Author: Nigel Dodd
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400880866
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
A reevaluation of what money is—and what it might be Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money is—and what it might be—hasn't kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of today’s leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating. What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money. One of the book’s central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the "claim upon society" described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theorists—including Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it.
Author: Viviana A. Zelizer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069123700X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
A dollar is a dollar—or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing relations to cold, hard cash. After all, it's just money. Or is it? Distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author Viviana Zelizer argues against this conventional wisdom. She shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. Zelizer concentrates on domestic transactions, bestowals of gifts and charitable donations in order to show how individuals, families, governments, and businesses have all prescribed social meaning to money in ways previously unimagined.
Author: Deborah Valenze
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521617802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
In an age when authoritative definitions of currency were in flux and small change was scarce, money enjoyed a rich and complex social life. Deborah Valenze shows how money became involved in relations between people in ways that moved beyond what we understand as its purely economic functions. This highly original investigation covers the formative period of commercial and financial development in England between 1630 and 1800. In a series of interwoven essays, Valenze examines religious prohibitions related to avarice, early theories of political economy and exchange practices of the Atlantic economy. In applying monetary measurements to women, servants, colonial migrants, and local vagrants, this era was distinctive in its willingness to blur boundaries between people and things. Lucid and highly readable, the book revises the way we see the advance of commercial society at the threshold of modern capitalism. Deborah Valenze is Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York City. She is the author of The First Industrial Woman, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England, and numerous scholarly articles.
Author: Lana Swartz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300233221
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
A new vision of money as a communication technology that creates and sustains invisible--often exclusive--communities "In an engaging and timely work, brimming with fascinating anecdotes and historical and literary references, Lana Swartz brilliantly illustrates how financial technologies are quietly transforming how we socialize and what it means to belong."--Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It One of the basic structures of everyday life, money is at its core a communication media. Payment systems--cash, card, app, or Bitcoin--are informational and symbolic tools that integrate us into, or exclude us from, the society that surrounds us. Examining the social politics of financial technologies, Lana Swartz reveals what's at stake when we pay. This accessible and insightful analysis comes at a moment of disruption: from "fin-tech" startups to cryptocurrencies, a variety of technologies are poised to unseat traditional financial infrastructures. Swartz explains these changes, traces their longer histories, and demonstrates their consequences. She shows just how important these invisible systems are. Getting paid and paying determines whether or not you can put food on the table. The data that payment produces is uniquely revelatory--and newly valuable. New forms of money create new forms of identity, new forms of community, and new forms of power.
Author: Nigel Dodd
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This is the first systematic sociological discussion of one of the most important of modern institutions: money. It demonstrates the immense significance of monetary systems in modern societies and considers why sociologists have been so slow to address this issue. Nigel Dodd, a sociologist by training, analyzes differing conceptions of the nature of money in economics, sociology, and anthropology, and subjects each of these to a systematic critique. He covers the main debates in economic theory, but concentrates special attention on the role of money in the work of such prominent social theorists as Simmel, Parsons, Habermas, and Giddens. None of these writers, Dodd concludes, offers a satisfactory account of the character or significance of money in modern societies. And so he offers a new interpretation of the nature of monetary transactions: one with far-reaching implications for social and economic analysis. Interdisciplinary in nature, The Sociology of Money will be of interest to those working in the fields of economics, social theory, sociology, and anthropology, and all those wishing to gain a better understanding of this dominant, but neglected, social institution.
Author: Nina Bandelj
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how do we make sense of it? Money Talks is the first book to offer a wide range of alternative and unexpected explanations of how social relations, emotions, moral concerns, and institutions shape how we create, mark, and use money. This collection brings together a stellar group of international experts from multiple disciplines—sociology, economics, history, law, anthropology, political science, and philosophy—to propose fresh explanations for money's origins, uses, effects, and future. Money Talks explores five key questions: How do social relationships, emotions, and morals shape how people account for and use their money? How do corporations infuse social meaning into their financing and investment practices? What are the historical, political, and social foundations of currencies? When does money become contested, and are there things money shouldn't buy? What is the impact of the new twenty-first-century currencies on our social relations? At a time of growing concern over financial inequality, Money Talks overturns conventional views about money by revealing its profound social potential.
Author: Ariel Wilkis
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503604365
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Looking beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary social interactions, The Moral Power of Money investigates the forces of power and morality at play, particularly among the poor. Drawing on fieldwork in a slum of Buenos Aires, Ariel Wilkis argues that money is a critical symbol used to negotiate not only material possessions, but also the political, economic, class, gender, and generational bonds between people. Through vivid accounts of the stark realities of life in Villa Olimpia, Wilkis highlights the interplay of money, morality, and power. Drawing out the theoretical implications of these stories, he proposes a new concept of moral capital based on different kinds, or "pieces," of money. Each chapter covers a different "piece"—money earned from the informal and illegal economies, money lent through family and market relations, money donated with conditional cash transfers, political money that binds politicians and their supporters, sacrificed money offered to the church, and safeguarded money used to support people facing hardships. This book builds an original theory of the moral sociology of money, providing the tools for understanding the role money plays in social life today.
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429942584
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
Author: Geoffrey Ingham
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745638031
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
In this important new book, Geoffrey Ingham draws on neglected traditions in the social sciences to develop a theory of the ‘social relation’ of money. Genuinely multidisciplinary approach, based on a thorough knowledge of theories of money in the social sciences An original development of the neglected heterodox theories of money New histories of the origins and development of forms of money and their social relations of production in different monetary systems A radical interpretation of capitalism as a particular type of monetary system and the first sociological outline of the institutional structure of the social production of capitalist money A radical critique of recent writing on global e-money, the so-called ‘end of money’, and new monetary spaces such as the euro.
Author: Sidonie Naulin
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030182991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Why do ordinary people who used to engage in domestic and leisure activities for free now try to make a profit from them? How and why do people commodify their free time? This book explores the marketization of blogging, cooking, craftwork, gardening, knitting, selling second-hand items, sexcamming, and more generally the economic use of free time. It outlines how the development of web platforms, the current economic context and post-Fordist values can account for this extension of market and labor. Drawing on a range of interviews, ethnographic observations, and quantitative surveys, the contributors question the empowering effects of commodification, with a specific focus on how gender and class inequalities affect the social meanings of extra money. Ultimately, the collective findings demonstrate how commodification pervades even the most mundane social activities. This research will be invaluable to scholars and students with a focus on gender and digital sociology, the sociology of work and labour, and the marketization of leisure.
