Informal Practices in the Making of Professionals: The Case of Engineers in Soviet and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Introduction

Informal practices in education and employment have long been recognized as persistent features of transition in all post-Soviet societies. Informal work has been instrumental to survival strategies during the sharp economic decline of the 1990s and in the following years remained an important source of income for many (Gerber, 2002; Morris and Polese, 2014, 2015; Williams et al., 2013). However, the use of informal practices among highly skilled professionals beyond providing additional income remains under-researched (but see Round et al., 2008; Salmi, 2003; Yakubovich, 2005). This study traces the continuities and changes in repertoire and use of various informal practices relating to the work of engineers in post-Soviet Azerbaijan and examines their role of both subverting and maintaining professionalism. We argue that in the context of post-socialist change, informal practices are both a symptom of institutional disintegration and a mechanism for professional integration.

We understand informal practices as persisting strategies of action which circumvent or manipulate formal rules and procedures established for dealing with a particular set of problems (Böröcz, 2000; Ledeneva, 2006). In the socialist shortage economy, informal practices involved a non-monetary exchange of goods and services and ‘second economy’ activities, such as black market trade and clandestine production of consumer goods (Grossman, 1989; Ledeneva, 1998; Stark, 1989). These activities were strongly embedded in localized interpersonal networks of trust and kinship, and at the same time intertwined with formal political institutions, which tolerated and benefited from them (Clark, 1993; Mars and Altman, 1983; Willerton, 1992). With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the introduction of market reforms and the subsequent economic decline, informal economic activities aimed at poverty reduction proliferated (Clarke, 2002; Gerber, 2002; Humphrey, 2002). With time, informal practices have become institutionalized as they link business and political elites (Collins, 2002; Ledeneva, 2006; Safiyev, 2016; Stefes, 2005) and provide some avenues for popular resistance to exclusive economic policies (Polese et al., 2016; Sayfutdinova, 2015; Wegerich, 2006).

The existing studies on informality among post-Soviet highly skilled professionals have documented the proliferation of informal payments, particularly to doctors and teachers (Aliyev, 2017; Lonkila, 2010; Morris and Polese, 2014; Riska and Novelskaite, 2011; Round et al., 2008; Yakubovich, 2005). Yet we believe that the role of informality for post-Soviet professions and professionalism extends beyond this narrow understanding. Rooted in the structural constraints of the socialist economy, in the post-Soviet period informality has replaced some functions of state bureaucracy which formally withdrew from the regulation of professions. The peculiarities of the post-Soviet nexus of state and market where professions are situated, make this situation markedly different from the ‘hybrid’ professionalism observed in advanced capitalist societies (Noordegraaf, 2007). This study thus contributes to the scholarship on the under-researched topic of post-Soviet professional change.

Azerbaijan, where our empirical research took place, is a fertile ground to explore informality. In Soviet times, the Republic was notorious for the strength of its ‘second economy’ and political corruption (Willerton, 1992; Zemtsov, 1976), which is explained by the dominance of traditional social structures based on kinship and place of origin. In the post-Soviet period, the informal economy has been one of the largest in the former Soviet Union (Alexeev and Pyle, 2003: 165). Some of the informal practices researched in post-Soviet Azerbaijan are the neopatrimonialization of the political system (Guliyev, 2009; Safiyev, 2013), and bribery within the healthcare and education sectors (Lepisto and Kazimzade, 2008; Rzayeva, 2013; Sadigov, 2014; Silova et al., 2007).

In the following section, we present our conceptual framework. This is followed by an explanation of our methodology and short background information on the development of the engineering profession in Azerbaijan. The informal practices of Soviet and post-Soviet engineers are discussed in two sections dedicated to entry into the profession and maintenance of professionalism. We conclude by commenting on the changes and continuities in the informal practices that were revealed in the analysis.

