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Explores changes in the informal networks of overlapping memberships between opposition organizations in Poland between the 1960s and the 1980s. When civic organizations are subject to severe constraints, as in Communist regimes, informal networks are particularly important as alternative sources of resources. There, networks not only operate as micro‐mobilization contexts but also provide the basic infrastructure for civil society. The chapter explicitly takes the time dimension into account, using individual affiliations to chart the evolution of networks over time, and offering an accurate reconstruction of changes in the Polish political system and the emergence of a strong democratization movement.

Chapter Four examines the hidden sinews of political power in the local state by examining the role of patronage networks in county and prefecture government. The chapter explains the origin of patronage networks in Poshan, tracing the configuration of present-day networks to the early post-Mao years of decentralization and economic reform. While analysts have long been aware of the importance of personalistic ties and informal networks at the elite national level of Chinese politics, this is one of the first studies to systematically examine the origins, structure, and function of patronage networks within the local state. Despite often being seen as a parasite on the formal institutions of state, in a political system characterized by fragmented authority and personal power relations rules, patronage networks play a vital role in bureaucratic coordination and in maintaining order through the informal regulation of political competition.

This chapter addresses the ubiquitous unofficial networks, primarily of patronage, that permeated the official bureaucracy. In the 1930s and 1940s, an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus emerged to administer the production and performance of music in the Soviet Union and provide for the material well-being of the musicians who produced and performed that music. For the second of these tasks, a subsidiary system of material support grew up within the bureaucracy. However, the official bureaucracy and related resource allocation institutions could not fulfill their respective tasks. As such, on a case-by-case basis, individuals could and did utilize unofficial networks to facilitate their negotiations through the official bureaucracy. At the same time, the existence of unofficial networks was a continual source of suspicion for those outside each one. The entire music system cannot be understood without coming to grips with the significance of these informal networks.

The formal state ownership of alcohol production assets detailed in chapter 4 was far from the only way in which economic interests and alcohol policymaking collided under Putin. This chapter provides a case study of the complex kleptocracy in the Russian political economy. The interests in vodka production of some of Putin’s closest cronies – and their perceived influence on state policy – are analysed in the context of sistema, the informal network-based system of governance in Russia through which allies of Putin are rewarded with business rents.

This chapter analyzes the roots of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) regime's learning curve in managing popular contention and the mechanisms that have enabled the regime to develop its authoritarian structure and practices. It first defines Hong Kong's hybrid regime in terms of its liberal–autocratic and central–local contradictions and then discusses various state countermobilization strategies used to respond to mass protests. The chapter then examines how the hybrid regime's strategies of disciplinary exclusion, patron-client politics, ideological work, and attrition have mobilized or incentivized proregime and nonstate actors against dissent. On the one hand, the hybrid regime has co-opted formal institutions and has manufactured informal networks through which political crisis has been maneuvered by the regime to monitor the ruling class's factional quarrels and to further develop its authoritarian protocols. On the other hand, the party-state's local apparatuses have extended and refined their united propaganda and mass-line strategies to address the rise of activism in Hong Kong.

This chapter investigates how in the later Middle Ages the English crown also actively cultivated unofficial contacts at the papal curia thanks to networks of ‘friends’ and ‘protégés’. During the fourteenth century informal contacts between England and the Apostolic See supplemented administrative deficiencies, whereas the process of bureaucratization in both polities facilitated Anglo-papal diplomatic discourse. Three specific questions are answered in this chapter. First, who were the English crown’s contacts at the papal curia during the first half of the fourteenth century? Second, how did informal networks at the papal curia facilitate Anglo-papal diplomatic discourse, particularly during the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War? And finally, how did the English crown reward its ‘friends’ at the papal curia for their services?

Chapter 5 extends the issues discussed in the previous two chapters and explores women’s use of informal and formal support networks. It also describes the structural challenges women confront, such as their religious communities and/or the criminal justice system, as they move forward in the years following the termination of their abusive relationships.

This chapter provides the first comprehensive history of the homes and studios belonging to Arts and Crafts women and the relationships that played out in these spaces. Together these homes, which ranged from rented rooms in purpose-built urban housing for working women through to grand country houses, constituted key sites of resistance and self-expression. In the quest to find ‘a room of one’s own’, women art workers increasingly sought their own studios, which functioned as the central space in their lives. Following the life course of women art workers, the chapter begins in the unmarried home. Firstly, exploring the experiences of young women in the family home, and then their adult lives, often in all-women households, or remaining in the houses they had grown up in. The final section explores how art workers, married and unmarried, together used their homes and studios to create an expansive network spread across the capital, and across the country. By reformulating traditional practices of domestic socialisation such as ‘At Homes’, to organise meetings focused around art, work, education, and political reform, these women remained respectably situated amidst an expansive domestic milieu, whilst engaging in the very process of pursuing modern working lives.

This chapter discusses the phrase “the Underground Book Railroad,” used to describe the informal networks through which prisoners share books. The Underground Book Railroad serves as a crucial reminder of the historical continuities between slavery and incarceration, as well as the ongoing ways in which racial ideologies delimit conceptions of prisoners' humanity and capacity for change. The phrase also underscores the connections that reading can foster in prison—connections that sometimes trespass the boundaries separating incarcerated women from one another, from people outside prison, and from the world of ideas. Furthermore, the Underground Book Railroad evokes the imaginative, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual ways in which reading allows some women to proceed to new destinations, even if they will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.