[1] She is currently Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL).

Ledeneva has led the UCL pillar in the large-scale research project funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Program - Anticorruption Policies Revisited: Global Trends and European Responses to the Challenge of Corruption (ANTICORRP) (2012-2017).

In How Russia Really Works (2006) she has identified the informal practices that have replaced blat in the functioning of the political and economic institutions of the 1990s.

The interdisciplinary study of informality has been relevant for studying social capital, consumption, labour markets, entrepreneurship, trust, mobility and migration, shortages, barter, survival strategies, alternative currencies, the shadow economy, redistribution and remittance economies, and democracy (demonstrable in citation index).

All these developments illustrate efforts to re-integrate social dimensions into studies of politics and economy and have policy implications.