The Formalising Regime and its Formalising Technology: The Case of Informal Trade in Recife, Brazil

Ramos & Hayes The Formalising Regime and its Formalising Technology: The Case of Informal Trade in Recife

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, Negombo, Sri Lanka, May 2015

THE FORMALISING REGIME AND ITS FORMALISING TECHNOLOGY: THE CASE OF INFORMAL TRADE IN RECIFE

Rui Roberto Ramos, Lancaster University Email: [email protected]

Niall Hayes, Lancaster University

Email: [email protected]

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to consider the role of ICT within the formalisation programme put forward by Recife’s City Council to regulate the informal trade that pervades the city’s popular squares and streets. This formalisation takes shape by issuing formal licenses to give informal workers ‘permission’ to sell pre-determined items at specific sites. Drawing on Foucault we will argue that ICT is a formalising technology, which serves this formalising regime to control, discipline and survey informal traders. We will argue that the technology’s disciplinary intent was shaped by: a) the ways by which the socio-political context, rather than a technical rationality, affected how both control and surveillance were performed and disciplinary decisions were enacted; b) how its appropriation by licensed workers facilitated the reach of the regime’s surveillance but in some cases also sabotaged the programme’s disciplinary intents, c) how the information system reinforced the marginalization of informal workers and strengthened the position of the municipality.

Keywords: Informal work, formalisation, ICT, regimes of truth, control and surveillance, Foucault, Brazil.



THE FORMALISING REGIME AND ITS FORMALISING TECHNOLOGY: THE CASE OF INFORMAL TRADE IN RECIFE

1. INTRODUCTION Informal street commerce is a prevalent across the Global South. However it has become subject to increasing formalisation policies that seek to regulate what is sold, who is selling and where trade can be conducted. Such policies derive from a view of informal work being in opposition to many countries and municipalities’ visions of security, orderliness and development that make up what the modern civilised city should be (Turner & Schoenberger, 2012). However, commentators have argued that rather than being disruptive, informal street commerce is an integral part of the socio-economic context in many developing nations. They argue that formalisation policies can marginalise and disempower informal workers by not only threatening their livelihoods but also excluding them from opportunities to negotiate how they may be part of the municipality’s future plans (Musembi, 2007; Siegel and Veiga, 2009; Cousins, 2009). This has led to formalisation often being contested and negotiated on the ground during encounters between the state officials and informal workers (Pinheiro-Machado, 2008; Cross 2000). With regard to information systems (IS), the focus of this paper, it is typically used by state agencies to formalise work through the issuing and monitoring of licences and the issuing of penalties to illegal traders. Our paper reports on Recife’s municipal authority (Brazil) ongoing implementation of a formalisation programme that seeks to regulate informal street traders through the issuing of licenses. These licences provide traders with formal ‘permission’ to sell specified items from pre-determined sites. We primarily draw on Foucault’s ideas pertaining to regimes of truth (Foucault 1978) to help us better understand how this ‘formalising regime’ and its ‘formalising technology’ put in place relate to the processes of control, surveillance, discipline and punishment. Specifically we looks at: a) the macro dimensions pertaining to the ways in which the socio-political context shaped how these processes unfold; b) the micro dimensions relating to how the workers’ appropriation of the system facilitated and/or constrained the municipality’s disciplinary intents and c) the specific features of the ICT that was used by government officials in Recife to regulate and control informal work.

