The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies - Softcover

Zelizer, Viviana A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691176035 ISBN 13: 9780691176031

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Zelizer has a genius for detecting hidden order in everyday practices. Gently but firmly she uses her discoveries to overturn widespread beliefs in the power of money to corrupt, standardize, and depersonalize social ties. Best of all, she writes of these complex matters with grace, lucidity, wit, and humanity."--Charles Tilly, author of Credit and Blame

About the Author:

Viviana A. Zelizer is the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She is the author of The Purchase of Intimacy, Pricing the Priceless Child, Economic Lives and Morals and Markets

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0691176035
• ISBN 13: 9780691176031
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320