Conceptual framework

We draw on Ledeneva’s definition of informal practices as ‘regular sets of players’ strategies that infringe on, manipulate, or exploit formal rules’ (2006: 22). This approach is based on Bourdieu’s understanding of practices as actions ‘which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions’ of the production of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977: 78). Ledeneva’s (1998) groundbreaking work on blat and informal networking was crucial for the recognition of the importance of informality in linking the state and society in the Soviet Union. However, the role of informality for the Soviet and post-Soviet professions is not well researched. Western sociology conceptualized socialist professions as ‘primarily state-located and state-employed’ (Krause, 1991: 4), owing to their being founded, funded and managed by the state and the Communist Party. In this framework, socialist professions are considered deprofessionalized, with their autonomy ‘abolished in a professional and organizational sense’ (Gloeckner, 1991: 111). This dominant view contradicts the experience of broad managerial and workplace autonomy that existed in socialist economies (Kalleberg and Stark, 1993; Lado et al., 1989; Linz, 1988) and neglects the peculiarities of the interpenetration of state and society under state socialism (Grzymala-Busse and Luong, 2002). Drawing on these insights about the mediating role of informality, we argue that informal practices were also instrumental in negotiating the relations between the state and socialist professions.

In addition to non-hierarchical practices of informal exchange, such as blat (Ledeneva, 1998) and collegial referrals (Riska and Novelskaite, 2011), we include hierarchical practices in our analysis. In the Azerbaijani context, the culturally embedded non-monetary practice of tapş is an important mechanism of bridging otherwise unconnected social groups (Aliyev, 2017; Sayfutdinova, 2018). Tapş involves one person asking another for a favour to be done for a third person. It also often involves an element of patronage. Patronage, which can be defined as an asymmetrical and typically long-term relationship where certain services are exchanged for protection, was indispensable for the operation of both the Soviet political system and the second economy, where members of party-state nomenklatura provided protection from persecution while receiving goods and services from black market operations (Willerton, 1992). But patronage was also important for career advancement, particularly in industry. In the late Soviet period, the management of industry became an increasingly technocratic function and career advancement required a combination of professional expertise gathered through a process of professional growth from the lowest to the highest ranks in industry (Clarke, 2007; Kryshtanovskaya and White, 1996), membership of the Communist party and patronage.

Turning specifically to the engineering profession in the Soviet Union, we consider informality important in several other ways. Informal relations in the workplace were the basis of professional identities and solidarities in the context of long-term employment and vertical integration of industry (Abramov, 2016a). Professional identities among technical specialists in the Soviet Union were relatively narrow and centred on the branch of industry to which a workplace belonged rather than the wider professional community; for example, oilmen (Rus. neftyaniki), builders (Rus. stroiteli), energy sector workers (Rus. energetiki), etc. This was related to the vertical integration of Soviet industry and the role of branch ministries in it (Gorlin, 1985: 354; Lewis, 1984). Another, and related, site for developing professional solidarities was professional unions (Rus. professionalniye soyuzy). They also followed the branch logic of organization, uniting workers of specific sectors regardless of occupation (Ashwin and Clarke, 2003: 17). These unions and ‘scientific-technical societies’ provided a milieu of interaction and socialization for their members, both formal and informal, and facilitated the exchange of information among different practitioners of the same profession (Abramov and Yarskaya-Smirnova, 2017). Finally, Soviet engineers played an important role in the re-distribution of resources, goods and services both within and outside the official economy. For example, they engaged in various practices aimed at overcoming shortages and ensuring production in their enterprises (Ledeneva, 1998) while siphoning public resources into the black market through various embezzlement schemes (Khokhriakov, 2002; Zemtsov, 1976).

The extent to which these practices remain relevant for post-socialist professions is not clear. Existing research on professionals suggests lingering continuities with the socialist system, even in countries that had joined the EU (Osinsky and Mueller, 2004; Riska and Novelskaite, 2011; Wierciński, 2017). In a study focusing on informal practices among doctors in post-Soviet Lithuania, Riska and Novelskaite (2011) argue that informality constitutes the ‘fourth logic’ of social organization in addition to professionalism. Building on this insight, in this study we examine the changes and continuities in the use of informal relations and practices among engineers in Azerbaijan. In conceptualizing the continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet informal practices, we also draw on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘genesis amnesia’, or lack of actors’ consciousness about the origins of objective social conditions which produce practices (Bourdieu, 1977: 79).

