Payment Conflicts and Professional Legitimacy in China's Psychotherapy Market

• In Event: Knowledge, Expertise, and Economic Valuation

Abstract

Providers of intimate economic services often have to palliate moral controversies about monetary payment. Sociologists have shown that participants of intimate economic relations co-create acceptable meanings of transaction through relational work, but less is known what underlies unsuccessful relational work. This article examines how psychotherapeutic professionals, laypeople, and therapeutic platforms in China contest and negotiate payment-related practices for psychological counseling services. Practicing an uninstitutionalized and unregulated profession, psychological counselors in China routinely experience relational mismatches on the matter of payment. Using interviews and ethnography, I show that psychotherapeutic professionals draw on expert knowledge and professionalism in their relational work to justify control over pricing and payment processes. Laypeople resist professional justifications by deploying a “hostile worlds” framework that portrays money as a contaminant to the therapeutic relationship. Therapeutic platforms intervene by introducing new tactics of transactions that aim to mitigate money’s contaminating effect, both expanding the market for psychotherapeutic services and undermining the autonomy of the professionals they work with. In showing how an emerging profession’s struggle for legitimacy is bound up with cultural contests about appropriate systems of monetary transactions for intimate economic services, I contribute to both the sociology of professions and cultural economic sociology.

Author

• Siqi Rebecca Qin, University of British Columbia