Studies of creative industries typically contend that creative work is profoundly precarious, taking place on a freelance basis in highly competitive, individualized and contingent labour markets. Such studies depict creative workers as correspondingly self-enterprising, self-reliant, self-interested and calculative agents who valorise care-free independence. In contrast, we adopt the ‘ethics of care’ approach to explore, recognize and appreciate the communitarian, relational and moral considerations as well as interpersonal connectedness and interdependencies that underpin creative work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with creative workers (...) in a range of marginal socio-cultural contexts, we argue that creative workers cultivate and sustain a diverse array of practices of care arising from an affective concern with the well-being of others. Far from being merely individualistic and crudely competitive actors, creative workers enact practical ethical responsibilities and affectivities towards a range of human and non-human others, including families, local communities and neighbourhoods, colleagues, artistic scenes and their adjacent genres, and surrounding national and linguistic cultures. In emphasizing the fundamental and structuring role of care in contingent labour markets our approach accords with recent trends in the social sciences that ‘affirmatively’—as opposed to ‘negatively’ and ‘suspiciously’—recognize that mutuality, solidarity and affectivity are powerful drivers of action on a par with or even exceeding market-driven self-centredness. (shrink)

This article examines how distrust drives exchange. We propose a theoretical framework integrating the literature of trust into cultural sociology and use a case of patients giving hongbao (red envelopes containing money) to doctors in China to examine how distrust drives different forms of unofficial exchange. Based on more than two years’ ethnography, we found that hongbao exchanges between Chinese patients and doctors were, ironically, bred by the public’s generalized distrust in doctors’ moral ethics. In the absence of institutional assurance, (...) Chinese patients drew on the cultural logic of particularism and its associated cultural repertoire to induce fidelity from their physicians. They mobilized interpersonal networks to function as assurance and presented hongbao as a return of favor to the doctors. This form of exchange is gifting-oriented. Alternatively, if there were no interpersonal networks to rely on, they proactively offered hongbao to doctors at arm’s length in an attempt to personalize the relationship to seek assurance and abate their anxieties. This form of exchange is bribery-oriented. Both forms of exchange co-existed when there was one-way generalized distrust manifested from patients to doctors. When doctors also developed generalized distrust in patients, arm’s length exchanges declined, leaving embedded exchanges as the dominant form. Our study asserts the central role of culture in constituting exchange behaviors and the importance of institutions in shaping the form of exchange. It contributes to the midrange theory of trust, generating a number of hypotheses for future research on the relationships among culture, institutions, distrust, assurance, and illicit exchange. (shrink)

This paper explores the intersection of time and relational economic sociology. Building on Viviana Zelizer’s relational framework, I argue that analyzing the temporal dimensions of exchange provides insight into how social ties gain meaning through economic practices. The paper shows time’s dual role as both an organizing structure bounding action, and a dynamic element that actors leverage to shape transactional contexts. As structure, time offers culturally-available templates like schedules and rhythms that facilitate coordination and signify predictable social meanings befitting particular (...) relational categories. Yet time also constitutes relational work itself; strategic timing, duration, pacing, and sequencing of interactions signal context, manage expectations, and sustain bonds amidst entanglements. Synchronization through temporal agency prevents mismatches between transactions and social contexts that could strain ties. This agency in time ranges from passive adherence to dominant structures to active assertions of power resistance, enabling both domination and defiance across economic contexts. Analyzing shared temporal infrastructure within circuits of commerce further illuminates how actors distinguish those spheres of exchange at various scale from the impersonal market. Ultimately, incorporating temporality strengthens relational economic sociology by identifying a key mechanism through which practices of exchange become relationally meaningful. (shrink)

