Relational Work in Food Pricing: How Price-Setting Mediates Organizational Equity Commitments [DRAFT]

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Relational Work

Abstract

This paper examines how prices are made inside a mission-driven nonprofit intermediary operating across a regional food supply chain. While economic sociology has shown that prices are social objects, we know less about the everyday mechanisms through which organizational actors produce prices that must satisfy competing moral commitments. Drawing on qualitative interviews and fieldwork (all names are pseudonyms), I analyze price-setting as a form of relational work.
The organization studied sits at a fault line: it is committed both to supporting small and historically marginalized farmers and to advancing food access in low-income urban neighborhoods. The same price that feels “fair” to a producer may feel exclusionary to a shopper. I show how staff navigate this tension through what I call moral flexibility—situational adjustments to classificatory boundaries and evaluative criteria in order to produce prices that can be justified to multiple parties at once.
Across wholesale and retail settings, prices function not just as economic outputs but as moral and relational signals. By foregrounding pricing as an organizational mechanism of relational work, the paper contributes to scholarship on intermediaries, market morality, and the production of inequality.

This study is based on ongoing qualitative fieldwork; data collection and coding are still in progress, and findings presented here reflect preliminary patterns.

Author

• Isabelle Caraluzzi, New York University