2. INFORMAL WORK AND THE POLITICAL AIM OF FORMALISATION Informal work is an activity that comprises “the production and exchange of legal goods and services that involves the lack of appropriate business permits, violation of zoning codes, failure to report tax liability, non-compliance with labour regulations governing contracts and work conditions, and/or the lack of legal guarantees in relations with suppliers and clients” (Cross, 1999 p. 580 as cited in Cross 2000). Over the decades informal work in the Global South has been conceptualised differently. In the 50s and 60s, in line with the dominant modernist visions of capitalist development, informal work was seen as backward and inefficient and therefore detrimental to national development schemes (Cross, 2000). However this became contested by two schools of thought. The neo-liberal approach argued that the rise of overarching regulations that modernisation often put in place to regulate formal work forced informality to grow by building an entrepreneurial incentive to pass by the regulatory hand of the state (de Sotto, 1989, 2000; Wenar 2008). The neo-Marxist approach is critical of capitalism itself, and has argued that modernist schemes that aim to ‘develop’ the third world have failed and have resulted in the Global South becoming dependent on the Global North. Indeed, marginalising informal work was integral to the ways by which corporations maintained their profitability (Castells & Portes, 1989; Portes & Sassen-Koob, 1987; Portes & Schauffler, 1993; Portes et al., 1989; Sassen-Koob, 1989).



Despite these criticisms, governments in the Global South have often persisted in problematizing informality as a force that acts against development (Bromley, 2000; Seligmann, 2001; Brown, 2006). What in the modernist era had tried to be ‘solved’ through crackdowns and raids on street vending, in the post-modernist era becomes the target of formalisation policies (Cross, 2000). Such policies typically advocate the need for greater public order and state control. As such, formalisation takes shape through what Cross (2000) has called - formalomorphism, analysing the problem of informal work by reducing it to being a ’bad’ copy of its formal counterpart. Consequently, its operationalization consists of implementing formalisation regulatory schemes that aim to manage and change its ‘informal’ characteristics.

Many have been critical of attempts to formalise economic activity, arguing that it acts as a mechanism to enforce modernist ideologies of structured governance associated with what civilisation is to be (Scott, 1998). This consequently marginalizes informal workers out of negotiations about what their ‘formalised’ lives are to become (Siegel and Veiga, 2009; Kaarhus et al., 2005; Sjaastad and Cousins, 2008) and ends up instead formalising the existing structures of inequality (Benjaminsen et al., 2006). Further, while informal work is central to livelihoods, it is is yet to be recognised by governments as integral part of the formal economic system. Despite policies and regulations, a clear distinction between informal, illegal and formal becomes blurred (Pinheiro-Machado, 2008). What is apparent from the introduction and this literature review is first that there is no agreed definition on what exactly constitutes informal work. Instead formalisation can be conceived as a power-constituted process which involves the constant negotiation of what is to be considered as ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ economic behaviour (Cross 2000) in specific settings. Second, little literature has sought to understand the ways by which the formalisation of informal trade is enforced by municipal authorities. Third, little literature has discussed the ways in which ISs are developed and used to support formalisation processes.

3. THEORETHICAL FRAMEWORK This research draws on Foucault’s (1982) idea of relational power. Power from this conception lies not in its positive or negative effects, but instead in its effectiveness to change or reproduce itself in the ways a community tends to accept it as a civilising force (Foucault, 1977). Power / knowledge are inextricably interlinked and as such power can be understood by researching the processes by which certain knowledges come to be legitimised as truth within a certain community. Such truth claims recursively enable or constrain people’s capacity for action by reproducing or changing the dominant knowledges and therefore maintaining or reconfiguring the existent power relations (Foucault, 1980). This is what Foucault refers to as regimes of truth (Foucault 1978, 1980). A regime of truth is characterised by: (a) the types of discourses it accepts and makes function as truth; (b) the existent mechanisms and instances used to distinguish true form false statements; (c) the means by which one is sanctioned by non-accordance with the truth; (d) the techniques and procedures put in place for acquisition of truth and (f) the status of those in accordance with the truth (Introna, 2003 as cited in Willcocks, 2006). We will argue that it is through on-going power-relations that the formalising regime configures both the knowledge of the ‘problem’ - the need for formalisation, and its ‘solution’ – the specific techniques, laws and monitoring systems. Further, not only did the information system become established to support such claims of knowledge but also reinforced the dominance of such claims. We also draw on Foucault’s (1977) panopticon, which refers to the potentiality that technology has to make human behaviour apparently transparent, and how this leads to the surveyed regulating their own behaviour. Transparency is also shaped by the system’s information structure (Suchman, 1987). Poster (1990) highlights that the database has come to emerge as the main language by which power discursively constitutes subjects by applying a grammar that ‘manipulates symbols (segments of information) to form a picture of the individual’ (p.87) which acts upon himself.



