Managing Ambiguity

<p> Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare.</p><p> <em>Managing</em><em> Ambiguity</em> follows how neoliberal insistence on local community flexibility and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back and how this fostered a specific mode of power.</p>