The Meanings of Money: A Sociological Perspective
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Bruce G Carruthers
Money undergirds market exchange, but the social significance of money goes well beyond the obvious importance of its highly uneven distribution in modern market economies. In addition, modern money imposes an ostensibly precise and unidimensional valuation on social products, processes and relations that often conflicts with other modes of social valuation. In this regard, monetarization is a particular instance of quantification. Money’s status as an official economic metric is the result of a long, contingent, and uneven historical process. Given alternative forms of valuation, people manage and constrain the commensurability of money through a variety of individual, institutional and organizational practices (often akin to "earmarking"). The social reception of money is active, not passive. A variety of examples are discussed to illustrate and develop these points.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Introduction
- Political Economy of Supplying Money to a Growing Economy: Monetary Regimes and the Search for an Anchor to Stabilize the Value of Money
- Alternative Approaches to Money
- The Meanings of Money: A Sociological Perspective
- Central Bank Transparency: Causes, Consequences and Updates
- The Crisis of Invented Money: Liquidity Illusion and the Global Credit Meltdown
- International Financial Centers: The British-Empire, City-States and Commercially Oriented Politics
- The Jurisprudence of Global Money
- Credit Cooperatives in Early Israeli Statehood: Financial Institutions and Social Transformation
- Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debts
- Inventing Industrial Statistics
- The Moneylender as Magistrate: Nicholas Biddle and the Ideological Origins of Central Banking in the United States
- Coin Reconsidered: The Political Alchemy of Commodity Money
- Elements of Negotiability in Jewish Law in Medieval Christian Spain
- The Role of Lawyers in Producing the Rule of Law: Some Critical Reflections
Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- Introduction
- Political Economy of Supplying Money to a Growing Economy: Monetary Regimes and the Search for an Anchor to Stabilize the Value of Money
- Alternative Approaches to Money
- The Meanings of Money: A Sociological Perspective
- Central Bank Transparency: Causes, Consequences and Updates
- The Crisis of Invented Money: Liquidity Illusion and the Global Credit Meltdown
- International Financial Centers: The British-Empire, City-States and Commercially Oriented Politics
- The Jurisprudence of Global Money
- Credit Cooperatives in Early Israeli Statehood: Financial Institutions and Social Transformation
- Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debts
- Inventing Industrial Statistics
- The Moneylender as Magistrate: Nicholas Biddle and the Ideological Origins of Central Banking in the United States
- Coin Reconsidered: The Political Alchemy of Commodity Money
- Elements of Negotiability in Jewish Law in Medieval Christian Spain
- The Role of Lawyers in Producing the Rule of Law: Some Critical Reflections
