Viviana Zelizer Research Articles

Avoiding the transactional "feel" while getting paid: Affect and relational work in sugar dating.

Following Viviana Zelizer's extensive scholarship on the interweaving of money and intimacy, this paper discusses the often overlooked yet critical role of affect in the production of relational work and in the success of relational packages. Drawing from the results of a grounded-theory-driven research study on sugar dating, the motions through which affect seeps through and structures negotiations of payments and emotional attachment are explored. The paper discusses the management of feelings as a component of relational work-so that arrangements neither feel too transactional nor too intimate-as well as the role that affect plays in differentiating sugar dating from illicit sexual transactions. It also contributes to the literature on sugar dating and sex work by critically discussing the limits of the commodification of intimate services and affect under a dominant belief system that rejects the possibility of selling "real" intimacy.

Viviana A. Zelizer: Sociologist of the family and intimacy.

This article is an introduction to the themed section titled, "Viviana A. Zelizer: Sociologist of the Family and Intimacy." It first reviews the major works of Viviana Zelizer and their significance for the social studies of families and intimacy, underscoring how she has accounted for the interplay between family and economy through a series of objects: life insurance, the assessment of children's value, the social meaning of money, and, more recently, intimacy. The second part of the article describes extensions of Zelizer's work in the fields of family and intimacy studies and presents the four articles featured in the themed section.

Relational Work and Accounting: What Venture Capital Analysts Do with Accounting and Other Information in Situations of Uncertainty

Analysts in venture capital (VC) organizations are important mediators in the entrepreneurial economy, operating as both ‘scouts’ and ‘coaches’ of early-stage ventures. Research shows that these analysts invest heavily in collecting and scrutinizing accounting and a wide range of other information at all stages of their work. However, we lack an integrative theorization of how, in the presence of fundamental or ‘Knightian’ uncertainty, analysts effectively use this information. We explore this topic through interviews with VC analysts and project makers operating in Denmark in 2009 and 2010. Drawing on and extending the work of Viviana Zelizer, we show, firstly, how the multiple, different uses of accounting and other information function in relation to each other and the communication and transformation of social relations. Each stage of analyst work involves a double movement in which economic media is differentiated and the relationships between analysts and project makers and their ventures are created, negotiated, maintained, and changed. Secondly, we show how this double movement provides an indirect and ‘ontological’ mode of handling situations of uncertainty in which accounting information adds matter and form to the new business venture. We conclude by exploring opportunities for further applications of relational work in accounting research.

Pricing the priceless childcare: Early childhood education for babies and toddlers.

This article connects Viviana Zelizer's theory of the social meaning of money to family studies, using the case of American parents' spending on children. We investigate how money spent on the youngest children-babies and toddlers-reflects the growing expert emphasis on the importance of parental investment in the critical early period for child development. First, we review literature on expert knowledge to trace the shift in increasing emphasis on the importance of building children's cognitive skills through formal education beginning in infancy, offered in center-based care, moving from spaces of "childcare" to "early childhood education" centers. Second, we use quantitative data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (1995-2017) to show that parents have increasingly spent money, and an increasing share of their income, on center-based care for babies and toddlers but not on otherchild items. Additionally, lower income families have been spending a greater share of their income on center-based care for their infants than other families. We interpret our findings using Zelizer's theory about the cultural influences on the meaning of money, showing how these can be expert-led and persist even when families are faced with structural economic constraints.

Time, ties, transactions: temporality and relational work in economic exchange

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.

Ethical intimacy: Relational work of male sex workers in Hong Kong

This article examines the boundary work of ethics in same-sex relationships between sex workers and clients in Hong Kong, a neoliberal cosmopolitan city that decriminalized homosexuality in 1991. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork between August 2019 and June 2020, I investigate the changing same-sex relationships between masseurs and clients in and outside gay massage parlors in Hong Kong. From in-house payment for sex to different off-premise gift exchanges, masseurs and clients transition from a market economy as sex workers and clients to the moral economy as real-life romantic and business partners. I build on Viviana Zelizer’s theory of relational work to examine how various forms of intersections of intimacy and economy are made ethical at different stages of masseur–client relationships. A historically contingent form of ethical intimacy emerges from the same-sex sexual economy as a queer response to socioeconomic inequalities in neoliberal Hong Kong.

