ABSTRACT
This chapter turns towards the use of ethnographic notes in exploring informality in the everyday spatial and social hierarchies as well as the labour relations in small-scale trade and domestic work. Drawing on the work-life stories of street vendors and domestic workers, I dissect the interlinkages between the (in)formality and (in)visibility of work. The main argument is that informality, reflected by (in)visibility, is constituted by multiple factors, among them legal frameworks and the material conditions of the workplace but also the social position of individual workers. Informality is hence not a single or fixed category, but is relative, relational, and intersectional, affecting workers differently contingent on social categories such as gender, class, education and professional experience, age, and marital status. The (in)visibility of informalized work is, moreover, enmeshed in contestations of the legitimacy of state and municipal governance as well as of appropriate institutions for regulating work. The formal-informal dualism and its inherent dichotomies, based on the normative grounds of historically exceptional conceptions of standard employment, thereby falls short of capturing the diversity of informalized labour relations and, in eclipsing structural conditions, contributes to informalization processes.
