Embedded Inequalities: The Social Dynamics of Informal Work in Urban India

Informal work and the informal economy more broadly, dominates the working landscape of countries in the Global South today. Over the decades, different ways of theorizing the informal economy have emerged focusing on the fragmentation and heterogeneity of this form of work, starkly distinguishing it from the formal, regulated economy. Scholarship has established that social relations of gender, caste, ethnicity, and religion intersect with material relations, further reinforcing existing inequalities in the labor market and at the workplace with respect to informal work. This emphasizes the undeniable sociological nature of informal work, as fundamentally embedded in social relations, and structured by intersecting institutions. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the urban villages of the north Indian city of Gurgaon, the focus of this paper is directed towards the processes that underlie the intersections between gender, caste, and religion on the one hand, and informal work on the other. In depth shadowing of individual informal workers’ life trajectories and informal households reveals the complex inter connections that produce the labor market while simultaneously incorporates worker subjectivities as they navigate precarity. While grounded in the economic sociology, urban sociology and migration scholarship, the paper seeks to underscore the processual and relational nature of work and the temporal methodological value of following urban poor households in a transforming city.