Waltzing, Relational Work, and the Construction (or Not) of Collaboration in Manufacturing Industries*

Josh Whitford

Politics & Society, 2012, vol. 40, issue 2, 249-272

Abstract: The article uses a case study of relationships in American manufacturing industries to demonstrate the utility of documenting the “relational work†that managers do as they negotiate circumstances where either roles or norms are ambiguous. It shows that the explicit identification of the role that relational work plays in those relationships story militates for—and extends, improves upon, and arguably completes—a particular understanding of what economic sociologists should mean when they talk about the “embedding†of the economic in social relations. The article hence shows the utility of jointly using otherwise disparate perspectives in the analysis of interorganizational relationships, and thus contributes to the development of a more unified paradigm in economic sociology.

Keywords: economic sociology; relational work; embeddedness; manufacturing; organizations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329212441600 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:40:y:2012:i:2:p:249-272

DOI: 10.1177/0032329212441600

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().