Managing Ambiguity

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.

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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.