Methodology

This article is based on the data collected through in-depth interviews during two fieldwork visits to Azerbaijan (December 2011 and summer 2012), and one visit to Houston, TX, USA (March 2013), which is the major destination for internationally mobile Azerbaijani engineers. In total, 41 interviews were conducted, including 33 with Soviet-educated engineers, and eight with engineers who graduated in the post-Soviet period. Among the Soviet-educated group, we prioritized those who had work experience in the post-Soviet period as well. In-depth interviews were chosen as the main research technique to gain a thorough account of practitioners’ perceptions and achieve a holistic understanding of the changes in professionals’ lives.

The respondents were reached in different ways, including our personal contacts and referrals of the respondents. The sampling strategy aimed to reach engineers from different industries, including oil and gas, energy, manufacturing, construction and chemical industries. Respondents were asked to describe the reasons for becoming engineers; their professional experience in the Soviet times; their experiences of post-Soviet changes; and how they envisage their personal future and that of the engineering profession in Azerbaijan. Interviews lasted between 45 minutes to three hours. Nineteen of the interviews were recorded, either fully or in part. Those who refused to have the interviews recorded cited concerns about the political sensitivity of the topic of transition in Azerbaijan’s context. ¹ When respondents refused to be recorded, we took extensive notes during the interviews. This allowed us to preserve the rich data generated in the interviews. They were mainly conducted in Russian due to the fluency of the Soviet engineers in Russian rather than in the Azerbaijani language. To ensure anonymity, information which has the potential to reveal respondents’ identities is removed and pseudonyms are given. We state the year of graduation (in parentheses) as it is important for understanding the Soviet and post-Soviet dynamics of informality.

The engineering profession in Azerbaijan

The emergence of the modern engineering profession in Azerbaijan is linked to the oil boom in Baku between 1872 and 1901 when the city became the centre of oil production in the Russian Empire (Goldman, 2008: 4). During the boom, technical expertise was imported from Russia and Europe (Gökay, 1999; Mostashari, 2000: 94). The first higher educational institution for training engineers, the Polytechnic Institute, was opened in Baku after the Soviet takeover, in November 1920 (Musayeva, 1979: 101). Eager to showcase Baku and Azerbaijan to the Muslim Middle East as a site of socialist industrialization and development, Soviet authorities invested heavily in the education of the local population, which was officially designated as ‘culturally backward’ (Martin, 2001: 126, 167; White, 1974).

During the Soviet years, engineering education in Azerbaijan expanded in line with the policies of rapid industrialization. Thus, between 1928 and 1932 the number of graduates from the Polytechnic Institute increased from 42 to 575 (Musayeva, 1979: 188). In the post-Second World War period, when Baku lost its role as the centre of Soviet oil production, other industries, particularly the refining and manufacturing of oil-field equipment, were developed (Dilbazov, 1976: 52; World Bank, 1993: 121). By the 1980s, there were three institutions training engineers in Azerbaijan: Azerbaijan Industrial Institute, ² the Polytechnic Institute, ³ and the Construction Institute (Aliyev, 1984: 52−53). Students from Azerbaijan were also trained in other parts of the Soviet Union, particularly Russia and Ukraine (Mamedli, 2015: 116). The number of engineers in Azerbaijan reached 70,000, making it the second largest occupation requiring higher education after teachers (Avakov and Atakishiyev, 1984: 195).

By the late Soviet period, Azerbaijani engineers were integrated into the Soviet professional community through vertically integrated union-wide industrial organizations headed by branch ministries. Heavy industry, including the sectors in which Azerbaijan specialized, such as oil production, refining and manufacturing of oil-field equipment, were regulated at the union level (Cooley, 2005: 74−78). Engineering was also an avenue for a managerial career, as many managers and ministry officials had an engineering background (Kryshtanovskaya and White, 1996).

