BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
Instead of claiming, like neo-classical economists, that economic behavior is not shaped
in any significant way by social context or prevailing social norms, economic sociologists
posit that economic actions are constitutive of social relations and the cultural meanings
attached to them. 6 Production, distribution, and consumption, the traditional spheres of
‘economic’ activity, are always already relational activities, playing a valuable role in the
relational work people perform every day. 7
In particular, Viviana Zelizer has developed a relational framework for analyzing
economic activity, one that will lay the foundation for our investigation of bribery.
Zelizer defines economic transactions by the presence of a transaction medium, called a
‘money’: “a representation of rights to goods and services, usually in the form of
concrete tokens.” 8 Just as important as the transaction medium (the money given or
received) are the transaction context and the social relation of the transactors. While the
relations of the transactors can vary almost infinitely, Zelizer distinguishes among only
three types of transaction contexts—gift, compensation, and entitlement—which
Bourdieu (1977: 171-7) points out, however, transacting even in gifts requires misrecognition; ‘economic’
calculation can and does factor into how or what gifts are exchanged. See further discussion at Appadurai
(1986: 13), Bloch and Parry (1989: 8-12). What economic sociologists like Zelizer have done, therefore,
is to posit that the logic of the exchange is oriented around the social relations of the transaction, not
necessarily the exchanged goods, themselves.
6
To be sure, recent literature in the New Institutional Economics and the contextualist camp of the New
Economic Sociology has modified the neo-classical model tremendously: see the overview in Lambsdorff,
Taube and Schramm (2005), with examples in della Porta and Vannuci (1999) and Warburton (2001) on
networks and corruption. Still, the essential core of these models is assumed to be the traditional homo
economicus rational actor. It is here, in dissolving a rational actor approach, that the alternative camp of
economic sociologists makes its boldest and most stimulating claims.
7
See further Abolafia (1996), Tilly and Tilly (1998), Biggart and Delbridge (2004), Fourcade and Healy
(2007).
8
Quote from Zelizer (2001: 9992). Zelizer (2001) provides a helpful overview of the sociology of money
summarized here; see also Davis (1992), Zelizer (1994; 2005b), Zelizer and Tilly (2006).
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