Economic Lives : : How Culture Shapes the Economy / / Viviana A. Zelizer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Zelizer, Viviana A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2010]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (496 p.)

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

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 -- Introduction -- 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 -- Introduction -- 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 -- Introduction -- 13. Caring Everywhere -- 14. Risky Exchanges -- Part Five: Circuits of Commerce -- Introduction -- 15. Circuits within Capitalism -- 16. Circuits in Economic Life -- Part Six. Appraising Economic Lives: Critiques and Syntheses -- Introduction -- 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