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, much of Azerbaijan’s manufacturing industry was left without markets for its products, and many industrial workers and engineers lost their jobs. However, engineering education was expanded and several engineering schools have been established since 1991. ⁴ The number of graduates increased from 4812 in 1980 to 5350 in 2012 (Aliyev, 1984; State statistical committee, 2014). Both the quality and the utility of post-Soviet engineering education in Azerbaijan remain questionable. Although there are no official statistics on the employment of graduates, according to our interviews only up to 20% found jobs according to their acquired specializations in the 2000s. The situation has been different in oil-related departments, whose graduates have more employment opportunities in both local and foreign oil and engineering companies active in Azerbaijan.

Entering the profession: Informality in higher education

The proliferation of bribery and other forms of corruption in Soviet higher education is a well-known phenomenon (Osipian, 2009). In Azerbaijan, this was amplified by the relatively few opportunities for higher education compared to other Soviet republics, the high social prestige of qualifications and the impact of higher education on career prospects. Yet, most of our Soviet-educated respondents held the view that bribes were uncommon in higher technical education in the Soviet period. For example, Said (1971) explained his decision to apply to AZI with lack of bribery: ‘I was advised to go to AZI because the education was good and there was no bribery. Well, at that time, in general, there was no bribery, but in AZI there was no bribery at all’ [emphasis added]. But the situation was more complex, and further probing revealed that bribery existed, although it was less common. Still, other informal practices were more widely spread than bribery. Our respondents identified two such practices: tapş and using somebody else’s work for the semester and diploma projects. An example of the simplest triadic tapş in an educational setting would be a parent asking an acquaintance at the university for help with her child’s examination. Unlike some of the currently practised forms of bribery, tapş was both more nuanced and restricted in its scope. Usually, it meant leniency in grading or assistance in raising the grade.

The second practice used to obtain good grades was hiring well-performing students or recent graduates to complete the final semester or diploma projects. The payment for such ‘assistance’ could be quite substantial and amounted to up to half of a young engineer’s monthly salary. Two of our respondents admitted to having complemented their income in this way. According to Nadir (1977), ‘whole assembly lines’ for the production of such projects operated at AZI.

In the post-Soviet period, these two practices were replaced with bribery, reflecting the monetization that has been common for post-Soviet informality (Ledeneva, 2008: 136; Morris and Polese, 2014; Osipian, 2009). Our respondents described paying for grades as nearly universal, as tolerated and even encouraged by the administration, who often participated in the income-sharing schemes reminiscent of the Soviet-time embezzlement practices in the industrial sector (Zemtsov, 1977). According to our post-Soviet respondents, bribery took different forms, from accepting bribes only from those who were willing to pay, to blanket extortion, when money was collected from whole groups. In some cases, instructors took what they were offered, while in others they established price lists and demanded certain amounts for certain grades.

Engineers’ attitudes to bribery in higher education were ambivalent. All respondents condemned bribery and saw it as a symptom of the decline of the educational system in general and of engineering education in particular. At the same time, it became normalized as increasing numbers of people were being involved at both the giving and the taking ends. Generally, the giving of bribes was viewed as less morally reprehensible than taking them as most people saw themselves being forced to pay. Furthermore, the practices in which our respondents personally participated, such as making final projects for money, were not seen as corrupt. Some narratives explained, if not justified, taking bribes as well. In these narratives, bribery was not necessarily seen as unethical and was treated as emerging out of need. The most common explanation was that of a survival strategy, referring especially to the ‘hard times’ of the early 1990s when official salaries were so inadequate that making a living without extra income was not possible at all. Choosing between low-skilled options of income generation, such as taxi-driving or house cleaning, which were often seen as incompatible with the high social status of a university instructor, many opted for the easily available option of taking bribes from students. Yet, when the economic situation stabilized and salaries became sufficient for basic subsistence, if not for a decent life, the bribery in higher education progressed rather than diminished. One of our younger respondents, Yashar (1999) described this process in terms of moral decay:

In 1993, even up to 1996–97, education was good. At that time there still were Soviet-time teachers, and corruption wasn’t as rampant . . . [. . .] So at that time, it was still okay. I mean, of course, teachers used to take money and all that, but you could easily study without money, and they were giving good knowledge, these old cadres. [. . .] In 1998–99 . . . people were just getting tired. Even those who did not take money [before], they were becoming tired of getting by in this misery, and were slowly starting [to take bribes]. [emphasis added]

Speaking about later periods, he claimed that the situation further deteriorated, and that ‘now . . . it has become a total mess’.

This account was rare in that it saw informalization of the higher education as a process rather than a rupture. A more common view was that of a rapid change, resulting from both moral decay and the post-Soviet institutional disintegration. For Ali (1966), education was ‘a mirror of society’ and bribery in education reflected the general spread of corruption. Yet, few engineers traced the spread of bribery in higher education to earlier Soviet practices. Edhem, a former professor of power engineering, located the roots of bribery in the changes in the prestige of the engineering profession in the 1970s. It was the period when directors of shops and markets became, in his words, ‘the masters of the situation’.

Edhem’s pointing to these particular occupations indicates the shifting scales of prestige in the Soviet Union between the so-called ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’ sectors. While the non-productive occupations in retail and wholesale trade were ideologically disapproved, these occupations became especially valuable in the late Soviet period, with the development of consumerist culture and the economic decline. Having access to the goods in shortage, sales-people traded them on the black market or helped to obtain them through informal networks (Ledeneva, 1998: 130). Often, they were wealthy but lacked the prestige of more educated occupations. The norms of the informal market economy, which were already widespread in the non-productive sector, penetrated higher education, which became a route to obtaining higher social status. This suggests that bribery in higher education can be seen as an attempt to maintain instructors’ social prestige in a changing stratification system where one’s status is no longer determined by his or her place in the system of production, but by one’s capacity to consume according to certain perceived standards.

The rise of bribery in higher education raises a question about the value of educational credentials. As Sadigov (2014) and Aliyev (2017) had demonstrated, in Azerbaijan, diplomas have become primarily status symbols, serving to mask nepotism in employment by providing the veneer of the formally transparent employment process. Our interviews suggest that qualifications, when supported by evidence of knowledge and skills, usually through referrals from trusted colleagues, also played a role in employment. Both employers and senior professionals distinguished between those who gave bribes to obtain grades and those who ‘studied themselves’.

From their part, engineering students who were committed to becoming competent professionals also employed a combination of formal and informal tactics to obtain the knowledge they needed. Those in oil-related specializations had opportunities to participate in training and internship programmes provided by foreign companies working in Azerbaijan (Azimli, 2016). However, most tactics were informal and included additional study with private tutors, self-study groups and arrangements to access specialized literature not available from the largely outdated university libraries. Many began to work part-time, often informally, to gain some practical experience. But not all of the students’ practices were benign. Some, like Elmira (2008), who was the top student in her class, became intermediaries and collected bribes from other students on behalf of instructors. In return, they were left alone and were no longer subjected to squeezing and extortion.

Although bribery in higher education appeared to be more widely spread in the post-Soviet period, it did not completely devalue formal education and credentials. Formal and informal work together, and the descriptions of the value of formal education, remained strikingly similar in the accounts of engineers educated in both Soviet and post-Soviet periods. For example, Namik (2008) described how it was his formal education and ‘technical mindset’, rather than practical experience, that convinced his boss to allow him to take on a new task with which he was not thoroughly familiar. He went on to state that ‘the university gives a person the skill of working with books’. This statement echoed verbatim the words of Nadir (1979), who also considered ‘the skill to work with books’ as the most important skill gained through formal education. This suggests significant continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet informal practices in higher education. The narratives of collapse and rupture which dominate Soviet engineers’ accounts thus constitute a case of ‘genesis amnesia’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 79), and the continuities between Soviet and post-Soviet educational systems remain significant.