Movement meaning of money: Monetary mobilization in Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement

The resource mobilization (RM) theory has long discovered the significance of money for protests; yet can this insight be applied to nowadays’ decentralized movements, characterized by the absence of organizational leadership and more creative and spontaneous participation from below? While the RM perspective is anchored in a political economy of organizational fundraising, it is time to bring in Viviana Zelizer’s economic sociology to understand how participants utilize the role of donors, consumers, savers, and investors for the movement purpose. Focusing on Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement, this article theorizes the full panoply of ‘monetary mobilization’ to revise RM’s narrow conception. By offering a safer and anonymous channel of expression, monetary mobilization emerges as a substitute for in-person participation for risk-averse citizens with financial means. Money is always loaded with symbolic meanings and ethical considerations so that it also functions as a vehicle of the moral outrage and utopian aspirations. Participants are keen to establish a proper relationship between sponsors and beneficiaries by exercising diligent oversight to prevent its corruption. Contrary to the instrumentalist conception, money is per se not a fully fungible and all-purpose resource.

Pricing the priceless child 2.0: children as human capital investment

This article takes Viviana Zelizer’s (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child to the new millennium. Zelizer documented the transformation between the 19th and 20th century from an “economically useful” to an “emotionally priceless” child. She observed that by the 1930s, American children were practically economically worthless but invested with significant emotional value. What has happened to this emotionally priceless child at the dawn of the new millennium? Has there been a new transformation in the social value of children, and, if so, what might have such a transformation entailed? To address these questions, we examine overtime trends that point to increasing devotion of resources and time to children’s education, a key input in the exceedingly influential human capital theory, which connects investment into children’s human capital with their future market value. Therefore, we argue that the priceless child 2.0 is a useful-to-be human capital investment child. We use four empirical examples of overtime growth in children’s human capital investment: (a) enrollments in early childhood education, (b) federal spending on early education, (c) federal spending on K-12 programs, and (d) parental spending on child care, education and extracurricular activities. In the conclusion, we discuss some potential consequences and concerns about raising children as human capital investment.

Money As Justice: Work-Related Deaths, Victim Workers’ Families, and Injustice in Turkey

In the event of a work-related death, Turkish law directs the victim’s family to see the death as accidental and understand monetary compensation as a primary vehicle for justice. Based on interview data from a group of victims’ survivors, I examine how the bereaved make sense of accepting money for their losses. Despite the compliance of these families with monetized justice, the interviews suggest that they also have resentments against it. I show that pressing economic needs, a sense of disenfranchisement, and the limited nature of legal counsel lead the survivors to suppress their frustrations. In turn, many come to narrow their expectations of justice to getting what they think of as a fair sum of money. This situated framework, I argue, works to trivialize concerns about workplace safety. Insofar as the families see monetary compensation through a frame of justice, structural factors behind their losses remain unaddressed. Viviana Zelizer has long treated money as being grounded in meanings and moralities. In the tradition of legal consciousness literature, this article extends Zelizer’s fundamental approach by providing a framework to address how the moral underpinning of money can emerge from and reinforce power imbalances and systemic bias in the legal system.

Resources in Relational Packages: Social Capital as a Byproduct of Relational Work

Social capital theory offers a compelling explanation as to why people are committed to making resources available to others outside of formal institutions. In this article, we build on social capital theory to explain how actors overcome two practical problems endemic to these resource transfers. We present Viviana Zelizer’s relational work theory as a complimentary framework which accounts for when an individual may act on commitments to offer resources and which commitments to act upon when they are in conflict. Drawing on our empirical work on almsgiving to social outcasts and resource transfers at mourning ceremonies in Azerbaijan, we describe how people identify and ascribe their relationships to others by relying on available cultural conventions to mark economic transactions and other media as appropriate or inappropriate. By conceptualizing social capital in this way, we also obtain a process-tracing methodology useful for social researchers and for community activists to generate ideas on how to expand social capital in their own or others’ communities.

“We Ask for More Than We Give Back”: Negotiating the Boundaries of Informal Childcare Arrangements

There is an assumption that childcare services and workplace flexibility policies enable a seamless shift between childcare and work. Similarly, there is an assumption that informal care arrangements will be relatively seamless as the norm of reciprocity is assumed to bind families together through the bonds of love and affection. Monetary exchange for this work is seen to demean the caring relationship, but this does not mean “costs” are absent. Drawing on the work of Viviana Zelizer, this article examines how parents negotiate informal care arrangements, identifying the “payments” that differentiate family from friend care. The analysis focuses on parents working nonstandard and variable hours who were part of a broader project examining childcare flexibility, which also involved childcare providers and policymakers. This article identifies the relational work involved in the maintenance of informal care relationships and how they are negotiated when parents “ask for more than they give.”