With regard to the focus of our paper, a formalising regime, the IS put in place acts as a formalising technology that augments the visibility of informal work by structuring it according to the regime’s knowledge of the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’, in order to control informal traders and survey their deviances to the formalising processes.

4. METHODOLOGY We report on Recife City Council’s formalisation programme and specifically the ways in which the information system put in place configures and disciplines (or not) this process. Our data derives from interviews, observation and secondary data undertaken between April to October 2014. This data was gathered from the Department of Mobility and Urban Control of Recife (CSURB) and the streets and squares in Recife where formal and informal work was undertaken and regulated.

Twenty semi-structured interviews were undertaken with department officials, fiscals responsible for the control of informal trade on the streets as well as with informal traders in order to understand their views on informal work and on the formalisation programme. We also observed the ways staff in the CSURB department used the information system to manage the processes of formalisation. We observed fiscals’ identifying and registering informal traders and their monitoring of the traders compliance. We also observed and asked questions about how this information was captured on the registration forms and later into the information system. Secondary data such as CSURB official documentation was also collected and analysed.

5. RECIFE’S FORMALISATION PROGRAMME Recife’s CSURB is currently implementing a formalisation programme that seeks to regulate informal traders through the issuing of licenses that provides them ‘permission’ to sell specified items from stipulated sites. These sites currently take the form of ‘disciplined’ streets that are regulated, and where only the licensed workers can perform street trading. Further, these traders have to comply with different regulations such as: perform their activities solely in the specific space allocated to them, respect specific space limits in relation to the positioning of their stalls and products, only sell a specific category of product such as food and beverages, mobile phone covers, clothes, etc. The medium / long term objective is for traders to be licenced to operate from City Council provided standardized stalls; or ‘kamelodromos’- which are specific small sized malls aimed to be spread around the city to accommodate licensed workers. The objective being that traders become gradually familiarized with the norms pertaining to the usage of the envisioned kamelodromos and standardized stalls allowing for a smooth transition upon their implementation.

The processes put in place by CSURB have three main aims: 1) Control existing informal work. This is operationalized by fiscals on the streets who register (on paper forms) who the sellers are, what are they selling and where do they sell. 2) Register this data in a database. This allows for the easy retrieval and filtering of information such as what is to be sold, where, and by whom. Rules specify that a trader can only be licenced for one specified commercial activity, one location and have only one stall. Further it checks that licenses are not issued to more than one member of a family. Satisfying these rules is required for traders to be provided with a license and for its annual reissue.

3) Survey and control deviations. Fiscals patrol the streets to detect any licensed workers that are not following the regulations, traders without a license operating in disciplined streets, and / or other illegal trading activities. This is registered and traders may be instructed to modify their trading practices, pay a fee, and have their products confiscated and/or have their licenses revoked.



