Doctor, how much does it cost? Moral values and price talk in a stratified consumer medical market

Abstract: 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.