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

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.