Legal, illegal, either way informal: examining continuities of small-scale entrepreneurship between late socialism and postsocialism in Czechia

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to capture the continuities and transformations of everyday small-scale business practice in the period of “long change” between late socialism and postsocialism in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic. Both of these periods are characterized by the employment of informal and purely illegal practices, although they took on different meanings in both periods. To capture continuities and differences, we employ the concepts of field, capital and habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Based on interviews with small-scale entrepreneurs active in both periods under review, we argue that informality and illicit practices in the late socialist period primarily enabled entrepreneurs to fulfil consumption needs in a dysfunctional planned economy. In this regard, small entrepreneurs were willing to use a large amount of different informal practices to achieve material goals. The article demonstrates that in the post-1989 era of neoliberal reform, small-scale entrepreneurs continued to employ informal and illegal practices as a means of “playing the system”, integrating them into their formal business efforts in order, among other things, to sustain their businesses in the face of new conditions of liberalization, increasing competition and criminality. The article thus analyses economic transformation through the tension between institutional change and continuity of social practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• informality
• socialism
• postsocialism
• Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic

Disclosure statements

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Primary sources (interviews)

All interviews are held in the personal archives of the authors.

Interview with Adam, recorded 2014 by Petr Kupka.

7 interviews with Bohumil, recorded 2014, 2017 and 2019 by Petr Kupka.

Interview with Ctibor, recorded 2014 by Petr Kupka.

Interview with Daniel, Emil and Filip, recorded 2015 by Petr Kupka.

Interview with Gustav, recorded 2021 by Petr Kupka.

Interview with Helena, recorded 2021 by Veronika Pehe.

Interview with Irena, recorded 2023 by Petr Kupka.

Interview with Jan, recorded 2023 by Petr Kupka.

Notes

1. For details of the interviews, see the section Primary Sources at the end of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was produced within the framework of the Lumina quaeruntur award [300632301] supported by the Czech Academy of Sciences, carried out at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Notes on contributors

Veronika Pehe

Veronika Pehe is a historian based at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she leads the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies. She has published on questions of nostalgia, retro, popular culture, oral history, memory politics and the history of the economic transformations in Eastern Europe. Pehe is the author of Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (Berghahn Books, 2020) and co-editor, with Joanna Wawrzyniak, of Remembering the Neoliberal Turn: Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe After 1989 (Routledge, 2023).

Petr Kupka

Petr Kupka is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of West Bohemia. His work explores and links postsocialism, informality, organized crime, crime control, and urban marginality. He published on these issues in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, European Journal of Criminology, Crime, Media, Culture, or Trends in Organized Crime. Currently, he conducts research on the history of private entrepreneurship in late socialism and postsocialism in Czechia (as a member of the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies), on the roots of cultures of compliance and defiance in Czechia (as a member of the ‘LUXCORE’ research project), and on how and why crime occurs in the autobiographical narratives of offenders in Czechia (as a member of the ‘In Their Own Words’ research project).