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The speaker of this "Inimkond" seminar is Dr Abel Polese from Tallinn University, who will be talking at 6 p.m. in room A-447 about Finding a Place for Corruption: Between Legal and Licit.

Corruption is a key concern for of a number of academic disciplines and policy making. In spite of a growing scholarly view, mostly from anthropology and human geography, that plays on the concept of 'embeddedness' to propose alternative views on informal payments, mainstream research seems to suggest that liquidation of corruption is a condition sine qua non for economic effectiveness and democratic governance.

Among other transitional regions, post-Soviet spaces have shown a tendency to tolerate, not to say encourage, illegal practices such as corruption and have shown few signs that it will disappear any time soon. This presentation deals with corrupted practices, or what are considered normatively corrupted practices in transitional economies, as an integrating part of an economic system that involves economic but also social transactions as vital to daily life of members of a society. It thus provides further empirical evidence to contrast the widespread TINA (there is no alternative) assumption.

The empirical research is concerned with an 8 year period of participation observation amongst Ukrainian higher educational institutions as a case study. My main argument is that illegal practices are a constituting element permitting an ineffective system to survive. To do this, I identify a series of issues, such as teachers' wages, pressures on youngsters to get a degree, incapacity of the state to remedy to  high unemployment and to allocate sufficient funds for public services, and suggest how informal payments can: contribute to make up for state mismanagement while creating an alternative system that perpetuates itself and allows survival of actors.

All are welcome to attend!