Doctor, how much does it cost? Moral values and price talk in a stratified consumer medical market
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4237358 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Eliza Brown (0000-0002-6009-2993, University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Socio-Economic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1475-1461 • E-ISSN: 1475-147X |
| DOI | 10.1093/ser/mwaf025 |
| OpenAlex | W4410520574 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 44 |
In recent years, economic sociology scholarship has begun to interrogate how moral understandings of market exchanges differ according to organizational context and class stratification, but it has not yet made clear how these structures might intersect to produce distinct meanings and practices. Through ethnographic observations at three fertility clinics in the USA, I investigate how fertility providers spoke about the price of care with patients given the threat to professional authority and patient trust from appearing financially motivated. Rather than one moral value, I find variation in the field that cannot be explained by attending to either class or organizational structure alone, but instead depends on how the two combine to shape perceptions of providers' pecuniary interests. In considering variation in moral practices across clinics, I suggest that one way that actors match economic transactions with social relations includes talking about price explicitly or abstractly
Actuarial science · Economics · Financial economics · Microeconomics · Pharmaceutical industry and healthcare
Abductive Analysis
Last Best Gifts
Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy
The End of the Golden Age of Doctoring
The Dignity of Working Men
The Theory Of The Leisure Class
Gift-Giving, Disreputable Exchange, and the Management of Donations in a Police Department
Exploiting Ambiguity
Class and culture in the making of an assisted living market
Consumerism in Action
Consumerism, reflexivity and the medical encounter
A Theory of Racialized Organizations
Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda
Working for Free in the VIP
Selling Genes, Selling Gender
Toward an economic sociology of race
Money, Meaning, and Morality
The Patient-Client as a Consumer
Producing Moral Palatability in the Mexican Surrogacy Market
Altruistic Agencies and Compassionate Consumers
Ordinalization
Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange
The Clinical Encounter and the Problem of Context
How I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean
Switching Clinics
Whose Good Death? Valuation and Standardization as Mechanisms of Inequality in Hospitals
From Medicine to Health
The Engaged Patient
The Continued Social Transformation of the Medical Profession
The Social Characterizations of Price
Contradictions in the Commodification of Hospital Care
The Transformation of Morals in Markets
This is a handcraft
Analyzing the culture of markets
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |