In many informal economies, entrepreneurs face a visibility paradox: increasing visibility to resource-granting stakeholders simultaneously increases exposure to resource-extracting stakeholders. To investigate this phenomenon, we leverage a unique, hand-collected, small-area census dataset of firms in the township of Delft in Cape Town, South Africa, providing rare insight into a population of otherwise unobserved firms. Through an abductive, multimethod approach, we address three interrelated research questions: (i) How do informal economy entrepreneurs make their firms visible? (ii) Which informal economy entrepreneurs make their firms visible? (iii) How does firm visibility relate to firm performance? Our analysis identifies distinct dimensions of authority- and community-oriented visibility and introduces the concept of selective visibility, which refers to making a firm visible to certain stakeholders (e.g., community members) but not others (e.g., authorities). Using a social embeddedness lens, we find that while highly embedded entrepreneurs are more associated with invisibility, less embedded entrepreneurs are more associated with community-oriented selective visibility. The QCA results also indicate a configurational relationship such that visibility's association with performance varies with an entrepreneur's level of embeddedness. As a whole, our study builds theory regarding the taken-for-granted concept of firm visibility and provides important insights that are generative for entrepreneurship research in informal economies and other difficult-to-access settings.

在许多非正规经济中，企业家面临着可见性悖论：提高对资源授予利益相关者的可见性，同时增加对资源提取利益相关者的接触。为了调查这一现象，我们利用了南非开普敦代尔夫特镇企业的独特、手工收集的小区域普查数据集，提供了对其他未被观察到的企业群体的罕见洞察。通过溯因、多方法的方法，我们解决了三个相互关联的研究问题：（i）非正规经济企业家如何使他们的公司可见？(ii) 哪些非正规经济企业家让他们的公司引人注目？(iii) 公司知名度与公司业绩有何关系？我们的分析确定了以权威和社区为导向的可见性的不同维度，并引入了选择性可见性的概念，它是指使公司对某些利益相关者（例如社区成员）可见，但对其他利益相关者（例如当局）不可见。使用社会嵌入性视角，我们发现，虽然高度嵌入的企业家与隐形性更相关，但嵌入性较低的企业家与面向社区的选择性可见性更相关。QCA 结果还表明了一种配置关系，即知名度与绩效的关联随着企业家的嵌入程度而变化。总的来说，我们的研究建立了关于企业知名度这一理所当然的概念的理论，并提供了重要的见解，这些见解对非正规经济和其他难以进入的环境中的创业研究具有启发性。