
New study suggests people use “constructive noncompliance” to enact change - user_235711
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/citizens-disobey-enact-change-0519
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timthelion
I live in the Czech Republic, a former member of the Soviet Union, and people
and businesses here take breaking the law for granted. Many of the laws here
concerning employment, taxes, and building permits can be quite overwhelming
and our beurocrats are very slow to process the various forms. However, I
believe that the fact that so many people and companies ignore these laws
actualy tends to hide the faliures of the system. If everyone were to try to
follow these laws and fill out all the forms that were needed, and wait for
them to be processed then the slowness of the beurocratic system would become
much more apparent than it is today.

~~~
deciplex
Indeed, and there is an even darker side to this, which is what you get when
the government starts selectively enforcing these ridiculous laws. Play ball
with the oligarchy, and they'll ignore that you didn't bother to go through
all various red tape stuff (because no one can actually meet all those
requirements and stay in business). Pose a threat to them, and find your
property confiscated and very likely facing criminal charges. This is
Oppression 101, first week. I challenge anyone to find an unequivocally
oppressive regime which does not engage in this tactic.

I'm not totally disagreeing with the article, because these tactics can be
useful as long as you keep the long-term goal in mind: overturning stupid or
onerous legislation. But if in doing this you foster a culture which does not
respect rule of law, you most definitely _will not_ challenge the legitimacy
of the really oppressive regimes - rather, you will enable them.

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Spooky23
I always get a kick out of academics discovering phenomena that are pretty
obvious.

If you have the ability to haggle with a person of authority, you'll
eventually wear them down. It works for cops, teachers, bosses, etc.

~~~
golemotron
It's worse than that. They don't even use the strategy's common name: civil
disobedience.

~~~
jasonmp85
Everyone's talking civil disobedience, but the phrase that came to mind when I
read the summary was "prefigurative politics":
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics)

> Prefigurative politics are the modes of organization and social
> relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the
> group.

A little more general, and a little more complex, but also missing the
negative connotation of "disobedience".

I get the feeling that the study wishes to remove some agency from this
equation, as in "people will passively disobey and you should listen to that,
because it means something", but behaving in a way that you'd like society to
be has a somewhat prefigurative flavor.

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alexpw
> "They had this belief that if [officials] did see there was sufficient
> noncompliance, [the officials] would conclude that the citizens were trying
> to tell them something," Tsai says.

"Constructive Noncompliance": an alias of passive aggression.

Or, maybe this is collective or conspiratorial passive aggressive behavior,
aimed at authority?

~~~
deciplex
>[the officials] would conclude that the citizens were trying to tell them
something

The officials may also take the opportunity to move against political rivals,
or other threats and undesirables, under cover of laws which most people don't
follow. Selective enforcement, in other words.

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acconrad
This study was conducted in China, which has a very different government
structure compared to much of the West (or pretty much anywhere), so I fail to
see how this can be applied to Western democracies (where the article was
published).

~~~
__z
Civil disobedience (such as the Rosa Parks, the Boston Tea Party, and lunch
counter sit-ins) has been a vehicle for social and political change since
forever.

~~~
shredprez
This constructive noncompliance seems more pragmatic than political, to the
point that it feels like a distinct form of disobedience to me. Your examples
come to mind exactly because of their tight association with grander social-
change movements, and I think that context sets them apart from individual
acts of noncompliance in response to ill-conceived legislation. Where civil
disobedience is often based in morality and identity politics and aims to
reform broad inequities in society with a visible campaign, the examples of
civil noncompliance seem to focus on the political change effected when
individuals quietly eliminate minute inefficiencies by ignoring detrimental
laws.

And there may be something to be said for covert noncompliance in a democracy
where strongly polarized political parties shoot down visible campaigns the
moment they take off. Civil disobedience (openly democratic) is about
kickstarting the political process, swaying society in the hopes of swaying
their representatives. But civil noncompliance (covertly democratic) is about
bypassing politics entirely, forcing authorities to either punish the
community at large or acknowledge the impotence of the law in question.

This is all very stream-of-consciousness on my end, hopefully it's coming
across with some clarity.

------
abakker
Isn't this exactly what is working for Uber and AirBnB? As far as I can tell,
what they are doing is mildly illegal in most of their major markets, but once
sufficient economic benefit and traction was demonstrated, it made it very
hard for officials to ignore it.

It seems a terrible precedent to set that the disobedience be driven by a
corporation that provides a service, rather than consumers, but it also seems
that a corporation's legal pockets are much deeper and the disobedience can be
enacted on a much larger, safer scale. i.e. if I disobey the law, I can go to
prison. If Uber disobeys the law, and has a million customers, Uber just
stalls in court and lobbies, and nobody goes to prison, nobody gets a criminal
record, and nobody gets hurt. Its a fun subversion of the legal protection
that corporations afford the individuals that work for them.

~~~
meatysnapper
It does help when you have a few hundred million dollars in the bank too.
Welcome to real world, where if you are rich, you can break the law as you see
fit.

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scarmig
For a book that talks a lot about this as a vehicle for political demands, see
James Scott's _Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance_.

~~~
ajksdfh289ih2n
...and, slightly off-topic, for a book that talks a lot about scientific
forestry, colonization in Tanzania and the pitfalls of centralized cultural
and city planning see James C. Scott's _Seeing Like A State: How Certain
Schemes To Improve The Human Condition Have Failed_.

------
parennoob
One hole that this study has (in my opinion) is that it _asks_ people people
about what they would do in a certain situation instead of observing them in
that situation (admittedly more difficult when you're talking about not
following rules of law).

But I can't help wondering if the numbers in this study would be very
different if it observed actions rather than words. A lot of people talk big,
but don't follow through when it comes to acting.