Maintaining professionalism: Mentoring, patronage and collegiate ties

It is well established that in any profession formal education forms only a beginning of professional competence, and becoming a professional requires considerable on-the-job training. In Soviet work practices, which emphasized long-term employment, such on-the-job training was institutionalized in the mandatory mentoring of ‘young specialists’ by experienced professionals during the three years of compulsory ‘placement’ after graduation. Research engineers, who constituted about a third of our sample, received mentoring in the form of research supervision.

Mentoring can be defined as a learning-oriented asymmetrical relationship aimed at the development of skills and talents of the junior member of the relationship (Allen and Eby, 2007: 10). Most of our Soviet-educated respondents described their relationships with mentors as crucial for their professional development. In the words of Aziza (1966): ‘it is very important in whose hands you fall as a young person’. The success of mentoring for the professional development of the young specialist largely depended on the quality of the informal relationship between the mentor and his or her protégé.

An important dimension of mentoring in the context of Soviet Azerbaijan was its proximity to patronage (see also Willerton, 1992). The practices of career advancement within Soviet vertically integrated industrial ministries meant that it was intertwined with professional development. A mentor who happened to hold an important position in the administrative hierarchy of an industrial enterprise or research institute could provide patronage, including career advancement. In Azerbaijan, the structural intersection of mentoring and patronage was also amplified by the culture of patriarchy and respect for the elderly (Az: aqsaqqal) that it entails (Aliyev, 2015; Diuk, 2012: 78). The respect for one’s mentor often mixed personal with the professional. Some mentoring relationships could become so close that engineers often invoked the language of family ties to describe them. Thus, describing the relationship with the director of his institute, Rza (1966) said: ‘he loved me like a son’.

On the downside, the close relationship between mentor and protégé could lead to a blockage of a protégé’s career in the case of a mentor’s ‘fall from grace’ or him or her passing away. This happened to Fahriyya (1961), who enjoyed a long-term professional relationship with her mentor from her first postgraduate job in a chemical laboratory of an oil processing plant to heading a laboratory in the R&D institute where he was a director. In a manner common for many personally close mentoring relationships, she describes Professor A. as a surrogate ‘parent’:

He was like a Dad. When I was defending [my dissertation], my relatives, my Dad came from the province. And he, A., was sitting like that and he put his hand [around me] and he was so proud! Maybe even more than my own father, you see? . . . for him, it was such a pleasure, he was sitting like he was the happiest man ever.

When her mentor fell out of grace with the higher ranks of management and eventually died, Fahriyya’s career and the research direction that her mentor had patronized were also halted:

. . . we were getting colossal results. And we were just claiming these [directions of further research]. But unfortunately, it happened that this man was . . . he died, and he was disgraced [. . .] And this direction, it was left, well, using slang, without a ‘roof’ (bez kryshi), to use such a language.

This quotation is interesting also for the use of the term ‘roof’, which originally meant protection racketing in the black market economy (Humphrey, 2002: 78). Yet it has since been used in a dual sense, referring also to patrons in formal political structures – pointing to the commonalities between different forms of patronage.

In the post-Soviet period, political patronage and professional mentoring became de-coupled. With the disintegration of Soviet vertically integrated industrial hierarchies with relatively clear criteria for career progress, the importance of professional merits for career advancement decreased. In a process often described as neopatrimonialization, senior managers in both state and private sectors were increasingly appointed on the basis of kinship relations to higher-ranking officials (Guliyev, 2012). Several respondents mentioned this practice and gave examples of high-level appointments of persons without relevant professional credentials. As a result, senior managers who were well placed in the networks of political patronage could sponsor their clients’ career advancement but were not able to help them learn the intricacies of the profession. In contrast, older engineers who mentored younger colleagues were no longer able to assist in their career advancement. Thus, to have a successful career, a young engineer would need both a mentor and a patron. At the same time, mentoring in the workplace gained new importance as it became crucial for compensation of the deficiencies in the formal education system.