Identity crafts for migration and citizenship purposes require the assistance of brokerage actors that help secure documents, advise on self-presentations, and vouch for relevant credentials. While recognizing the contradictory roles these intermediaries play in both facilitating and controlling migration and the porous boundary between for-profit and non-profit actors, scholars have yet to explore what challenges these characteristics pose to the organization of a particular brokerage transaction. How do these intermediaries reconcile their roles as migration facilitators and surrogate gatekeepers? Does it (...) matter to present the transaction as driven by financial rewards or other loftier goals? How are the boundaries between different types of intermediaries enacted and contested? I explore these questions through the case of a religious organization that helps migrants establish their religious identities for asylum claims-making on religious grounds. Combining insights from the “relational work” approach with ethnographic research in Korean evangelical congregations in the U.S., I show how the template of gift giving allows the church to focus on making the faithful as God’s intermediary, instead of screening them as the state’s private deputy, and avoid an accusation that its trade with asylum-seekers turns the Christian persona into a quasi-commodity. The boundary between the church and commercial brokers, between gift giving and market exchange, however, is constantly contested and renegotiated through the interaction between the transaction parties. In conclusion, I discuss how the relational work approach can advance our comparative inquiry into the brokerage transactions facilitating the “profane” exchange of “sacred” identities for migration and citizenship purposes. (shrink)

Based on ethnographic fieldwork with panhandlers who provide services while asking for money, informal interviews with pedestrians who have interacted with them, and formal interviews with twenty people who regularly interact with panhandlers, this article unpacks the relationship between temporality and ambiguity of meaning in exchange. In line with previous research, I find that providing a service while asking for money allows panhandlers to manage stigma by recasting their relationship with pedestrians who give as a market exchange. More surprisingly, I (...) find that this kind of recasting makes giving less compelling for the pedestrians in fleeting encounters with panhandlers: they resist service provision in fleeting encounters with panhandlers on the grounds that the exchange is experienced as a coldly rational quid pro quo. In contrast, pedestrians who have long-term relationships with panhandlers experience the interaction as a gift exchange and the service as an expression of gratitude and subservience. The development of an open-ended temporal horizon and of a cycle of exchange, I argue, allows the service and the money given to operate as boundary objects, enabling panhandlers and pedestrians to attach different meanings to the exchange of money for services. This emergent ambiguity allows them to carry out interaction and exchange successfully. Contrary to models of interaction and everyday economic transactions that frame shared definitions of the situation as necessary for successful and repeated interactions, I find that ambiguity and polysemy may be productive and sustaining in interactions between participants from distinct social worlds. (shrink)

Studies on surrogate motherhood have mostly explored paid arrangements through the lens of a contract model, as clinical work or as a maternal identity-building project. Turning to the under-examined case of unpaid, so-called altruistic surrogate motherhood and based on an analysis of interviews with women who had been unpaid surrogate mothers in a full gestational surrogacy with a friend or relative in Canada, the United States or Australia, this article explores altruistic surrogate motherhood as relational work. It argues that this (...) form of surrogate motherhood within close interpersonal relations can be conceptualised through the relational work involved in hosting a child for the intended parents. The article explores how relational work in this context implies an embodied, asymmetrical and far-reaching sense of responsibility that surrogate mothers describe as characteristic of their surrogacy experience. In this way, the article sheds light on feminist concerns about surrogacy as an embodied and objectifying work of women while at the same time illuminating how surrogate mothers respond to the intended parents in light of their pre-surrogacy relationship, how meanings are negotiated by them and how relationships are managed during the pregnancy. (shrink)

The article uses a case study of relationships in American manufacturing industries to demonstrate the utility of documenting the “relational work” that managers do as they negotiate circumstances where either roles or norms are ambiguous. It shows that the explicit identification of the role that relational work plays in those relationships story militates for—and extends, improves upon, and arguably completes—a particular understanding of what economic sociologists should mean when they talk about the “embedding” of the economic in social relations. The (...) article hence shows the utility of jointly using otherwise disparate perspectives in the analysis of interorganizational relationships, and thus contributes to the development of a more unified paradigm in economic sociology. (shrink)

The combination of money and intimacy, particularly in the context of paid caring, can be difficult, given the tendency to view them as belonging to separate spheres. This research studied paid caring within the context of breastfeeding and labor support, using 72 interviews with lactation consultants, doulas, clients, and health care professionals, as well as 150 hours of ethnographic observation. Building upon the work of Viviana Zelizer, I examined the relational work of lactation consultants, doulas, and their clients, finding that (...) this process is highly influenced by the way gender is mapped onto the separate spheres dichotomy. Lactation consultants, doulas, and their clients drew boundaries around their social relations to construct them as different from family care in order to legitimate the combination of money and intimacy. Lactation consultants and doulas both experienced tension in determining appropriate transactions and media for their care work, which illustrates how the separate spheres ideology can perpetuate the relative low pay of care work. (shrink)

