Students of the intersection between monetary transfers and intimate social relations face a choice among three ways of analyzing that relationship: as hostile worlds whose contact contaminates one or the other; as nothing but market transactions, cultural constructions, or coercion; or as differentiated ties, each marked by a distinctive set of monetary transfers. A review of payment practices, legal disputes, and recent legal theory illustrates the weakness of the first two views and the desirability of further pursuing the third alternative.In Making Ends Meet (1997)' their important study of how low-income and welfare single mothers survive financially, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein make three observations of great consequence for this paper's topic: first, that relationships to men played a significant part in the household finances of these mothers; second, that the women made strong distinctions among their various relationships to men who are or have been their sexual partners; and third, that they developed distinct systems of payment and obligations corresponding to these different relationships. In field observations and interviews of almost 400 mothers, Edin and Lein identified a whole system of categories distinguishing the women's different relationships to Viviana A. Zelizer is professor of Sociology, Princeton University. I am grateful for information, suggestions and criticisms to 1. The broadest distinctions people make separate compensation (direct exchange), entitkment (rightful claim to a share), and gift (one person's voluntary bestowal on another). Money as compensation implies an equal exchange of values, and a certain distance, contingency, bargaining, and accountability between the parties. Money as entitlement implies rights not contingent on the recipient's current performance. Money as gift implies intimacy and/or inequality plus a certain arbitrariness. Of course finer and multiple distinctions appear within these three categories and at their boundaries. See Zelizer 1994, 1996 for further discussion of differentiations in relationships involving monetary transfers.
My paper proposes the concept of relational work to explain economic activity. In all economic action, I argue, people engage in the process of differentiating meaningful social relations. For each distinct category of social relations, people erect a boundary, mark the boundary by means of names and practices, establish a set of distinctive understandings that operate within that boundary, designate certain sorts of economic transactions as appropriate for the relation, bar other transactions as inappropriate, and adopt certain media for reckoning and facilitating economic transactions within the relation. I call that process relational work. After identifying specific elements of a relational work approach, the paper focuses on the case of monetary differentiation. It compares a relational work theory of earmarking money with behavioral economics’ individually based mental accounting approach.
Students of the intersection between monetary transfers and intimate social relations face a choice among three ways of analyzing that relationship: as hostile worlds whose contact contaminates one or the other; as nothing but market transactions, cultural constructions, or coercion; or as differentiated ties, each marked by a distinctive set of monetary transfers. A review of payment practices, legal disputes, and recent legal theory illustrates the weakness of the first two views and the desirability of further pursuing the third alternative.
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