Adderley Positive Research Incubator
Hosted by: Center for Positive Organizations

"Celebrants and Confidants: How Wedding Officiants Resolve the Intimate Labor Paradox"
Featured Scholar: Justine Murray, Harvard University

Description: As community ties weaken, people increasingly pay strangers for care once provided by intimates. This expanding intimate labor economy poses a paradox: the support it delivers ordinarily grows from a shared history, accumulated knowledge, and trust, yet providers are hired precisely where that relationship is thin or absent. How is intimate labor accomplished without intimacy? Through an inductive study, we learn that wedding officiants—professional strangers hired to make a couple’s ceremony feel singular—resolve this paradox through disclosure work: the deliberate and asymmetric management of a couple’s personal information. Disclosure work pulls apart what intimate relationships ordinarily fuse—a bond with the recipient and the knowledge it yields—and lets officiants build the occasion from either one. Celebrants treat personal information as an input, crafting the occasion from solicited knowledge while forgoing a relational bond; confidants treat acquiring information as the work of relating, building an accelerated, bounded bond from which the occasion flows. We advance research on intimate labor by showing that its service moments can be produced without the relationship that ordinarily underwrites them, and on disclosure at work by showing that personal knowledge can be decoupled from the relational bonds through which it ordinarily travels.