What is the animating 'spirit' behind what may appear to be the coldly calculating world of markets and business enterprise? Though often mathematically modelled in dry terms, markets can be looked at instead as meaningful domains of human activity. To economists, markets have been seen as nothing but objective 'forces' or allocation 'mechanisms'. This book, however, argues that they can be seen as involving the human spirit, personal expression and moral commitments. It presents the view that markets are not so much things that need to be measured as meanings that need to be narrated and interpreted. The aim of this book is to introduce two scholarly fields to one another, economics and cultural studies, in order to pose the question: how does culture matter to the economy? When we look at the economy as a legitimate domain of culture, it transforms our understanding of the nature of business life. By viewing markets as an integral part of our culture, filled with the drama of human creativity, we might begin to better appreciate their role in the world.

Contents:
1. Introduction
I. The Spirit of Enterprise II. The Study of Both Markets and Culture III. Civil Society and Cultural Studies IV. The Development, Representation, and Morality of Business
2. What is Culture and Why Does it Matter?
I. Culture as Context: from the Arts to Morality II. Culture and Economy in the Modernist Epoch III. The Evolution of the Field of Cultural Studies IV. Shifting the Site of 'Politics'
3. But is Cultural Studies Compatible with Economics?
I. On Different Worlds? II. The Universality of Economics, the Diversity of Economic Culture III. Individualism, Communalism and Rights IV. Ethnocentrism and Markets V. Popular Culture and Markets
4. How Does Culture Influence Economic Development?
I. Which Culture Prospers? Comparative Cultural Advantage
a. The meaning of economic development b.Cultural nationalism c. Values conducive to economic development d. Checklist ethnography e. Comparative cultural advantage
II. For Example, Different Kinds of Entrepreneurship
a. Entrepreneurship in its context b. Culture versus rationality? c. Cultural fit d. Cultural studies and public policy
5. The Culture Industry's Representation of Business
I. The Image of Business in Popular Culture II. The Construction of Meaning
a. Reading the texts of popular culture b. resistance and susceptibility in the creation of meaning c. Popular culture and the state
III. A New Cultural Reading of Business
6. The Market Order and the Moral Order
I. Unintended Consequences and the Ethics of Business
a. The invisible hand and the minimalist argument b. Socialism, social responsibility and the traditional defense of market morality c. A renewed challenge to business
II. The Minmalist Defense of the Market
a. The morality of obedience to stockholders b. From stockholders to stakeholders
III. Markets and the Construction of Meaning
a. Room for moral choices b. Resistant readings in the market context c. Doesn't business just co-opt progressive clauses?
7. Conclusion