6. FINDINGS

6.1. The Problematisation of Informal Trade One of the problems that the formalisation of informal traders sought to address was making the streets easier for pedestrians and cars to navigate. Government officers would often complain to street vendors that they leave little space for pedestrians to pass: ‘they complain but we need to ensure mobility’ (CSURB Fiscal). Recife’s citizens encountered problems with its infrastructure. Streets were often flooded due to poor drainage systems, there were open sewers, and broken pavements and poorly secured electric cables. Consequently, many citizens were supportive of the CSURB officials’ attempts to make sure that traders were not blocking the streets. Indeed, even some of the street vendors were supportive: ‘I know I speak against myself but it’s true. I mean… look at that (pointing the finger to a overcrowded sidewalk with stalls). It’s chaos’ (Unlicensed Trader). The street traders often found novel ways to compensate for some of the flaws of the urban infrastructure. This not only maintained their trading activities but also assisted mobility across the city. For example, they would clear the floods on the streets by sweeping the water away, clear the drains, provide shelter from the sun and the rain, and provide seating in public spaces. In hospitals, banks and public offices they sold low cost food for the people waiting (for hours) in queues and even provided chairs for elderly citizens. Further to mobility, the CSURB’s policy was to ‘regulate’ informal traders so they could offer ‘standardised’ products and services from ‘legitimate’ stalls in ‘disciplined’ sites. As such, the processes put forward by the government had an implicit acknowledgement of informal trade as a ‘bad copy’ of its formal counterpart (Cross 2000). This discourse gained increasing acceptance amongst citizens such as non-pedestrians and car drivers that had little direct contact with street traders. This wealthier population saw informal traders as one more of the aesthetically unpleasant and backward aspects of Recife. Such view was reinforced by CSURB officials and street fiscals often referred to the streets where informal trade was conducted as ‘dirty’ and claimed there was a need to ‘clean’ them: ’We will remove them to leave the sidewalks clean’ (CSURB Mid-Manager). Or more strikingly, to ‘humanise’ them: ‘our plan is to humanise the streets’ (CSURB Fiscal). Not surprisingly, this was not well accepted by informal traders: ‘a person worthy of his work need not be mistreated. But the City Council does not want to know that’ (Unlicensed Trader). Crucially, while the objectives were typically formally stated as a way to help clear the streets and thus enhance the mobility of citizens, CSURB had an underlying and longer term objective of extending their reach of control: ‘It is difficult to control the streets because they (informal traders) are very scattered. This (reallocating them to specific stalls and malls) makes it easier to monitor. To do everything.’ (CSURB Mid-Manager). Such a view highlights that the process of formalisation was not a means to an end, but in fact the end in itself. Once in these new sites CSURB would not only reduce informal trade but also gain greater control: “It is a palliative measure. Once they’re there (in the disciplined sites), no new licenses will be issued.” (CSURB Mid-Manager).

6.2. The Role of Information Technology The information system used by CSURB to support its formalising processes was not a robust relational database but an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet supported the formalisation programme by: (a) the metadata on the Excel sheets provided the basis for the printed forms used to collect data from the streets; (b) this data became standardised according to rules within the spreadsheets which filtered the issuing of licenses; (c) the spreadsheets made visible the number of deviations from the formalisation regulations, and thus were central to the discipline and/or punishment of both informal and licensed workers within specific sites.



The paper forms were an important technological artefact. When fiscals walked past the traders on the streets with the forms in their hands, they would become the centre of attention for some of the informal traders. The workers would ask them if their names were on the lists, the names of their family members, when their licenses would be issued, when the kamelodromo was to be built, etc. When asked why a fiscal responded: ‘first they did not believe it (that the CSURB would clear informal traders from the streets) but when they realised they had no alternative they began to run after us to register’ (CSURB Fiscal). Thus, these printed ‘formal’ documents with their structured lines and check boxes facilitated the fiscal’s data collection processes. However, the fiscals did not always welcome this attention from informal traders as it became intrusive and distracting. Consequently they would often leave the ‘formal’ printed version in the office, and hand-write on a piece of paper whatever information was needed to survey the streets that day. This hand-written paper would attract less attention form informal traders. The paper forms were too structured to capture the reality of informal trade. Fiscals often had to write a lot of information in the “other” category as well as in the blank spaces as what they observed did not fit a predefined category. Examples included workers selling products or services that couldn’t fit into any of the pre-defined categories, stalls with more than one worker responsible, traders who had no fixed location, etc. This data would then be typed up and recorded in the ‘other’ column in the excel spreadsheets. When questioning the officials why so much data collected on the streets had no specific category on the spreadsheets they claimed it was because they ‘don’t know how to do that in excel’ (CSURB Fiscal). In fact, changing the spreadsheet design to accommodate the categories for ‘deviant’ behaviours was difficult as ‘deviances’ usually related to workers which sold more than one product, in more than one stall and/or were active in different locations. Consequently, for ‘deviant’ behaviours to be registered it required a one-to-many relational database design. However, the spreadsheet provide for a one-to-one relationships as each line on the spreadsheet corresponded to one worker and the corresponding columns to their type of stall, product/service category, location, etc. If a worker sold a combination of products that fit into two categories, this could only be registered by entering his name again or, as was typically the case, filling it in the ‘other’ column. Interestingly, many fiscals considered this to be one of the system’s strongest points: ‘why would we change the ‘other’ column - that’s where we find out everything’ (Fiscal who digitised forms). Fiscals would often try to discursively coerce informal traders to change their activities when they didn’t align with the ‘appropriate’ behaviour prescribed by the formalisation programme. Specifically, such coercion arose from their need to be able to complete the columns in the spreadsheet without too much recourse to the ‘other’ column. The “other” column in the Excel sheets made ‘deviant’ data to look contrary to the ‘structured’ rest of the data that was captured in the specified columns. It was the spreadsheet that subtly made the fiscals aware that a particular behaviour was ‘inappropriate’ which then led them to require informal traders to change their activities so that they conformed to the spreadsheet and consequently, with the formalisation programme.