The Private Tutoring Industry in Denmark: Market Making and Modes of Moral Justification

Purpose: The article focuses on the emergence of a private tutoring industry in Denmark over the last decade. Specifically, it explores how private tutoring companies legitimize themselves in a social and cultural context where education has for long predominantly been understood in egalitarian terms. Design/Approach/Methods: The article takes inspiration from Viviana Zelizer’s work on morally controversial markets. It explores the “moral labor” performed by private tutoring companies to redefine the exchange of private tutoring services as a socially wholesome activity. It does so through a close analysis of business information, company websites, and news media articles on private tutoring. Findings: The article argues that, generally, the marketing material of tutoring companies focuses more on social equality and student well-being than on academic success. Thus, the companies predominantly legitimize themselves in terms of long-standing Scandinavian ideals of education. Increasingly, these are also the terms in which the companies criticize mainstream schooling. Originality/Value: The article contributes new knowledge of private tutoring in a Scandinavian context where very little research on the issue has so far been conducted. Theoretically, it relates previous research on “legitimation projects” of private tutoring companies to broader sociological theories on market making.

Relational Work in the Economy

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.

How Did I Become a Historical Economic Sociologist? Viviana Zelizer in Conversation with José Ossandón

In this interview, Viviana Zelizer discusses three dimensions that characterize her distinctive sociological approach to the economy. First, Zelizer explains how she made archival historical analysis her sociological method. Second, she talks about the relational character of her objects of study, namely moral controversies and commercial circuits. Third, Zelizer discusses the part played by gender politics in her work.

Situating Zelizer: A Beginners’ Guide

This short text could work both as a long footnote that contextualizes the interview with Viviana Zelizer published in this issue, and as a very brief beginner’s guide to Zelizer’s economic sociology. The premise is that a good way of introducing Zelizer’s contribution to the study of economic life is by situating her oeuvre in the context of recent research. The main argument is that Zelizer’s work is not simply a cultural counterbalance of the mostly structural “new economic sociology”. She has constructed an original angle to the study of economic life. From this perspective, sociologists learn to focus on the frictions in which economic life unfolds.

The social meaning of financial wealth: Relational accounting in the context of 401(k) retirement accounts

AbstractBehavioral economics has become a dominant set of theories in explaining economic behavior, yet such behavior remains under the limited purview of psychological, cognitive, or neural approaches. This article draws on and extends Viviana Zelizer's social meaning of money framework in conjunction with new work in ‘relational accounting’ to suggest a sociological counterpoint, focusing in particular on the social and symbolic meaning attached to individual 401(k) retirement accounts. Following a market downturn, neoclassical and behavioral economics predict various types of behavioral responses, in particular loss aversion - where investors seek to increase risk-taking rather than locking in a sure loss (a loss is more painful to bear than an equivalent gain). A sociological theory that understands the shared meaning of retirement saving would predict something different, a behavior I call durable conservatism. In this article, I show how this concept better explains observed risk behavior in Americans’ 401(k) accounts following the 2002 and 2008 bear markets in stocks, and how that response differed from the behavior documented in non-retirement brokerage accounts.

Child Labour in India: Literary Representations along the Trajectory of Nation

This paper will examine literary representations of children as earning members of society against the history of child labour in India, as a means of understanding the relationship between class, labour, nationalism and childhood. It is part of my ongoing attempt to examine formulations of childhood in the Global South as a way of engaging with the concept of ‘multiple childhoods’ and examining their position vis-à-vis global, universal (and, according to scholars like Emer O' Sullivan, Western) paradigms of childhood. In the wake of The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2016, the historical and constitutional journey India embarks on is examined, beginning with the Indian Factory Act, 1881, along the path of its nascent nationhood, to The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986 and the subsequent Amendment. The focus is on Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie and Anita Desai's The Village by the Sea as texts which portray two different modes of thinking about labouring children. Applying Viviana Zelizer's definitions of the ‘uselessness’ and ‘usefulness’ of children, my paper studies these two literary representations of useful childhood in India, published at different points in India's journey as a nation, in a political and historical continuum within which the futurity of a young country is embodied by the willing labour of youth.

What Does Money Tell Us?

