MONEY TALKS Money Talks EXPLAINING HOW MONEY REALLY WORKS Edited by Nina Bandelj, Frederick F Wherry & Viviana A Zelizer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON & OXFORD Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket image courtesy of iStock All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-16868-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017931724 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Miller Printed on acid-free paper ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 To the Princeton University Sociology Department, where it all started CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION Advancing Money Talks Nina Bandelj, Frederick F Wherry, and Viviana A Zelizer PART I CHAPTER BEYOND FUNGIBILITY Economics and the Social Meaning of Money 25 Jonathan Morduch CHAPTER Morals and Emotions of Money 39 Nina Bandelj, Tyler Boston, Julia Elyachar, Julie Kim, Michael McBride, Zaibu Tufail, and James Owen Weatherall CHAPTER How Relational Accounting Matters 57 Frederick F Wherry PART II CHAPTER BEYOND SPECIAL MONIES The Social Meaning of Credit, Value, and Finance 73 Bruce G Carruthers CHAPTER From Industrial Money to Generalized Capitalization 89 Simone Polillo PART III CHAPTER CREATING MONEY The Constitutional Approach to Money: Monetary Design and the Production 109 of the Modern World Christine Desan CHAPTER The Market Mirage 131 David Singh Grewal CHAPTER The Macro-Social Meaning of Money: From Territorial Currencies to Global Money 145 Eric Helleiner PART IV CHAPTER 09 CONTESTED MONEY Money and Emotion: Win-Win Bargains, Win-Lose Contexts, and the Emotional Labor of Commercial Surrogates 161 Arlie Hochschild CHAPTER 10 Paid to Donate: Egg Donors, Sperm Donors, and Gendered Experiences of Bodily Commodification 171 Rene Almeling CHAPTER 11 Money and Family Relationships: The Biography of Transnational Money 184 Supriya Singh PART V CHAPTER MONEY FUTURES 12 Money Talks, Plastic Money Tattles: The New Sociability of Money 201 Alya Guseva and Akos Rona-Tas CHAPTER 13 Blockchains Are a Diamond’s Best Friend: Zelizer for the Bitcoin Moment 215 Bill Maurer CHAPTER 14 Utopian Monies: Complementary Currencies, Bitcoin, and the Social Life of Money Nigel Dodd Selected References on the Social Scientific Study of Money 249 Contributor Biographies 255 Index 261 230 PREFACE 12, 2014, a group of scholars came together at the Yale Law School, the School of Management, and the Center for Cultural Sociology for the Money Talks Symposium, which we organized to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Social Meaning of Money (1994) by Viviana Zelizer Daniel Markovits at the Law School proved to be an excellent co-convener Participants included legal scholars, behavioral economists, economic anthropologists, social psychologists, political scientists, and economic and cultural sociologists, as well as historians who had developed or extended di erent aspects of Zelizer’s landmark book They ranged from established leaders in their elds to some of the most innovative younger scholars working on money They all welcomed this pioneering e ort to engage in sustained dialogue across our disciplinary boundaries None had previously encountered collaborative sites such as the one a orded by the symposium All became fully engaged in discussions about di erent approaches to exploring money’s new forms and about policy-sensitive issues such as those involving low-income household nances as well as considerations of money’s moral impact We were deeply inspired by conversations that ourished at the Money Talks Symposium and left the conference with a rm belief that a broader audience should have an opportunity to bene t from these conversations With this purpose in mind, fourteen essays were further developed speci cally for this volume In this process, it became inevitable to recruit Viviana Zelizer as our coeditor While her book provided the impetus for the conference, let us note that the book that has emerged from that meeting is not a festschrift to Zelizer, as the chapters develop new approaches to our understandings of money, and aside from Bandelj and Wherry, none of the contributors are Zelizer’s former students or close collaborators Moreover, we also found out about a meaningful conversation between Zelizer and her cherished collaborator and friend, Charles Tilly A decade ago they had discussed editing a volume of the kind that we have now assembled Building on Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money, their envisioned