Economic lives : how culture shapes the economy / Viviana A. Zelizer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics--Sociological aspects.

Economics.

Social values.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (495 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

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 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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Introduction. The Lives behind Economic Lives

Part One. Valuation of Human Lives

Introduction

1. Human Values and the Market The Case of Life Insurance and Death in Nineteenth-Century America

2. The Price and Value of Children The Case of Children's Insurance in the United States

3. From Baby Farms to Baby M

4. The Priceless Child Revisited

Part Two. The Social Meaning of Money

5. The Social Meaning of Money. "Special Monies"

6. Fine Tuning the Zelizer View

7. Payments and Social Ties

8. Money, Power, and Sex

Part Three. Intimate Economies

9. Do Markets Poison Intimacy?

10. The Purchase of Intimacy

11. Kids and Commerce

12. Intimacy in Economic Organizations

Part Four. The Economy of Care

13. Caring Everywhere

14. Risky Exchanges

Part Five: Circuits of Commerce

15. Circuits within Capitalism

16. Circuits in Economic Life

Part Six. Appraising Economic Lives: Critiques and Syntheses

17. Beyond the Polemics on the Market

18. Pasts and Futures of Economic Sociology

19. Culture and Consumption

20. Ethics in the Economy

Published Works of Viviana A. Zelizer on Economic Sociology

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9786612821059

9781282821057

1282821059

9781400836253

1400836255

OCLC:

670429659