That social relations matter is a trademark contribution of economic sociology. By and large, the importance of social relations has been captured by the notion of embeddedness, deriving from Granovetter’s (1985) seminal argument that economic behavior, as human behavior in general, is embedded in networks of social relations. That is, economic actors are not atomistic decision-makers; the social relations they have with one another exert the foremost impact on their economic behavior. This formulation has been embraced by many economic sociologists who continue to show the influence of social ties and networks on various economic outcomes. This research has largely treated social relations as distinct from economic relations (aka arm’s length ties), and examined how network embeddedness matters for economic outcomes. Other variants of this research, propelled by formal network analysis, have treated social ties/networks as congealed properties of individual actors (such as structural autonomy or network centrality) in an attempt to specify structural features of the social context in which rational economic decision-making happens.

In contrast with a practice in economic sociology where relations are effectively treated as properties of individual actors, the goal of this chapter is to rethink relationality in economy as a dynamic process of negotiating economic relations between actors, shaped by affect, meaning, and asymmetries in power, as well as third parties, organizational structures, and institutions. I build on recent conceptual innovations by Viviana Zelizer (2005, 2010, 2012) and her focus on relational work, that is, the effort by which people