By developing the concept of “global borderlands”—semi-autonomous, foreign-controlled geographic locations geared toward international exchange—this article shifts the focus of globalization literature from elite global cities and cities on national borders to within-country sites owned or operated by foreigners and defined by significant social, cultural, and economic exchange. I analyze three shared features of these sites: semi-autonomy, symbolic and geographic boundaries, and unequal relations. The multi-method analyses reveal how the concept of global borderlands can help us better understand the interactions that (...) occur among people of different nationalities, classes, and races/ethnicities and the complex dynamics that occur within foreign-controlled spaces. I first situate global borderlands within the literatures of global cities and geopolitical borderlands. Next, I use the case study of Subic Bay Freeport Zone (SBFZ), Philippines to show (1) how the semi-autonomy of global borderlands produces different regulations depending on nationality, (2) how its geographic and symbolic borders differentiate this space from the surrounding community, and (3) how the semi-autonomy of these locations and their geographic and symbolic borders reproduce unequal relations. As home of the former US Subic Bay Naval Base and current site of a Freeport Zone, the SBFZ serves as a particularly strategic research location to examine the different forms of interactions that occur between groups within spaces of unequal power. (shrink)

A profusion of jobs has arisen in contemporary capitalism involving ‘connective labor’, or the work of emotional recognition. Yet the expansion of this interpersonal work occurs at the same time as its systematization, as pressures of efficiency, measurement and automation reshape the work, generating a ‘colliding intensification’. Existing scholarship offers three different ways of understanding the role of emotions in connective labor – as tool, commodity or vulnerability – depending on their view of systematization as useful, inseparable or dehumanizing. Based (...) on 106 in-depth interviews and 300+ hours of observations, I found that vestiges of all three models lurked in the experience of providing connective labor, yet none fully captured the profound meaning practitioners reported finding in their work. Systems varied on three dimensions, reflecting the relative worth of worker, recipient or the work, extracting value from the forged connections, while the meanings workers derived shaped their perspective on its systematization. (shrink)

Rewarding regulation involves pursuing the complex goal of bringing labor protection and firms’ economic performance together. A central element in achieving such goals refers to how regulatory bureaucracies operate. This paper examines the organizational structures, processes, and internal dynamics that allow regulatory bureaucracies to innovate and meet such developmental challenges. It reviews well-established interpretations about state bureaucracies that have emphasized either hierarchical structures and control processes or discretion and disperse individual behaviors. In addition, it suggests alternative analytical paths for combining (...) flexibility and control by examining the relational processes and dynamics within bureaucracies. The analysis of the Brazilian Labor Inspectorate, based on qualitative data and extensive fieldwork, and of other empirical examples from the literature, indicates that internal tensions and conflicts instigate a process of technical vigilance between members of the same bureaucracy, inducing innovation and responsible uses of discretion. (shrink)

Digital technologies have made access to and profit from scientific publications hotly contested issues. Debates over open access (OA), however, rarely extend from questions of distribution to questions of how OA is transforming the politics of academic knowledge production. This article argues that the movement towards OA rests on a relatively stable moral episteme that positions different actors involved in the economy of OA (authors, publishers, the general public), and most importantly, knowledge itself. The analysis disentangles the ontological and moral (...) side of these claims, showing how OA changes the meaning of knowledge from a good in the economic, to good in the moral sense. This means OA can be theorized as the moral economy of digital knowledge production. Ultimately, using Boltanski and Thévenot’s work on justification, the article reflects on how this moral economy frames the political subjectivity of actors and institutions involved in academic knowledge production. (shrink)

Progressing beyond the given has been a key modern tendency. Yet modern societies are currently facing the problem of how to put limits on progress, expansion, and growth, live within them, and preserve (rather than transcend) the present. Drawing on economic sociology scholarship on valuation and morality in economic life, this article develops and applies the term economization to analyze the enactment of limits on progress. The question of end-of-life care—when to stop medical efforts to prolong life, postpone death, and (...) advance the scientific frontier—serves as an illustrative empirical case that sheds light on limit-setting in general. My analysis of this case combines historical, ethnographic, and in-depth interview data on US palliative care clinicians, who specialize in making life-and-death decisions in acute care hospitals. (shrink)

