Economic lives : how culture shapes the economy
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Economic lives : how culture shapes the economy
Princeton University Press, c2011
- : cloth
Available at / 19 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 Lives synthesizes 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 Lives promises to be widely read and discussed.
Table of Contents
Preface ix Introduction: The Lives behind Economic Lives 1 Part one: Valuation of Human Lives Introduction 13 Chapter 1: Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in Nineteenth-Century America 19 Chapter 2: The Price and Value of Children: The Case of Children's Insurance in the United States 40 Chapter 3: From Baby Farms to Baby M 61 Chapter 4: The Priceless Child Revisited 72 Part Two: The Social Meaning of Money Introduction 89 Chapter 5: The Social Meaning of Money: "Special Monies" 93 Chapter 6: Fine Tuning the Zelizer View 128 Chapter 7: Payments and Social Ties 136 Chapter 8: Money, Power, and Sex 150 Part Three: Intimate Economies Introduction 165 Chapter 9: Do Markets Poison Intimacy? 171 Chapter 10: The Purchase of Intimacy 181 Chapter 11: Kids and Commerce 213 Chapter 12: Intimacy in Economic Organizations 237 Part Four: The Economy of Care Introduction 269 Chapter 13: Caring Everywhere 275 Chapter 14: Risky Exchanges 288 Part Five: Circuits of Commerce Introduction 303 Chapter 15: Circuits within Capitalism 311 Chapter 16: Circuits in Economic Life 344 Part Six: Appraising Ec onomic Lives: Critiques and Syntheses Introduction 355 Chapter 17: Beyond the Polemics on the Market: Establishing a Theoretical and Empirical Agenda 363 Chapter 18: Pasts and Futures of Economic Sociology 383 Chapter 19: Culture and Consumption 398 Chapter 20: Ethics in the Economy 440 Published Works of Viviana A. Zelizer on Economic Sociology 459 Index 465
by "Nielsen BookData"
