Abstract
The essays that we have brought together in this volume are intended to reassess the significance of partial compliance in public life. The conference which set the momentum for this volume had focused on illegal campaign and party financing. However, in the process of putting the papers together as an edited volume, we have expanded the scope quite radically, taking on a number of additional themes. In the event, the book takes our analysis beyond the political arena into market transactions, involving, in the cases we have examined, acts of infringement of the law. This epilogue reviews our findings and suggests the steps ahead, for future research.
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Notes
- 1.
The results of this project thus join those emerging from a previous study whose outcome was published under the title Bribery, Fraud and Cheating: How to explain and to avoid organizational wrongdoing, eds. Markus Pohlmann, Gerhard Dannecker and Elizangela Valarini, which forms part of this book series. (Springer, 2020).
- 2.
James Scott “Exploitation in a rule class relation: A victim’s perspective”, Comparative Politics, 7, pp 489–532, July 1975 illustrates the hiatus of actor’s and observer’s categories. He has followed up on this theme in his subsequent Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press; 1985). The actor’s perspective is extremely important for understanding the reasons why aggrieved folks do not always rebel. Paul Greenough writes how people “died in the streets in front of shops bulging with grain”, with not a shot fired against food riots, which were familiar in 18th century Europe, under conditions comparable to the Bengal Famine. See Nanavati Papers, ‘1944–45: Memoranda and oral proceedings before the Famine Commission’, mss. (New Delhi: National Archive of India), cited in Paul Greenough, “Indulgence and Abundance in Asian Peasant Values: A Bengali Case in Point”, Journal of Asian Studies, 42(4), p. 847.
- 3.
- 4.
Seidman (1978), “Why do people obey the law? The Case of Corruption in Developing Countries. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1409847.pdf.
- 5.
Rreference: Global corruption index.
- 6.
Diane Vaughan, “The dark side of organizations: Mistake, Misconduct and Disaster”, Annual Review of Sociology, 1999, 25:271–305.
- 7.
While most of the essays included in this volume have some connectivity to illegal campaign and party financing, the essays most directly connected are those of Mitra and Pohlmann, Croissant and Suri. The European examples of illegal campaign financing are quite revealing of useful illegality under the veneer of the Rechtstaat. In the German case, we learn from Jens Ivo Engels that not only Chancellor Helmut Kohl broke the law regarding campaign cash, “his behaviour seemed to demonstrate that he did not care about legal rules.”
- 8.
“Since everyday life is dominated by the pragmatic motive, recipe knowledge, that is, knowledge limited to pragmatic competence in routine performances, occupies a prominent place in the social stock of knowledge.” Berger and Luckmann 1985 [1966], p. 56. They use the example of a telephone whose use requires only a few procedures about its actual use, and not a deep knowledge of the complex engineering that underpins it. The Election Commission of India has developed a ‘model code of conduct’ for millions of karyakartas—campaign managers—who run the actual process of campaigning, without necessarily having the knowledge of the institutions that sustain the aggregation of ballots into the mandate that issues of out of an election. We argue below that the recipe knowledge of elections derives from the early formulation of the process by the British statesman and theorist Edmund Burke.
- 9.
The Indian Election Commission, for example, keeps a sharp watch over ‘black money’—unaccounted for money which circulates outside banking channels—which further reinforces criminal behavior and networks.
- 10.
Understanding the role of the fixer, ensconced as entrepreneurs of crime in corporations, parties and electoral campaigns can help us gain a more realistic understanding of how parties, organisations and campaigns work. Pohlmann (2020, p. 6) refers to the parallel existence of state and market organisations and the mafia as “hidden partnership”.
- 11.
This is the spirit that underpins India’s ‘the representation of the people Act, 1951’—a comprehensive text of 117 printed pages—that governs the norms of elections in India. See legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/04_representation of the people act%2C 1951.pdf, downloaded on Oct 14, 2020.
- 12.
Riker and Ordeshook (1973) refer to this as the D term which denotes the innate satisfaction of showing support on the part of actors for turning up to show support for ‘their’ political party, or more generally, doing their citizen duty of voting. Once again, one can see the long shadow of Burke on the received ideas of party politics and electoral choice in Western democracies. See Greene (1999) for the use of party identification as an explanation of partisan choice.
- 13.
A report in the Indian media is revealing: An analysis of their Income Tax Returns (ITR) and donations statements filed with the Election Commission of India (ECI) showed that the sources remained largely unknown. Political parties have collected Rs 11,234 crore [1.340.355, 79 Euro] from unknown sources in the last 15 years, according to election watchdog, Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR). An analysis of their Income Tax Returns (ITR) and donations statements filed with the Election Commission of India (ECI) showed that the sources remained largely unknown. At present, political parties are not required to reveal the names of individuals or organisations donating less than Rs 20,000 [237, 01 Euro], neither those who donate via electoral bonds. As a result, more than 67 per cent of the funds cannot be traced as they come from 'unknown' sources.
See “Parties collected Rs. 11,234 crore from unknown sources in last 15 years: Report” in the Indian Express, Mar 10, 2020. See https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2020/mar/10/parties-collected-rs-11234-crore-from-unknown-sources-in-last-15-years-report-2114927.html. We learn from the same report that the amounts received by the Bharatiya Janata Party, in power at the Union level and in many of India’s major regions is 1.5 times more than all the other parties taken together! That fact alone suggests the linkage between power, financing and the solicitude at concealment of the sources of income.
- 14.
