Looking closely at everyday practices within marketplaces such as the Makola market in Ghana's capital Accra brings to the fore the very diversity of actors and institutions involved in order-implementation in this particular social space. All of these actors draw on multiple conceptions of order and creatively recombine its various elements and significations into ever-new contexts. Our joint article on the maintenance of order in Makola takes the perspective of two key, ordering actors and institutions in this market–traders associations and police forces–and analyses the manifold and mutually entangled conceptions of order on which these actors draw in their pursuit to legitimise their own and others’ actions. Police officers may not represent the state but act in the light of business interests, whereas market associations follow many more rationalities apart from their members’ economic gains. They perceive themselves as a market family, and enact particular realms of stateness; for example, when assisting with tax collection. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork, in which each researcher independently focused on particular actor groups in the market, we analyse how these constellations of actors and their particular conceptions of order play out in everyday practices and interactions.