Payments and social ties

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 monetary gifts, 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. 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 ofThe 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.