Such coercion thus was not driven necessarily by their tacit agreement with the modernistic ideals of the formalisation programme. Indeed, Fiscals would often purchase food or products from them. While some of the fiscal’s would show sympathy with the informal traders, the CSURB managers did not. They believed that when traders did not comply, it was because they did not want to, or were unable to comprehend the rules of the formalisation programme. CSURB managers did not consider the formalisation programme may have been inappropriately designed and thus the rules, processes and solution remained unquestioned. They saw informal trade as being backward and against the ‘formal’ and modern way of doing business: ‘Some may want this, but they are not prepared to work in a formal way. They’re used to the streets’ (CSURB Mid-Manager). Consequently, surveillance and punishment were seen as important mechanisms which could solve the recurring ‘deviances’ found on the streets and ensure the programme’s success: ‘Inspection and seizure is the only weapon we have’ (CSURB Mid-Manager). When deviances



were found in ‘disciplined’ sites, the trader would be highlighted in red in the spreadsheets. This applied to licenced traders who could lose their licence or pay a fee but also to unlicensed ones conducting illegal activities such as selling pirated CDs/DVDs. Another deviance seen as ‘critical’ was the one-license-per-family-member. However, given that many workers were unaware or didn’t believe in this rule, they would often be the ones giving fiscals the names of their family members still unlicensed in an attempt to get them formalised as well: ‘I don’t know… and I don’t believe it. Everyone is doing it (trying to get as much family members as possible in the licensing process). You have to be one for the other right?!’ (Unlicensed Trader). Interestingly, fiscals would rarely issue penalties in such cases, as they feared that by issuing a high number of fines it could lead to the traders protesting which could threaten the formalisation programme as a whole. This was especially the case of the one-licence-per-family-member rule. Issuing fines to single traders in dispersed sites thus was a safer way to ensure the success of the programme overall. Some informal traders felt the programme was overly aggressive: ‘they say: You’re out today! Tomorrow we’re gonna take it away! After tomorrow you’ll get a notification!’ You see? It’s this psychological pressure’ (Unlicensed Trader). However, as already noted, others driven by fear and/or expectations of a better life would run after the fiscals when noticing they were collecting data for the licensing process: ‘They’re just doing their job. I’m always nice to them and I never had any problem. I would just like if they could be faster in giving me the authorisation you know?!... My license.’ (Unlicensed Trader). Further, some of the newly licenced traders working in ‘disciplined’ streets, afraid of losing their hard-gained licenses, would actively cooperate with the fiscals’ surveillance activities and report any unlicensed traders found on their sites: ‘If anyone out there puts a stall here I’ll report it’ (Licensed Trader).



