Economic Lives

by Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman

• ISBN13: 9780691139364
• ISBN10: 0691139369
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-27
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. No one has played a greater role in this development than Viviana Zelizer, one of the world's leading sociologists.Economic Livessynthesizes and extends her most important work to date, demonstrating the full breadth and range of her field-defining contributions in a single volume for the first time.Economic Lives shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. Economic Lives ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity--as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises.Providing an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field,Economic Livespromises to be widely read and discussed.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction: The Lives behind Economic Lives	p. 1
Valuation of Human Lives
Introduction	p. 13
Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in Nineteenth-Century America	p. 19
The Price and Value of Children: The Case of Children's Insurance in the United States	p. 40
From Baby Farms to Baby M	p. 61
The Priceless Child Revisited	p. 72
The Social Meaning of Money
Introduction	p. 89
The Social Meaning of Money: "Special Monies"	p. 93
Fine Tuning the Zelizer View	p. 128
Payments and Social Ties	p. 136
Money, Power, and Sex	p. 150
Intimate Economies
Introduction	p. 165
Do Markets Poison Intimacy?	p. 171
The Purchase of Intimacy	p. 181
Kids and Commerce	p. 213
Intimacy in Economic Organizations	p. 237
The Economy of Care
Introduction	p. 269
Caring Everywhere	p. 275
Risky Exchanges	p. 288
Circuits of Commerce
Introduction	p. 303
Circuits within Capitalism	p. 311
Circuits in Economic Life	p. 344
Appraising Economic Lives: Critiques and Syntheses
Introduction	p. 355
Beyond the Polemics on the Market: Establishing a Theoretical and Empirical Agenda	p. 363
Pasts and Futures of Economic Sociology	p. 383
Culture and Consumption	p. 398
Ethics in the Economy	p. 440
Published Works of Viviana A. Zelizer on Economic Sociology	p. 459
Index	p. 465
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