The informalization of the state sector also made patronage indispensable for the operation of the private sector, both in its formal and in its informal varieties. Patronage could protect from extortion by street-level bureaucrats from the control agencies, as well as provide access to better contracts (Safiyev, 2013; Sayfutdinova, 2017). Nadir explained the success of his current employer, who was also a former colleague from a Soviet enterprise, by this combination of professionalism with having a good patron in state administration:

My employer, he is an engineer. He . . . Well, they [the employer works with a partner – authors] are lucky, you know, a lucky combination with a ‘back’. ⁵ It is a good ‘back’, which organized it all for them. So, they were pushed, and they received support, and they were given a certain territory, and they managed.

In the workplace, patronage and non-hierarchical ties with colleagues operated in a complementary manner. For example, Nadir’s employer recruited his former colleagues from the Soviet enterprise in his firm. At the same time, Nadir himself acted as a mentor, although not a patron, to two young engineers, recruited from the Technical University. They were recommended for the job by another former colleague, who had been teaching there at the time.

For those who did not have powerful patrons in state bureaucracy and relied on horizontal collegiate ties, a professional reputation was a primary resource. Professional reputation, to which some of our respondents referred to as ‘respect’ (uvazhenie), is the recognition of one’s professional competence by colleagues. For Soviet-educated engineers, reputation was also closely intertwined with interpersonal trust, and both were usually developed in the more stable Soviet workplaces many years ago. This was how Nadir described his current colleagues and the relationships in his workplace:

They are very, very good guys, and they have respect for me, both as a specialist and as a comrade (tovarishch), so we always . . . In this sense, they are very good guys, all urban (gorodskie) guys, and all factory (zavodskie) guys. Our relations are based on comradeship. [emphasis added]

Thus, an ideal colleague in such a post-Soviet workplace was someone who combined both professional reputation and interpersonal trust. Yet, this was difficult to achieve in full even with dense and multiplex ties inherited from the Soviet workplace (Lonkila, 2010). Interpersonal trust can put limitations on professional autonomy. For example, Nadir felt restricted in his freedom to ‘leave and go somewhere else to work’, both because the number of potential workplaces was low and because of the personal commitment which would be difficult to breach. He contrasted this with his Soviet-time freedom to change jobs (see also Linz, 1988). On the other hand, professional reputation and interpersonal trust could be at odds with each other. Viktor, an owner of a small business in ventilation, had to sack a trusted colleague and a personal friend who did not perform his work according to Viktor’s professional standards.

Like their older colleagues in the post-Soviet period, younger engineers were acutely aware of the importance of social networks. In contrast to the previous generation of engineers, they relied more on family ties and the networks of their parents for job searching. Thus, job searching is another area where the post-Soviet role of tapş increased. At the same time, younger engineers also sought to gain professional respect. For example, Namik, who came from an engineering ‘dynasty’ of three generations, and who benefited from having access to his father’s professional network, was trying to go beyond it and build his own reputation:

I found jobs through my father, but slowly I acquired respect not as somebody’s son but as a person who is doing his job. Many people told me personally that ‘we thought you would be sitting in your father’s air-conditioned office’. And then they saw me doing something up on a 35 metres-tall trestle, and they didn’t think [I would do that]. So, when I came down [from there], they would come up to me and say, ‘We heard about you, but we didn’t meet’. [. . .] My father is not always going to be in that chair, and in any case, life is a very long thing, and you need to gain your own respect.

The networks of post-Soviet engineers were weaker and therefore more flexible than those of the older generation. Soviet professional networks were formed in rather closed vertically integrated organizations (Abramov, 2016a) and stable workplaces where people used to work together for decades. In contrast, in the post-Soviet period professional networks were shaped in the context of flexible and precarious employment, often short-term and part-time. Mentoring relationships also changed: younger engineers often had multiple mentors from different jobs and no longer used the language of surrogate family in describing their mentors. Changing jobs was seen as normal, as a part of professional growth, rather than an impediment to it. Shahin (Turkish University, 2005), from a transnational company, described an optimal career path for a young engineer in terms of mobility between jobs and even countries: ‘Once you studied, you gained some experience, after, let’s say 3–4 years, then you can move to another company if you wish, or you can go abroad to broaden your knowledge’.

