engleski

Tradition or power? Corruptive practices and work culture in Croatia

There is a peculiar assumption, often rooted in anthropological re-search, that corruption is a culture-driven phenomenon (cf. Šimić Banović 2019), which sometimes turns whole field surveys into an exploration of peculiar kinds of people who bend or eschew the supposedly universalistic laws of Western societies. Such approaches seem to diminish the importance of power relations and with it, they fail to examine the ways in which corruption is imposed as the manner of functioning, which results both in high-class luxury and exuberance and in lower-class getting by in a certain society. If we choose to disregard the disruptions caused by the changes which occurred in the 1990s in Croatia, we can easily come to the conclusion that the contemporary prevalence of corruption is yet another iteration of the proverbial socialist(or even “earlier”) mentality, a continuity and not a discontinuity. In this paper, we will challenge such assumptions by delineating mechanisms by which certain corruptive practices in Croatian society were introduced and maintained, while keeping our focus on the consequences of such informality on everyday lives and work of our interviewees.

corruption, 1990s, privatization

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