Informal service labour and digital platforms in India’s marriage economy

Abstract

Purpose This article examines how digital platforms are reshaping informal service labour within India’s expanding marriage economy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in the urban and peri-urban fringes of Kolkata, it focuses on three wedding-related service providers: a photography collective, an event planning firm, and a heritage hospitality venue to analyse how post-1990 service-sector transformations intersect with platform-mediated forms of work. Situating marriage as a central economic institution rather than a peripheral cultural event, the article argues that weddings constitute a dense service ecosystem that aggregates labour, aspiration and consumption while remaining largely informal. The article shows that digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and personal websites do not simply function as marketing tools but actively reorganise how service providers imagine, present, and coordinate their labour to sustain their livelihood. Rather than producing a transition from informality to formalisation, platforms rework historically embedded practices of trust, personalised negotiation and networked collaboration by overlaying them with new demands for visibility, aesthetic coherence and continuous engagement. Service providers adapt through skill recombination, flexible service packages and digitally mediated relational labour, while continuing to rely on informal teams, advance payments and socially embedded reputational systems. The analysis further demonstrates how platform cultures contribute to the branding and aestheticisation of weddings, producing circulating visual templates that shape client expectations and redefine what constitutes an aspirational wedding in post-reform India. While platforms promise personalisation and entrepreneurial autonomy, they also intensify labour, standardise aesthetics and reproduce precarity. By foregrounding informal service providers rather than platform firms or app-based gig work, the article contributes to debates on informality, service-sector growth and digital labour in the Global South. It argues for moving beyond binaries of formal/informal and traditional/modern to understand how digital platforms embed themselves within historically structured service economies, reconfiguring rather than displacing informal labour. Design/methodology/approach This study draws on a qualitative research design combining digital ethnography with offline fieldwork conducted in Kolkata between 2023 and 2024. The empirical material is based on an in-depth analysis of 3 wedding service providers and their associated teams, including their social content creators. They are examined as analytically generative cases rather than statistically representative samples. The digital platforms taken into analysis are Facebook, Instagram and the personalised websites used by these service providers. Data include platform content (posts, reels, stories, reviews), longitudinal observation of online interactions, and informal conversations with service providers. Digital analysis was complemented by participant observation at a wedding event and sustained field engagement with providers. This mixed ethnographic approach allows examination of how informal service work, aesthetic labour and entrepreneurial subjectivities are articulated through digital platforms. Findings The findings show that digital platforms do not replace informal labour practices but reconfigure them through new aesthetic and entrepreneurial logics. Marriage-related service providers use Instagram, Facebook and their personal websites to craft professional identities that combine visual Polish with personalised, trust-based interactions rooted in local networks. Platform visibility enables providers to extend reach and legitimacy, yet work remains informal, flexible and dependent on caste, class, and reputation-based ties. Digital aesthetics function as a form of economic and moral signalling, shaping perceptions of reliability and skill. Offline negotiations, credit relations and affective labour continue to structure transactions, revealing how platform-mediated work remains deeply embedded in the social economy of marriage. Research limitations/implications This article primarily draws on digital ethnography conducted in and around Kolkata, which limits the generalisability of its findings across diverse regional contexts in India. It focuses on a specific subset of informal entrepreneurs – those with access to digital tools and visual platforms – thereby excluding offline or less digitally visible service providers. The study does not deeply engage with client perspectives or long-term economic trajectories of the entrepreneurs, which could have provided a fuller picture of sustainability and transformation. Finally, algorithmic dynamics are interpreted through interviews and observations, lacking direct platform data or analytics that could strengthen causal claims. Practical implications This article offers valuable insights for policymakers, platform designers and development practitioners aiming to support informal workers in the digital economy. It highlights the need for accessible digital literacy programs, protections for gig-like entrepreneurs operating outside formal contracts and recognition of aesthetic and affective labour as legitimate forms of work. For platform developers, the findings urge greater transparency around algorithmic visibility and fairer mechanisms for engagement. The study also calls for targeted support structures – such as micro-credit, cooperative networks and social security – for informal service providers navigating aspirational yet precarious markets like the marriage economy in post-reform India. Social implications Under the influence of the post-reform consumer culture, marriage related functions have increasingly become popular sites where people on individual as well as collective level individuals reflect on their aesthetic understanding and appreciation thereby acknowledging, dissolving and re-defining social and cultural recognition as mediated by the social media. The aim of the service providers here is in particular to emphasise and propagate the ways in which identity and recognition as taste and imagery have an impact on the processes of negotiating, planning and staging the marriage ceremonies. Hence, I contend that taste-making is an intrinsic part of digital platform practices: activities, such as liking, sharing, following, reposting, tagging, archiving, replying, commenting and last but not least posting and replying to the content posted by the wedding management companies on social media are not only ways of expression of taste, but always also practices taste-making. This results in making the digital platform users as consumers unavoidably participating in the creation of specific trends of shared observations, estimations and distinctions. On one hand, just like any other practice of taste making, this cannot be fully reduced to the technologies that the digital platforms offer and to the given social structures that are manifested on such digital platforms. On the other hand, taste-making on social media is determined, especially due to their respective performances, thus providing a specific structure for taste-making. Thus, this results in the formation of a triadic relationship of taste between the subjects, objects, and media, where it is not only just a persistent process of combined adjustment, but also based on the positions that lie outside of each individual situation. This also allows us to trace the wedding management companies, targeted audiences and media in processes of online taste-making as well as to follow the relations that unfold between them in each case. Originality/value This article is an original contribution of the author working with the economic structure, activities and exchanges that work around marriages in India. The economic relationships, rooted in the Jajmani system, are now being transformed into an entire economic system that seems to perpetuate new market practices, professions, occupations inter alia shaping cultural motivations and aspirations of families. New types of entrepreneurial practices, such as wedding planners employing or contracting florists, catering, photography, make-up artists, align with cultural market practices vis-a-vis mirror economy, which is not just informal but provides a salience to explore and understand the economic structure of contemporary India. This study, therefore, explores economic aspects that grow like a marriage market in post-reform India.