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The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies - Paperback | Diverse Reads

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

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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.

ISBN-13: 9780691176031

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 05-09-2017

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

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

What People are Saying About This

Charles Tilly

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, Columbia University

From the Publisher

"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

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1 The Marking of Money
2 The Domestic Production of Monies
3 Gifted Money
4 Poor People's Money
5 With Strings Attached: The Earmarking of
Charitable Cash
6 Contested Monies
7 What Does Money Mean?
NOTES
INDEX