Even in transnational oil companies – the most secure workplaces for engineers in present-day Baku – there was a high circulation of the trained employees, as much as 70–80% according to some of our respondents’ estimates, leaving for work abroad after a few years of employment. Compared to Soviet practices of lifelong employment, work in transnational companies was still less secure and more mobile. Moreover, the practice of expatriate secondment meant that many of the experienced professionals who had been mentoring young engineers were usually there only for a few years, making the long-term mentoring relationships experienced by older engineers impossible.

Conclusion

The study examined the changes and continuities in the use of informal networks and practices by engineers in Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Informality and informal practices in performing engineering are the main focus to understand the transformation from socialism. We identified how practices and transformation of the profession are perceived by the professionals. We aimed to understand the impact of post-Soviet transition on changing notions of professions and professionalism, which are embedded together in Soviet practices.

Our study shows that post-Soviet informal practices are not new but have their predecessors in the Soviet period, where they were culturally and socially embedded, accepted, practised and reproduced. They are therefore transmitted to the practising of the profession in the post-Soviet period. In Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet context of neopatrimonialization, patronage and family ties are mechanisms of linking state and society, including the professional domain. They provide a basis for the preservation and endurance of professional solidarity networks in dealing with the hardship of the social, economic and political transformation. Informality thus has a dual impact: some informal practices, namely tapş and some forms of patronage, undermine professionalism whereas others, namely mentoring, help to sustain it. Informality, thus, operates as a symptom of institutional disintegration, but at the same time works as a mechanism for professional integration through networking and development of collegiality.

Informal practices in the making and transformation of professions have also changed slightly. The replacement of tapş with bribery confirms previous observations on the monetization of informal practices in the post-socialist period (Ledeneva, 2008). While older engineers actively exploit the networks that were developed in Soviet contexts of stable employment and long-term workplace relations (Abramov, 2016a, 2016b; Lonkila, 2010), in the post-Soviet period these networks acquire new meanings and importance. Degrading economic conditions made it imperative to use informal networks for securing employment. Former professional ties, references and sometimes family connections are translated into the recruitment of new professionals. In the context of the disintegration of Soviet vertically integrated industrial organization and the decline of formal education, reliance on professional reputations and informal mentoring have become the primary mechanisms for maintaining professional communities. They also facilitated the transmission of knowledge and professional values. For engineers in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, then, informality serves as a mechanism of professional integration and of maintaining some form of professional solidarity.

The decoupling of career patronage and informal mentoring in the workplace is an important finding of this study. Career advancement has become increasingly linked to kinship-based political patronage, which is a part of a more general process of neopatrimonialization of politics in Azerbaijan (Franke et al., 2009; Guliyev, 2012). Linking career progress to kinship-based patronage is obviously detrimental to the values of meritocratic professionalism. Yet informal practices are also key to the learning of how to practise the profession, particularly in the situation of the declining quality of formal education. The professional community survived and was able to ensure some transfer of knowledge through informal mentoring and horizontal professional ties. Thus, contrary to Riska and Novelskaite’s (2011) argument of informality forming a fourth logic in the organization of the medical profession in Lithuania, we argue that in Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet context, informality is a form of a third, professional logic. Although this suggests a possibility for the emergence of the post-socialist autonomous professional project (Larson, 1977), for engineers in Azerbaijan currently such a domain remains very small and professionals’ market power is very weak. Further research in other professional groups and other national settings is needed to explore the possibility of a similar development elsewhere in the post-Soviet domain. Similarly, the analysis of the transformative impact of the post-Soviet era on other professional domains will contribute to a deeper understanding of how and to what extent the meaning of professionalism changes and informal practices endure.