In India, we learn from survey data that trust and confidence in political parties tends to be much lower than the armed forces and religious organisations. Parties do not have regular, bureaucratic organisations. Nor are their long-term supporters of parties as in old, European democracies. As such, candidates often turn to fixers to get the vote out. See table on Trust and Confidence in electoral and non-electoral institutions in India (2006, 2012) in Pohlmann and Mitra, in this volume.
- 15.
In the districts affected by Maoist insurgency, one finds a kind of dual rule that is noticeable in other parts of India affected by insurgency. In these parts of India, the state functions normally in terms of administration, taxation, holding of elections and normal operation of market transactions. However, in parallel, the insurgents hold their form of judicial trials, execute summary judgement, extort protection money and have quasi-regular forces that periodically carry out spectacular assaults on the forces of order, people they consider to be police informers and cut off communication by blasting improvised explosive devices (IED). Brass (2003), working out of his case analysis of riots in Aligarh, a North Indian city, suggests that an ‘institutionalised riot system’ underpins the failure of the agencies of law and order. The existence of local entrepreneurs of power who see an opportunity in mobilising their riot-network and their linkage with higher level leaders is critical to the outbreak of inter-community riots.
- 16.
Berger and Luckmann formulate reification (“Verdinglichung”) as an attempt to elevate facts into a level where their facticity can be taken for granted. This they do to explain how a mechanical emphasis on social ‘facts’ can lead to taking the tip of the iceberg as the whole and in the process, miss out on a proper understanding of the world of the actor. To quote: “…a purely structural sociology is endemically in danger of reifying social phenomena. Even if begins by modestly assigning to its constructs merely heuristic status, it all too frequently end by confusing its own conceptualisation with the laws of the universe.” (1966[1985: p. 208]).
- 17.
“This is where the criminological concept of organisational deviance and the sociological concept of useful illegality merge and create a new paradigm.” Pohlmann, op. cit., p. 16.
- 18.
Based on Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, (London: Penguin; 2014), p. 88. (First published as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, by Internationaler Psychoanlytischer Verlag 1930) we have argued in footnote 1, in the introductory chapter that compliance with the norm necessitates a balance of the ego which tends towards gratitification at any cost, regardless of the norm and the superego that becomes an internal controlling mechanism. This idea has found articulation in many of our case studies where authors analyse the discourse of law-breakers and show their reasoning, attempts at self-control and occasional failture to give into temptation or to take the risky path, ending up in prison! The occurrence of non-compliance become the incentive for law makers to modify norms, combining the carrot of incentives for compliance with the stick of stern punishment.
- 19.
With reference to a caste study from Indonesia, Geertz (1993) refers to the “Western view… that there are rules that sort right from wrong, a phenomenon called judgment, and there are methods that sort real from unreal, a phenomenon called proof, appears as only one mode of accomplishing this fact”. Pp. 174–175. The local actors are just as likely to consider the local norms as the arbiter of right and wrong.
- 20.
Geertz formulates multiple realities as a world of “various places”, “various between lawyers and anthropologists, various between Muslims and Hindus, various between little traditions and great, various between colonial thens and nationalists now; and much is to be gained, scientifically and otherwise, by confronting that grand actuality rather than wishing it away in a haze of forceless generalities and false comforts.” (1993: p. 234).
- 21.
Thus, under the impact of migration and cultural flow, the Marshallian concept of shared sense of citizenship that has been held to be fixed in form and content, can change over time. See, “The Idea of Citizenship and its Institutionalisation: Significance of India for the Korean Case” in Markus Pohlmann, Jonghoe Yang and Jong-Hee Lee, eds., Citizenship and Migration in the Era of Globalisation: The Flow of Migrants and the Perception of Citizenship in Asia and Europe (Heidelberg: Springer; 2013), pp. 211–226.
- 22.
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, in his debate with Jürgen Habermas, described the normative way of approaching social reality as ‘first-order observation’ and argued that there should be a shift from that to ‘second-order observation’, which refers to observing how other observers observe social reality. Reflexivity entails that the analysist of social reality should try to understand social actors in terms of their cognition of reality, and then look under them to generate explanatory categories and models that underpin the social construction of reality. Niklas Luhmann, “(2002a). ‘I See Something You Don’t See’, in William Rasch (ed.), Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 2002.) “Luhmann’s concept of ‘second-order observation’ points to the need to describe how societal problems are constructed, instead of criticizing specific social structures as repressive, illegitimate, or unjust. In a nutshell, Luhmann denied that sociology had any political role, rejecting Habermas’s critique of his systems theory as inherently conservative.” See David Seidl and Hannah Mormann, “Niklas Luhmann as Organization Theorist”, in Adler, P., du Gay, P., Morgan, G., Reed, M. (eds) Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents. (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2015), p. 3.
- 23.
Geertz’s influential work (1993) on culture as a system of meanings and symbols is critical to our understanding of an insight into why people choose the way they do in a given context. See, Robin Koning”Clifford Geertz's Account of Culture as a Resource for Theology” in Pacifica: Australasian Journal of Theology (2010) https://doi.org/10.1177/1030570X1002300103. However, while local knowledge and culture provide an ontological core of values, the actor might still have a room to manoeuvre within this matrix in terms of his perception of the opportunity structure and calculation of the cost and benefit of his choice.
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Mitra, S., Pohlmann, M., Valarini, E. (2021). Non-compliance, Organizational Deviance and Useful Illegality: Towards a Unified Agenda of Research. In: Valarini, E., Pohlmann, M., Mitra, S. (eds) Political Corruption and Organizational Crime. Organization, Management and Crime - Organisation, Management und Kriminalität. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-34374-3_16
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