This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in other disciplinary fields. Second, it reinterprets some exemplary economic sociology studies by using the relational work lens to clarify the concept’s utility for empirical analysis. Third, it speculates about the place of relational work in the theoretical toolkit of economic sociologists, in particular its relation to embeddedness. The paper concludes by arguing for the utility of the concept to integrate structural, cultural, and power-focused analyses of economic life, to highlight the often-overlooked role of emotions in economic exchange, and to ground an alternative to rational action theory in economic sociology.

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How do emotions influence economic action? Current literature recognizes the importance of emotions for economy because they either help individuals perform economic roles through emotion management or enhancement of emotional intelligence, or because they aid rationality through their influence on preference formation. All these strands of research investigate the link between emotions and economy from an atomistic/individualistic perspective. I argue for a different approach, one that adopts a relational perspective, focuses on emotional embeddedness and examines how emotions matter in economic interactions. Emotional embeddedness research starts with a premise that emotions result from and are influenced by interactions between economic actors during the economic process where emotional currents and their visceral and physical manifestations come to the fore. This increases the uncertainty in economic transactions and complicates the given means-ends logic of rational economic decision making, yielding economic action principles different from utility maximization. I propose two types of such creative economic action in this paper: improvisation and situational adaptation. Improvisation characterizes situations where ends (goals) and means are unclear at the beginning of a transaction process and get articulated as a consequence of emotional embeddedness experienced during a process. Situational adaptation characterizes situations in which means or ends of action change because of interaction-induced emotions that prompt actors to choose new means/ends. The article concludes with a call for empirical research that explicates further the influence of emotions not merely for rational economic action but also creative economic interactions.

In her groundbreaking scholarship on intimacy and economy, Viviana Zelizer coined the concept of relational work, or efforts in matching social relations with economic transactions and media of exchange. This article reviews the conceptual advances and empirical applications of relational work over the past two decades. I first trace the origins of the concept and discuss how it is distinct from the idea of embeddedness. I then identify variants of relational work proposed in economic sociology, including relational accounting, obfuscated exchange, clarifying and blurring practices, and emotions and power in relational work. The second part of the review discusses research on relational work in five areas: earmarking money, walking the terrain of morally problematic exchange, configuring social relations through economic activity, using social relations to negotiate economic interactions, and scaling up to relational work of organizations and institutions. I end by proposing areas of future research to examine the determinants and consequences of relational work for (dis)trust, (in)equality, and relational (mis)matches. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 46 is July 30, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

It is well documented that earnings inequalities have risen in many high-income countries. Less clear are the linkages between rising income inequality and workplace dynamics, how within- and between-workplace inequality varies across countries, and to what extent these inequalities are moderated by national labor market institutions. In order to describe changes in the initial between- and within-firm market income distribution we analyze administrative records for 2,000,000,000+ job years nested within 50,000,000+ workplace years for 14 high-income countries in North America, Scandinavia, Continental and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. We find that countries vary a great deal in their levels and trends in earnings inequality but that the between-workplace share of wage inequality is growing in almost all countries examined and is in no country declining. We also find that earnings inequalities and the share of between-workplace inequalities are lower and grew less strongly in countries with stronger institutional employment protections and rose faster when these labor market protections weakened. Our findings suggest that firm-level restructuring and increasing wage inequalities between workplaces are more central contributors to rising income inequality than previously recognized.

I argue that economic globalization, indicated by the tremendous rise in world foreign direct investment (FDI) in recent decades, is not driven simply by investor considerations of economic risk and return, but is significantly shaped by the construction of demand for foreign capital by receiving states. States signal this demand through the levels of formal and substantive legitimacy they grant to FDI. They institutionalize globalization in formal rule as a normatively desirable development strategy. States substantiate this commitment by providing domestic and foreign actors with ideational and organizational resources to facilitate FDI. To illustrate this argument, I use the case of Central and Eastern Europe, which was largely closed to global capital before the collapse of Communism. Analyses of quantitative and qualitative data show that substantive legitimacy granted to FDI by host states, more than formal regulations, determined the size of foreign capital flows into postsocialist countries in the first decade of market reform. These findings point to social foundations of macroeconomic trends beyond the instrumental considerations of risk and return privileged in previous research

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