The book entitled Money talks. Explaining how money really works and edited by Nina Bandelj, Frederick F. Wherry and Viviana Zelizer is a collection of 14 articles classed around 5 parts : over and above the fungibility of money (Part I), beyond the special funds (part II) monetary creation (Part III) contested money (Part IV) and future money (Part V), this book is also an anniversary book. It celebrates the 20th birthday of the publication of Viviana Zelizer's work, The social Meaning of MOney. All the articles in it were discussed and presented during a conference on September 12, 2014 on the pertinence of the thesis of the sociology of money by Viviana Zelizer. In her book published in 1994, Viviana Zelizer criticized economist and sociologist approaches to money. It is impossible then to understand the scientific, political and social stakes of this anniversary book without placing on the one hand, the criticisms of Viviana Zelizer in their intellectual context; in other words the arrival in the United States of a new economic sociology, and without remembering on the other hand that by highlighting the role of social standards and emotions which determine the use of money it must be shown that the economic agent is not rational and that market economy in fact is not or not only, the nuance is important, governed by perfectly rational actors, which challenges its efficiency. This is what this review would point out before presenting an outline of the contents of each chapter and concluding with a few critical comments.

What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures

What Does the Baby Selfie Say? Seeing Ways of ‘Self-Seeing’ in Infant Digital Cultures

The Sentimentalization of Adoption: A Critical Note on Viviana Zelizer's Pricing the Priceless Child

7 The Sentimentalization of Adoption: A Critical Note on Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child by E. Wayne Carp To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children,1 Brigette Soland, an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, and Emily Bruce, a graduate student in the department of History at the University of Minnesota, organized a symposium to celebrate and honor Zelizer’s book at the annual meeting of the 2011 Social Science History Association. The short, informal symposium papers, enthusiastically praising the book, have recently been published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Paula S. Fass, Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, described Zelizer’s study as one of two “foundational” books in the field of Childhood and Children’s History (457).2 Daniel Thomas Cook, an associate professor of childhood studies and sociology at Rutgers University, called Pricing the Priceless Child “a must-read for anyone interested in grasping the emergence of what some may call ‘modern childhood’” (468). Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a research associate in the Populations Study Center at the University of Pennsylvania, proclaimed the book’s archival research base “deep, thorough, and imaginative” (462). Barrie Thorne, Professor Emerita of sociology and gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, like several of the other symposium contributors, “routinely assigned Pricing” in her university sociology courses, where “‘Viviana Zelizer’ has become a household name” (474). It is almost unprecedented that any book, even a classic, can still be held in such high regard and deemed relevant to contemporary readers nearly thirty years after its publication. In stark contrast to Pricing the Priceless Child, Patrick J. Ryan, Associate Professor of Childhood and Social Institutions at King’s University College (Western), has maintained that PhilippeAriès’s Centuries of Childhood, the other book Fass described as foundational, “is the most harshly critiqued work in the historiography of childhood” (566; for more information, see Heywood 343–65). What historical interpretation could prompt such passionate endorsement from so many distinguished scholars? The thesis of Pricing the Priceless Child is that in the United States, “a profound transformation” in the social value of children occurred during the period 1870–1930, when the nineteenthcentury useful child was displaced by the twentieth-century economically Adoption & Culture Vol. 5 (2017) 8 useless but emotionally priceless child (209). It was during this period, Zelizer argues, that regardless of social class, the sentimentalization of childhood intensified until “the new sacred child occupied a special and separate world” (209). She supports this interpretation in six chapters examining the economic and sentimental value of children. Topics include, inter alia, changing attitudes toward the death of a child, the struggle over child labor legislation, the controversy over children’s life insurance, the changing criteria for compensation for the accidental death of children, and the transformation in adoption and the creation of a black market in children. In chapter six, which treats the sentimentalization of adoption, Zelizer contextualizes her thesis by stating that nineteenth-century children who were placed out with Midwestern farm families were “valued” for their economic contribution to the family’s well-being. By midcentury, she argues,arevolutionarytransformationin“value”beganrenderingchildren’s contribution to the family economically valueless but sentimentally “priceless,” resulting in an upturn in adoptions. This sentimentalization of adoption, according to Zelizer, created “an unprecedented demand for children under three, especially infants” (192). Babies who could not be given away in the late nineteenth century were, by the first decades of the twentieth century, preferred by adoptive parents. Zelizer asserts that a paradoxical consequence of the advent of the sentimentalization of adoption was the growth of a black market in babies and the charging of fees by adoption agencies. As a result, there was a “greater commercialization and monetization of child life” (201). By the 1930s, the priceless child displaced the useful child. This essay reexamines Zelizer’s thesis by challenging her chronology about changing social attitudes toward and practices in adoption, the concomitant advent of adoption fees, and an...