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Sociological Forum, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1996
Payments
and Social Ties1
Viviana A. Zelizer2
Monetary payments fall
into three
categories: gift, entitlement,
and
compensation.
Each one
corresponds
to a
significantly different
set
of
social
relations and
systems of meanings. People making payments
use a number
of
earmarking techniques
to
distinguish
those
categories of
social relations and
meanings from
each
other, impose
substantial controls over the
proper
uses
of
money
received within each
category,
and attach
great importance
to the
distinctions
involved,
thus
creating partly separate
currencies even when the
medium involved is
legal
tender In the United
States, bureaucratization,
commercialization,
and monetization
significantly
altered the
scope, form,
and
content
of monetarygifts, entitlements,
and
compensation,
but did not reduce
the
importance of
such
earmarking
and control.
Investigation of (1)
bonuses
in commercial
firms
and
(2)
sexual
payments
illustrate the
significance of
these
principles.
KEY WORDS:
payments; money;
social ties.
Suppose
for a moment that this is the
year
2096. Let's take a look
at American families:
although by
now
money
often takes
postelectronic
forms unfamiliar to the
twentieth-century,
in the "traditional"
home,
"housewives" and "househusbands" receive
monthly stipulated
sums of
money
as salaries from their
wage-earning spouses.
Salaries are
renegoti-
ated
yearly;
fines
imposed
for
sloppy cleaning, incompetent cooking,
care-
less child
care,
or indifferent
lovemaking. Midyear
raises or cash
prizes
are
'In
keeping
with the
bridge
this
paper
makes between
past
and
present work,
I have
adapted
a substantial section of the text from various
parts
of The Social
Meaning of Money (1994).
I am
grateful
to audiences that have
responded
to different versions of the
paper
at the
session
"Lumping
and
Splitting,"
1995 Annual
Meetings
of the Eastern
Sociological
Association,
the
Department
of
Sociology, University
of
Pennsylvania,
and the
University
of
Miami Law
School,
and to Eviatar Zerubavel for his
encouragement
to
prepare
this version.