Presented at IFIP WG 9.4: 13th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, Negombo - Sri Lanka, 20-22 May, 2015. Paper available at: https://www.academia.edu/12830883/The_Formalising_Regime_and_its_Formalising_Technology_The_Case_of_Informal_Trade_in_Recife ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to consider how valuation is performed within informal markets in the global south. Specifically, the paper addresses this topic with reference to empirical data garnered from an ethnographic study of urban piracy markets in Recife, Brazil. These markets are composed of piracy hawkers - street sellers using mobile piracy stalls equipped with a CD player, car battery and speakers, who walk the streets playing and selling copied CDs. Overall we seek to explain how the evaluation of music media products is entangled with the informal urban assemblages of piracy markets. We draw on Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature on assemblages and specifically moments of valuation (Antal et al 2015) and argue that the valuation of music media is spatially and temporally located and collectively performed as a contingent process that takes place within the informal assemblages of people, materials and technologies which daily emerge on the crowded sidewalks. In this context, valuation is collectively enacted and the dissonance in relation to new musical products is collectively negotiated trough the inscription of sonorous boundaries of belonging and difference that shape the spatiality and collective identity of urban daily life in Recife.

1. The case of informal trade in Recife
TheFormalising Regimeand
ItsFormalising Technology
Rui Roberto Ramos
& Niall Hayes
13th International Conference on Social Implications
of Computers in Developing Countries
Negombo - Sri Lanka, 20-22 May, 2015

2. Introduction
Empirical Focus
Recife, Brazil (April to October 2014)
Informal work as backward, inefficient and a force
against development
Formalisation enforces “appropriate economic
behaviour” based on modernist ideologies of structured
governance by regulating who can sell what and where
Research Questions
1) How are informal workers managed?
2) What is the role of ICT in this?
Theoretical Framework
Foucault power/knowledge & regimes of truth
Methodology
In depth ethnography focusing on formalisation
processes, informal workers, officials & fiscals from
CSURB*)
*CSURB: Dpt. Of Mobility and Urban Control of Recife City Council

3. Formalisation Plan
Aim
Build a public space capable of ’incorporating orderly
the commerce, which is informal and compromises the
fluidity and mobility of citizens’
Objectives
1) Regulation trough licensing of workers to work in
‘disciplined’ sites with ‘standardized’ stalls and
products
2) Issue penalties to worker’s ‘deviances’
Processes
1) Controlling existent informal work
2) Registering in a database
3) Surveying deviances and filtering candidates

4. Formalising Regime
Truth: Informality is a problem and it needs to be solved
Problem
mobility, unclean,
inhuman
Solution
formalisation
Premises
affects ‘citizen’s mobility’
Premises
‘order’, ‘standardisation’
Implies
un-citizenship
Implies
citizenship
Materialized
‘clean’ and ‘humanize’
Materialized
control and surveillance’
Informal Workers CSURB
Mobility as the overall issue
'They complain but we need to ensure citizens’ mobility’
Informal workers as non citizens
'We will remove them to leave the sidewalks clean’
‘Our plan is to humanize the streets’
Against traders and their local business practices
‘A person worthy of his work needs not be mistreated’
‘We go where the person is. The person wont go to a mall’

5. Formalising Regime
Informal Workers CSURB
CSURB military background
‘Inspection and seizure is the only weapon we have’
Constant psychological warfare
’You’re out today. Tomorrow we’ take it away. After
tomorrow you’ll get a notification. It’s psychological
pressure’
Reallocation to disciplined sites to facilitate control
‘It is difficult to control the streets. This makes it easier’
Overarching ambition of eradicating street trade
‘Is a palliative measure. (…) no new licenses will be issued’
Truth: Informality is a problem and it needs to be solved
Problem
mobility, unclean, inhuman
Solution
formalisation
Political Aim
informality/in-mobility
disempowerment through
un-citizenship
Political Aim
formality/citizenship
achieve total control
total erradicatication

6. Formalising Technology
Technologies Used
excel metadata -> printed forms & hand-written paper
Formalomorphist IS Design
standardizing rules (1-1 + 1LPFM);
Making the deviations ‘visible’ and filtering candidates
CSURB
Modernist appeal & camouflaged surveillance
‘first they did not believe it but when they realized they had
no alternative they began to run after to register’
’they don’t bug me this way (hand writing)’
Truth: Informality is a problem and it needs to be solved
Problem
mobility, unclean, inhuman
Solution
formalisation
ICT 4 Acquiring Truth
Register deviances
apply discipline and
punish
ICT 4 Acquiring Truth
control informality
filter candidates

7. Formalising Technology
Informal Workers CSURB
Friction structured/unstructured, other and coercion
‘I don’t know how to do it in excel’
‘why change the “other”? It’s where we find out everything’
Appropriation and 1LPFM sabotage
Everyone dopes it! You have to be one for the other right?!’
Appropriation and facilitation of control
‘If anyone out there puts a stall here I’ll report it’
Truth: Informality is a problem and it needs to be solved
Problem
mobility, unclean,
inhuman
Solution
formalisation
Technological False
form’s white spaces
notes,
digital ‘other’, red highlight
Technological True
no notes,
nor ‘other, nor red highlight
Implications of False
fees, apprehension,
Implications of True
Becomes licensed or

8. Conclusion
The Formalising Regime acted as mechanism to
enforce a transition towards a modernist vision
of socio-economic order where informality had
no place to exist
• Legitimised trough mobility & un-citizenship
• Applied through control, surveillance & discipline
(Foucault, 2007, 1977)
• Based on formalomorphism (Cross 2000)
ICT within the regime apparatus
• IS design (1-1) -> obstructed solutions (N-N)
(Poster, 1990)
• IS design (other) -> ‘subject’ made of ‘deviances‘-
> shaped control (Bowker and Star, 1999)
• Socio-political context (ratios) rather than technical
rationality, sabotaged modernistic 1LPFM
(Attewell, 1991)
The Formalising Technology reinforced the
position of the municipality crystalizing the
unequal power given to traders and formalising
their existent inequalities

9. References
Attewell, P. (1991). Big Brother and the Sweatshop: Computer
Surveillance in the Automated Office, in C: Dunlop and R.
Kling, eds, Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts
and Social Choices, Academic Press, Boston.
Bowker, G. C. & Star, S. L., (1999). Sorting things out:
Classification and its consequences. Cambridge, MIT press.
Cross, J. (2000). Street vendors, and postmodernity: conflict
and compromise in the global economy. International Journal
of Sociology and Social Policy, 20(1/2), pp.29–51.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. Penguin, London.
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the College de France 1977- 1978 (Picador, New York).
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the College de France 1977- 1978 (Picador, New York).
Poster, M. (1990) The Mode Of Information: Poststructuralism
and Social Context. Polity Press, Cambridge.

10. rui.ramos@lancaster.ac.uk
niall.hayes@lancaster.ac.uk