Seminal socio-economic and political changes that occurred in Croatia with the disappearance of socialism at the beginning of the 1990s have not changed the structures very much – in the domain of practices and values – linked to the participation of “ordinary” people in the informal economy. The article aims at illustrating ethnographically this hypothesis and analyzing it in the context of full employment under socialism and contemporary unemployment. It draws attention to the importance of cultural analysis of the informal economy and stresses social and symbolic motivations for participation in the sphere of the informal economy.