This article is an adaptation of the sixteenth Lewis A. Coser lecture, given virtually in 2021 for the American Sociological Association Meetings. In this article, I pay tribute to Lewis and Rose Laub Coser by engaging with their past work, which inspired a theoretical provocation about what it means to theorize from the margins. I specifically address the questions of who gets to be a theorist and what kinds of theoretical work get marginalized. I outline the process of epistemic oppression (...) involved in trying to publish marginal ideas in mainstream journals. I argue that the relationship between mainstream sociology and what I refer to as “marginal” requires a relational perspective that situates both marginalized scholars and their scholarship in the broader discipline of sociology and examines the epistemic oppression of their theories regardless of their sometimes-powerful institutional positioning in highly ranked departments or as leaders within various professional associations. (shrink)

California is the global hub for assisted reproductive technology practices, including egg donation. The rise of egg donation in the United States is surprising given the cultural context linking genetics and motherhood and rejecting the commodification of reproduction. Scholars in the hostile worlds camp have grappled with the relationship between intimacy and economics, yet employing this theory to explain the increase in egg donation is unsatisfactory. The concept of relational work, developed by Viviana Zelizer, provides scholars with a robust analytical (...) tool to account for the rise in egg donation. This paper analyzes the relational work of egg donors and fertility center staff. I argue that donors and staff construct an understanding of egg donation that avoids directly challenging the cultural context mentioned above. Analyzing egg donation as a case of relational work demonstrates the need to move beyond the reciprocity/market dichotomy upheld by the hostile worlds framework. (shrink)

The history of Credit Rating Agencies [CRAs], commonly called Rating Agencies, has a long and distinguished trajectory marked by influence, reputation and power. Due to the ability of this field to instigate significant changes in market regulations and actions of economic actors, this subject is extensively debated within the literature. In economic sociology, while some studies have focused on perceptions of performativity and market devices to understand how the calculability of its methods influences the economy, others, along relational lines of (...) sociology, aim to understand them through a more complex constructive process. In this study, we attempt to fill a gap by exploring the complementarity between two theoretical approaches to sociology: theory of fields and performativity. Thus, we mobilize theory of fields to understand the inter-field relationship between the State and CRAs. Specifically, this paper sets out to i) analyze the co-constitution of the state and market fields with the field of CRAs; ii) describe the existing regulation and situate the CRAs and their classification devices in the broader history of the State and the market; iii) analyze how the legitimation of the CRAs by the State generates broader social contexts that assist in the performative work of the CRAs. Based on historical documentary research, we analyze some of the main milestones and regulatory events in the field of CRAs. This research reaffirms the assumption that even after credibility crises, the State is the most significant predictor of legitimacy, power, and influence that CRAs hold to date. The legitimacy of this power and influence has yet to be exhausted because the reputation of CRAs is rooted in the reputation of the State itself. This happens because the State provides essential actions (such as regulations) for the existence of the financial market. Thus, results suggest that the State, through regulatory measures, can engage several other fields to promote the legitimacy of performative work of the CRAs, whose purpose is to provide calculation tools to shape markets. (shrink)

Although disproportionate housework and care responsibilities ascribed to mothers and wives have been found to greatly impact women’s self-employment, less is known about how family-level labor structures may shape daughters’ entrepreneurship. Family business scholarship has shed partial light on this question by showing that household hierarchies and gender norms impede daughters’ recognition and inheritance within family firms in the United States. Drawing on interviews with 32 women microenterprise owners in Zacatecas, Mexico, this article builds on previous research by suggesting that (...) gendered mechanisms and labor structures may in fact position daughters to inherit businesses or business-related resources such as skills, financial capital, and property from their parents. Daughters acquire these assets by virtue of contributing to their parents’ enterprises as part of their childhood chores and maintaining a continued attachment to these businesses into adulthood. Daughters’ job prospects aside from inheritance were found to further shape their perceptions of business succession and inform their decision about whether to take over the family enterprise. Such acquisitions can be said to comprise instances of “gendered inheritance,” in which gendered institutions largely understood as disadvantaging women also may position them to attain valuable assets. (shrink)