From the informal street vendor to the micro entrepreneur: the disenchantment of the wage condition?

• Grant number: 15/12742-7
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): September 01, 2015
• Effective date (End): February 08, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Jacob Carlos Lima
• Grantee: Felipe Rangel Martins
• Home Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 12/20408-1 - Labor conditions in current Brazil: formalization, job insecurity, outsourcing and regulation, AP.TEM
• Associated scholarship(s): 17/00154-9 - Les sens du travail dans le commerce populaire, BE.EP.DR 17/00153-2 - The market's social life: crossed trajectories in the popular commerce, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

This project aims to analyze the transformations in popular ways of trade in São Paulo, having in mind the recent formalization policies of street vendors activities and the translation of these activities from the streets to the galleries. We intent to investigate the effects of these objective transformations on the worker's perspective about their occupation, establishing relations between these experiences and the national work market situation, reflecting about a possible "disenchantment of the wage condition", in face of the changes in the social position of the formal employment in the last decades. To do so, we shall do an ethnographic observation about the work in the trade galleries in Brás neighborhood, trying to retrace the social trajectories of the agents, comparing the perceptions of the old "street vendors" with the "new micro entrepreneur" of the popular trade. From the field research, we will try to reflect upon not just the transformations in São Paulo's popular trade, but also about the more general changes in the world of work, that includes the dissemination of the neoliberal logic and the entrepreneur speech.