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.

The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how do we make sense of it? Money Talks is the first book to offer a wide range of alternative and unexpected explanations of how social relations, emotions, moral concerns, and institutions shape how we create, mark, and use money. This collection brings together a stellar group of international experts from multiple disciplines--sociology, economics, history, law, anthropology, political science, and philosophy--to propose fresh explanations for money's origins, uses, effects, and future. Money Talks explores five key questions: How do social relationships, emotions, and morals shape how people account for and use their money? How do corporations infuse social meaning into their financing and investment practices? What are the historical, political, and social foundations of currencies? When does money become contested, and are there things money shouldn't buy? What is the impact of the new twenty-first-century currencies on our social relations? At a time of growing concern over financial inequality, Money Talks overturns conventional views about money by revealing its profound social potential.

Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. No one has played a greater role in this development than Viviana Zelizer, one of the world's leading sociologists. "Economic Lives" synthesizes and extends her most important work to date, demonstrating the full breadth and range of her field-defining contributions in a single volume for the first time.

"Economic Lives" shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. "Economic Lives" ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity--as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises.

Providing an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field, "Economic Lives" promises to be widely read and discussed.

In this landmark book, sociologist Viviana Zelizer traces the emergence of the modern child, at once economically "useless" and emotionally "priceless," from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Having established laws removing many children from the marketplace, turn-of-the-century America was discovering new, sentimental criteria to determine a child's monetary worth. The heightened emotional status of children resulted, for example, in the legal justification of children's life insurance policies and in large damages awarded by courts to their parents in the event of death. A vivid account of changing attitudes toward children, this book dramatically illustrates the limits of economic views of life that ignore the pervasive role of social, cultural, emotional, and moral factors in our marketplace world.

The world of money is being transformed as households and organizations face changing economies, and new currencies and payment systems like Bitcoin and Apple Pay gain ground. What is money, and how do we make sense of it? Money Talks is the first book to offer a wide range of alternative and unexpected explanations of how social relations, emotions, moral concerns, and institutions shape how we create, mark, and use money. This collection brings together a stellar group of international experts from multiple disciplines-sociology, economics, history, law, anthropology, political science, and philosophy-to propose fresh explanations for money's origins, uses, effects, and future. Money Talks explores five key questions: How do social relationships, emotions, and morals shape how people account for and use their money? How do corporations infuse social meaning into their financing and investment practices? What are the historical, political, and social foundations of currencies? When does money become contested, and are there things money shouldn't buy? What is the impact of the new twenty-first-century currencies on our social relations? At a time of growing concern over financial inequality, Money Talks overturns conventional views about money by revealing its profound social potential.

"The interactions of our private lives consist of subtle blends of acts of intimacy and economic exchange, which the legal system awkwardly deconstructs when things go wrong. This beautiful book will gently guide you through the many ironies of intimate exchange."--Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, and Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences

"Do you think that the realm of money and the realm of intimacy are separate spheres? Viviana Zelizer will make you think again. A fascinating demonstration that romantic relationships are pervaded by transactions of multiple sorts--and that we ignore those transactions at our peril."--Cass Sunstein, author of "Republic.com"

"Zelizer demolishes the idea that caring and commerce inhabit two separate and mutually exclusive realms. As she shows in a wide range of examples drawn from marriage, the sex trade, and the caring professions, love and money have always been intimately intertwined. A fascinating and even liberating book."--Ann Crittenden, author of "The Price of Motherhood" and "If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything"

"Viviana Zelizer has long been known as the world's most astute, discerning, and original cultural analyst of economic processes. Here, she brings together the two streams of her work in a mighty river of a book. The Purchase of Intimacy will be read for years to come."--Charles Tilly, Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University, author of "Roads from Past to Future"

"Author of the classic "The Social Meaning of Money," Viviana Zelizer here draws many examples from the law and from studies of everyday life to illuminate the wondrous variety of ways money and intimacy continuouslymix. Carefully researched and clearly argued, "The Purchase of Intimacy" is an important and challenging read for scholars and nonscholars alike."--Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of "The Commercialization of Intimate Life" and coeditor of "Global Woman"

"Here, Viviana Zelizer explores the fascinating interplay of intimate relationships and economic interest, using legal cases as her raw material. Rejecting simplistic interpretations that privilege either economics or culture, she charts a middle course of 'connected lives' that reveals the complexity and richness of her subject matter. Zelizer provides an exhaustively researched, original, and carefully argued analysis that, like her previous classics, is sure to transform the way scholars think about economics and social relations."--Juliet Schor, Boston College, author of "Born to Buy" and "The Overworked American"

"This terrific book establishes the commodification of intimacy as something that now cannot be ignored."--Carol Sanger, Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law, Columbia University