Reading Response #2 – Payments and Social Ties

I think viewing the world of currency through a social lens is very interesting. The fact that Zelizer boils it down to three types of monetary payments is quite simple, yet complex. Those being, payments in the form of gifts, entitlement, and compensation. I never really identified it beyond a transactional level — I always viewed it at the surface level. After uncovering this information, I found it very interesting to see how to world of money operated at this level. First off, it was interesting to view gifting items as any sort of ‘monetary payment’. I view it more as something graceful and a gift shouldn’t come with the connotation of a payment. That simply implies that; you think, or someone thinks that that gift was necessary because you owed the receiver of the gift something, and you are compensating them for what they have done. That ties into the ideology of ‘compensation’. It’s a direct exchange of goods for quantitative work. That makes sense in the realm of monetary payments. The overarching monetary payment is then entitlement. Whether you are the employer of the gift-giver, if you are making a payment of some sort, you are at fault of having a some sense of entitlement. At least by definition of Zelizer, where she states the monetary payment of compensation is simply “the right to share [your] goods.”. With that mindset, every transaction ever has one side being entitled.

I think the concept of these different monetary payments is increasingly interesting in regards to segregating money within peoples lives. People will start putting money in different places and assigning values to things they wouldn’t necessarily have in the past. Furthermore, i think it is interesting that as an employer you can see what type of workers you have by emphasizing these monetary payments. You can see how they react and how they take what they are given. People who receive gifts show more compassion and are willing to work out of respect. While others who receive compensation for their time at work display a type of determination or even desperation. Entitled recipients may show some sort of resentment and lack of effort. With that being said, digressing from traditional methods of viewing payments as more or less just transactions creates an evidential divergence in people that can be observed.