, but features of the ‘negotiation process’ with traders are distinctive of custom officers.
Conclusion
This normative pluralism as manifested in Africa is not fundamentally different from what various currents in modern sociology and anthropology have described: from the diffuse and interactive mechanisms by which norms and practices are continually produced and recomposed in the countries of the North. The sociology of organizations, work, and professions all share an epistemological position that accords an active role to social actors and are concerned by the gap between public norms and regulated practices. In Africa, however, the extent of the gap, the style of the informal practices, and the registers of practical norms are of course distinctive.
One of the modalities of the famous and unacceptable ‘great divide’ between North and South would be falsely to assume that in the North norms and practices are ceaselessly produced, questioned, and recomposed through interactive processes, while maintaining that in Africa they take the form of a cultural traditional determinism that continues to impose itself on behaviour. Our firm position is that the advances of the social sciences in Europe must be taken into account in Africa, and that normative pluralism and the local production of practical norms in different modes of governance must be recognized. Indeed in several respects this normative pluralism and the local production of norms are actually – on the basis of empirical evidence and for historical reasons – more important in Africa than in Europe.
However, public administrations are not comfortable with normative pluralism. On the contrary, for political leaders and experts in management, an ideal administration is one that functions in complete conformity with coherent professional norms, without any significant divergences, following a perfectly designed logical frame. In such a world, the problem of informal practices would be non-existent. In an ideal administration divergences would be minimized as much as possible. This is exactly the dream of the international institutions and development agencies that engage with Africa. ‘Good governance’ approaches are based on the increase in and strengthening of official norms, and on the constant refinement of procedures to monitor their application. In order to improve the normative framework in Africa and boost its efficiency, this implies introducing New Public Management techniques (McCourt and Minogue 2001): more and more sophisticated technologies to manage and streamline public action, in ways that are increasingly quantified and computerized, in order to promote greater compliance of formal rules by public actors.
Nothing is less likely to take place. The weight of informal practices and practical norms in the bureaucratic mode of governance and the professional cultures of civil servants in Africa should not be underestimated, and they have the capacity to by-pass and undermine New Public Management techniques. One has good reason to doubt the success of such measures that are designed and implemented by ‘reformers from the outside’. However, this does not mean that the situation will not change. Practical norms and professional culture are not homogeneous and may evolve along their own dynamics, which are more often than not different from donors’ injunctions and the International Monetary Fund’s conditionalities, but which may nevertheless improve step-by-step the quality of services delivered by public agents in Africa, even in an informal way.
Notes
1Among the recent empirical studies in English on bureaucracies and civil servants in Africa, one may mention: Anders (2010); Bierschenk (2007, 2008); Blundo and Le Meur (2009); Blundo and Olivier de Sardan (2006); Chalfin (2010); Crook (2010); Therkildsen (2005). Publications in French are also growing.
2For a detailed description of the everyday forms of corruption in Africa, as well as for a popular semiology of corruption, see Blundo and Olivier de Sardan (2006); this chapter relies heavily on chapter 3, which is written jointly with Giorgio Blundo. Regarding the ‘moral economy of corruption’, see Olivier de Sardan (1999).
3‘Habitus’ refers to the set of socially learnt dispositions, skills, and ways of acting that are often taken for granted by ‘insiders’ and invisible to ‘outsiders’, and which are acquired through practice.
4There are good illustrations of this at two levels: Anders (2010) has studied the core features of the common informal practices of civil servants in Malawi, while Chalfin (2010) has conducted a detailed study of custom officers in Ghana.
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