The attempt to regard Adam as homo economicus with different masks for different social settings has run into, broadly, two kinds of trouble. One is that there are snags to the model even for the economic realm. In brisk philosophical summary, they crop up in both the belief component and the desire component of rational choice. The expected utility of a choice depends partly on what outcome it is rational for the actor to expect and partly on how much he wants that outcome. But expectations generate outcomes, thus unsettling notions of objective probability, and serial interaction changes preferences, thus unsettling the utilities. In upshot outcomes are too indeterminate for the model and are reached by a process which affects the individual inputs meant to explain it. The other broad kind of trouble is that social relationships need to be more than instrumental devices in the service of individual goals. It is not true that all the world's a shop and all the men and women merely shoppers.

The second complaint has emerged only piecemeal so far, and needs organising into a fresh portrait of Adam. This chapter tries to make sense of social life in a way which applies to economic activity too. Having found that social relations are not just market relations in disguise, let us see whether market relations are social relations. The emphasis will remain on Adam, the individual social actor. The shift will be not from actors to organisations and institutions but from marketeers to role-players, who recognise one another as players of roles.