Viviana Zelizer

Zelizer argues that people assign different meanings and rules to money depending on its source and intended use. In The Social Meaning of Money, household allowances, gifts, wages, and charitable funds show that a dollar is not always treated as socially interchangeable with every other dollar.

Relational work is the process of matching a social relationship with an appropriate payment, transaction, or medium of exchange. A payment suitable for a contractor may feel insulting between friends, even when the monetary amount is identical.

Zelizer studied markets involving things that people describe as priceless, including human life and children. Pricing the Priceless Child traces how children in the United States came to be valued less as wage earners and more as emotionally invaluable family members.

No. Zelizer rejects a simple division between a cold economic world and a caring personal world, showing instead that families and couples routinely negotiate money without eliminating intimacy. The Purchase of Intimacy examines how courts and households manage these mixtures of affection, obligation, and payment.