Introduction

The problem of individual decision making to allocate material-productive resources has been the subject of recurring contestation while often having in mind a ‘formal’ institutional setting—that which is codified in law and recognized by state political authority. This has meant that this contestation is often witnessed along the dichotomous debate of non-intervention by a formal external agent in how this decision is made, against various degrees of intervention by such bodies to participate in or coordinate this decision based on a plan (e.g. state direction based on an industrial policy). Focusing on the formal milieu has perforce led to the gradual exclusion in political economy research of the effects of other non-codified or ‘informal’ institutions as also relevant in the study of this decision—particularly in societies where codified domains of socio-political life are not yet expansive. This is the problem with which this book engages: studying the effects on individual allocative decisions of informal (i.e. embodied or implicit) institutions in a recent case, Afghanistan during 2002–2018, by investigating the practical knowledge that has shaped this decision—the use of practical referring to this knowledge’s transmission primarily in a learning process centred on practising a profession during a lived experience, rather than through formal didactic means. Building on this theoretical point, the book, in a further step, analyses the effects of this decision-making and the subsequent encounter with the field of production on whether manufacturing sector grew structurally significant (criteria for doing so discussed below) in the economy of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital and largest city by population, which attracted more than half of the private investments in the country during the aforementioned period.