7. ANALYSIS

Recife’s Formalising Regime and its Formalising Technology

Truth claim Informal work is a problem and it needs to be solved

Problem Solution

Informal work affects the ‘citizens mobility’, it is dirty and inhuman

Informal work needs to be formalised

Build on the premises

‘Citizens’ don’t interact with informal work and are against it because it affects their daily urban experience.

Its informal structure needs to be ‘ordered’ by means of ’regulating’

the workers and ‘standardising’ the stalls and products offered

Which implies Informal traders are not citizens Licensed workers are citizens

Materialised in

The need to ‘clean’ and ‘humanise’ the streets

The need for ‘control’ and ‘surveillance’ in order to ‘discipline’

and ‘punish’ the workers’ ‘inappropriate’ behaviours

Political aims Gain political acceptance by relating informal trade to Recife’s mobility problem

Achieve total control through the formalomorphism approach to

informal work

Disempower informal traders through the un-citizenship discourse

Impose the acceptance of disciplinary tactics by relating

‘formality’ to ‘citizenship’

ICT role within the acquisition of

‘truth’

Surveying the deviances, registering them into the system and applying disciplinary or punishing measures as appropriate

Controlling informal work through the collection of data into paper

forms later translated into the excel sheets to filter the availability of

candidates for licensing

Distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ statements

within ICT

If there are registries in the ‘other’ column or a worker name is highlighted in red.

There are no registries in the ‘other’ column and no red highlight in the

worker’s correspondent line

Implications of ‘true’ and ‘false’

statements

Not being licensed; payment of fee; license revoked; products apprehension

Availability of the worker to get the regime’s license of approval

Table 1 - Recife’s Formalising Regime and its Formalising Technology

Recife’s ‘formalising regime’ camouflaged the CSURB’s overarching ambition of eradicating informal work through processes aimed to control, survey and discipline the existent informal trade infrastructure on the streets (Foucault, 2007, 1977). This was achieved through a legitimation of the need for formalisation to improve ‘citizen’s mobility’. Framing the nature of informal work in this matter served three political objectives: 1) by relating informal work to the citizens’ concerns about mobility, the programme built a normative authority that facilitated its acceptance; 2) by placing informal work in opposition to responsible ‘citizenship’ it diminished the traders’



capacity to have a voice in the formalisation processes while simultaneously positioned formalisation as the only means by which ‘citizenship’ could be ‘re’-gained; 3) by seeking to formalise trade, it restricted some of the local solutions that traders put in place to alleviate some of the infrastructural problems such as floods, pavements, umbrellas for sun and rain and chairs in public squares, etc. Further, low-income citizens would be hit especially hard if informal trade was formalised due to the increased prices of products and services. CSURB’s conceptualization of informal work was strongly based on a modernist ideology that placed informal work as marginal and as a force against development (Bromley, 2000; Seligmann, 2001; Brown, 2006; Turner & Schoenberger, 2012). This was noticeable in the ways by which the formalisation discourse placed informal traders as non-citizens that needed to be controlled and surveyed in order to discipline them to become ‘ordered’, ‘standardized’, and ‘licensed’, this is, ‘citizens’. In this context, formalisation was not implemented to solve a particular problem of informal work, but rather it served as a crucial mechanism to enforce a transition towards a modernist vision of socio-economic order where informality had no place to exist (Scott, 1998). Accordingly, the peculiar disciplinary methods imposed on informal traders followed a formalomorphist approach (Cross 2000) based on a specific conceptualization of civilization in relation to structure, order and truth (Mitchell, 1991) which consequently made their ‘informality’ to be the target to be ‘changed’ towards its ‘formal’ counterpart, this is to say - erased. It was within this apparatus that the information system assumed a crucial political role and acted as a ‘formalising technology’ crystalizing the unequal power given to informal traders by reinforcing the regime’s truth claims and formalising their existent inequalities (Scott, 1998, Benjaminsen et al. 2006). The design of the system’s information structure reinforced the regime’s proposed formalomorphist solution. This was achieved by placing all ‘informal’ characteristics into the ‘other’ column’ and in so doing signalling its inappropriateness (Bowker and Star, 1999). Consequently, this information structure acted as a ‘grammar’ (Poster, 1990) that constituted informal work as a subject made up of ‘deviances’ to be solved, which were seen in the ‘other column’ and/or highlighted in red. Thus, because this ‘grammar’ didn’t afford any space for the ‘deviances’ to be structured in predefined categories with their own columns, it made it difficult to envision alternative possibilities for the reality of informal trade beyond the one put forward by the formalising regime. For example, if one could associate one worker with the various types of products and services it sells, a different and more appropriate categorisation could potentially be found. Or if one could associate a worker with different locations, possibly one could find some patterns in relation to workers’ paths and products sold and consequently form a better picture of an appropriate urban infrastructure to be built on top of the existent practices.

