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 Livesshows 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 Livesranges 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.
The purchase of intimacy Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman
2005., 20090209, 2009, 2005, 2005-01-01, 20050101
eBook
In their personal lives, people consider it essential to separate economics and intimacy. We have, for example, a long-standing taboo against workplace romance, while we see marital love as different ...from prostitution because it is not a fundamentally financial exchange. In The Purchase of Intimacy, Viviana Zelizer mounts a provocative challenge to this view. Getting to the heart of one of life's greatest taboos, she shows how we all use economic activity to create, maintain, and renegotiate important ties—especially intimate ties—to other people. In everyday life, we invest intense effort and worry to strike the right balance. For example, when a wife's income equals or surpasses her husband's, how much more time should the man devote to household chores or child care? Sometimes legal disputes arise. Should the surviving partner in a same-sex relationship have received compensation for a partner's death as a result of 9/11? Through a host of compelling examples, Zelizer shows us why price is central to three key areas of intimacy: sexually tinged relations; health care by family members, friends, and professionals; and household economics. She draws both on research and materials ranging from reports on compensation to survivors of 9/11 victims to financial management Web sites and advice books for same-sex couples. From the bedroom to the courtroom, The Purchase of Intimacy opens a fascinating new window on the inner workings of the economic processes that pervade our private lives.
Money Talks Bandelj, Nina; Wherry, Frederick F; Zelizer, Viviana A
2017, 2017., 20170425, 2017-04-25
eBook
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 Talksis 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 Talksexplores 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 Talksoverturns conventional views about money by revealing its profound social potential.
Life insurance—the promise of an insurer to pay a sum upon a person's death in exchange for a regular premium—is a bizarre enterprise. How can we monetize human life? Should we? What statistics do we ...use, what assumptions do we make, and what behavioral factors do we consider? First published in 1979, Morals and Markets Is a pathbreaking study exploring the development of life insurance in the United States. Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer combines economic history and a sociological perspective to advance a novel interpretation of the life insurance industry. The book pioneered a cultural approach to the analysis of morally controversial markets. Zelizer begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of the life insurance industry, a contentious chapter in the history of American business. Life insurance was stigmatized at first, denounced in newspapers and condemned by religious leaders as an immoral and sacrilegious gamble on human life. Over time, the business became a widely praised arrangement to secure a family's future. How did life insurance overcome cultural barriers? As Zelizer shows, the evolution of the industry in the United States matched evolving attitudes toward death, money, family relations, property, and personal legacy.
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.
Purpose – The mingling of economic transactions with sexual intimacy, friendship, and kinship sometimes causes trouble in workplaces, but prevailing analyses misrepresent how and why that trouble ...occurs. Analyses of the impact of intimate relations on organizational effectiveness range from claims of disruption to claims of sociable satisfaction. Such relations often coexist with organizational effectiveness, and sometimes contribute to it.Methodology – A review and synthesis of available literature identifies theoretical and empirical obstacles to recognition of how intimacy operates within organizations.Findings – This analysis draws attention to relations between intimate pairs and third parties as crucial to intimacy's impact.
Historical and Economic Background Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman
Morals and Markets. the Development of Life Insurance in the United States,
2019
Book Chapter
