With a little help from my friends: relational work in leisure-related enterprising

Abstract

The present article analyses the indistinct boundaries between formal and informal economic exchanges, with a focus on friendship and work relations. To illustrate these intersections, we present a study of Swedish lifestyle entrepreneurs who run small-scale horse-related enterprises. The specific characteristics of this form of business – in which the horse farm owners/operators, customers, employees and voluntary workers share a leisure interest in horses and participate in the everyday work on the farm – provide the foundation for an economic environment where personal favour exchanges and a gift economy are intertwined with a market economy. Drawing on Viviana Zelizer's notion of ‘relational work’, applied in a context where the gift economy is based on individual leisure interests and leisure-based friendship, the present analysis focuses on how relationships, transactions and forms of repayments are constantly negotiated along a continuum between work-oriented friendship and friendly work relations. The empirical illustrations demonstrate the limitations of the notion of boundary work often employed in studies of relational work – which emphasizes boundary definition. In contrast, it seems that relational work may also involve practices that maintain indistinct boundaries between different types of relationships, thus sustaining tension between a formal and informal economy.