Further, this ‘grammar’ and its constitution of the subject primarily in relation to its ‘deviances’ influenced the coercive disciplinary actions that fiscals adopted towards the informal traders. Such coercive actions were not necessarily driven due to the fiscals’ agreement about the programme’s modernist ideals, but rather as a means to facilitate a smoother transition between the physical and the digital sides of their work. Because the information structure, relied more on a vision of what the formalisation aimed to achieve – one-to-one relations, rather than what it actually was - many-to-many relations, it caused a friction between the necessary digital registering of data and the reality of the data on the streets. This friction ended up as being one of the main vehicles that shaped how a tacit exercise of control was performed by fiscals on the ground in order to ‘solve’ the system’s strong reading of an imposition between what was to be considered ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ behaviours. However, both the macro-dimension of the socio-political context and the micro-dimension of the informal traders’ appropriation of the regime’s intents affected how its disciplinary actions were performed. For instance, the context affected how decisions to take punishing actions were not linearly derived from the system’s individual signalling of deviances but by its capacity to show the ratios between those affected by such actions and those not in particular sites (Attewell, 1991).



This was particularly noticeable in the case of the one-license-per-family rule, which given it was such a pervasive ‘deviance’ in particular sites, the decision to take the necessary disciplinary action would often be cancelled given the risks its implementation could cause in relation to a potential sabotage of the programme. Further, as the informal traders freely provided data about their family members to fiscals, which led to the high number of deviances recorded, they were central in subverting the regime’s disciplinary intent (Lyon, 1993). On the other hand, the appropriation by licensed workers in disciplined sites facilitated the regime’s intent in the ways by which, driven by fear of loosing their licenses, they implicitly expanded the regime’s reach of control by partnering with municipal authorities surveying their own sites (Foucault, 1977).

8. CONCLUSION The urgency of this study lies in the fact that something as pervasive as Recife’s informal work is under threat and may disappear by virtue of modernist developmental agendas which aim to turn the social, cultural and economic diversity into a normalizing gaze easier to control. This paper has suggested that the formalisation of informal work is a power-constituted regime where the information system used assumes a critical political role in the negotiation of the regime’s disciplinary intents. Conceptualising Recife’s formalisation program as a ‘formalising regime’ helped to illuminate the ways by which this regime imposed modernist developmental ideologies, and was implemented not to solve a particular problem of informal work, but rather to enforce a transition towards a modernist vision of socio-economic order where informality had no place to exist. Within this apparatus an information system acted as a ‘formalising technology’ where ‘formalising’ came to mean the formalisation of the existent inequalities enacted through the application of an information structure which facilitated the regime’s disciplinary intents while at the same time obstructed alternative solutions to emerge. To conclude, we hope this research has helped to illuminate both the urgency and richness of this particular area of study and the need for more in-depth research to explore how technology is shaping the nature of informal work more broadly.

This article was partially supported by Rui Roberto Ramos doctoral grant SFRH/BD/77812/2011 funded by FCT/MCTES (Portugal) and POPH/FSE (EC). The Lancaster University HighWire Centre for Doctoral Training is supported by the Digital Economy Programme (RCUK Grant EP/G037582/1).

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The Formalising Regime and its Formalising Technology: The Case of Informal Trade in Recife, Brazil

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