volume would, in fact, include some of the same authors that are now part of this project and would forge an interdisciplinary conversation Then, the idea for the Zelizer and Tilly volume was led into a manila folder, reopened by Zelizer a decade later The time for collaboration had come The volume before you ful lls that early Zelizer/Tilly vision about money talking across disciplinary domains, which continues to brim with relevance today, as we expect it will for decades to come ON SEPTEMBER Nina Bandelj Frederick F Wherry Irvine, California and New Haven, Connecticut, July 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS about some of the risks involved in triads, our editorial trio worked together with exceptional harmony The making of Money Talks became an energizing joint adventure We were not alone We were fortunate to receive support from numerous institutions and colleagues We were able to convene the volume’s contributors at Yale University thanks to the generosity of a number of o ces and colleagues At Yale we thank the O ce of the Provost, the Center for Cultural Sociology, the Yale Law School, the Yale School of Management, the Center for Comparative Research, and the Sociology Department At the University of California at Irvine we thank the Center for Organizational Research, the Sociology Department, and the O ce of the Dean of Social Sciences Viviana is grateful to Princeton University and the Russell Sage Foundation for providing precious sabbatical support at RSF’s stimulating and congenial community Special thanks go to Miguel Centeno, chair of Princeton’s Department of Sociology Nina gratefully acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Grant no 1328172 A number of colleagues o ered suggestions, advice, and encouragement, including Daniel Markovits (who co-hosted our symposium at Yale Law), Je rey Alexander, Richard Breen, Julia Adams, Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Andrew Metrick, Olav Sorenson, and Alice Go man Our introductory chapter bene ted from valuable comments from Rene Almeling, Christine Desan, and Eldar Sha r We are also grateful to Nancy Folbre, Marion Fourcade, Shane Frederick, Kieran Healy, Akinobu Kuroda, Daniel Markovits, and Stephen Vaisey, who presented papers at the 2014 conference Heba Gowayed and Nicholas Occhiutto served as the symposium’s scribes and its promoters, writing up a report for the American Sociological Association’s Economic Sociology Section newsletter, Accounts Nadine Amal coordinated us all with great care and with assistance from Carolyn Ly, Till Hilmar, and Shai Dromi At Yale, Pam Colesworthy handled other troubles before they could become a bother Yader Lanuza ably assisted with the references, as did Ashley Fournier with the copyright permissions The sustained e orts and warm collegiality of our contributors made this book possible We hit the jackpot with a set of brilliant colleagues that met every deadline and responded to each of our suggestions We could not nd a better home for our book than Princeton University Press Under the stewardship of its director, Peter Dougherty, PUP is an author’s dreamworld From day one, Meagan Levinson’s enthusiastic and skillful editorial support helped guide our e orts We greatly bene ted from her advice as well as comments from three demanding but constructive anonymous reviewers Our good fortune extended to the superb production team led by Kathleen Cio , with Samantha Nader’s assistance, as well as Beth Gianfagna’s gifted copyediting and Jim Curtis’s indexing prowess Our families endured our distraction, our enthusiastic late night notes back and forth, and our solitary retreats to think things through Nina’s mother, Olga, a masterful DESPITE GEORG SIMMEL’S FAMOUS WARNING practitioner of relational work, heard about the very beginnings of this amazing venture and would have been the loudest one to celebrate its culmination Draga mami, vedno si z mano .. .MONEY TALKS Money Talks EXPLAINING HOW MONEY REALLY WORKS Edited by Nina Bandelj, Frederick F Wherry & Viviana A Zelizer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON & OXFORD Copyright... account by presenting alternative historical, cultural, and political interpretations Contested Money: Having established relational, emotional, moral, and political dimensions of money, we examine... investigations challenge and reshape our understandings of how money works Breaking down arti cial barriers between the worlds of money and social life, analysts from multiple disciplines document money? ??s