Viviana A. Zelizer – författare

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.

In their personal lives, people consider it essential to separate economics and intimacy. We have, for example, a long-standing taboo against workplace romance, while we see marital love as different from prostitution because it is not a fundamentally financial exchange. In The Purchase of Intimacy, Viviana Zelizer mounts a provocative challenge to this view. Getting to the heart of one of life''s greatest taboos, she shows how we all use economic activity to create, maintain, and renegotiate important ties--especially intimate ties--to other people. In everyday life, we invest intense effort and worry to strike the right balance. For example, when a wife''s income equals or surpasses her husband''s, how much more time should the man devote to household chores or child care? Sometimes legal disputes arise. Should the surviving partner in a same-sex relationship have received compensation for a partner''s death as a result of 9/11? Through a host of compelling examples, Zelizer shows us why price is central to three key areas of intimacy: sexually tinged relations; health care by family members, friends, and professionals; and household economics. She draws both on research and materials ranging from reports on compensation to survivors of 9/11 victims to financial management Web sites and advice books for same-sex couples. From the bedroom to the courtroom, The Purchase of Intimacy opens a fascinating new window on the inner workings of the economic processes that pervade our private lives.

Revealing the human side of economic lifeOver 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.

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.

En 1896, les parents d’un enfant de 2 ans poursuivirent la Southern Railroad Company of Georgia pour le décès de leur fils dans un accident ferroviaire. Ils plaidèrent en vain que l’enfant leur rendait des services précieux « en allant faire des courses chez les voisins, en surveillant et en amusant son cadet ». En 1979, un enfant âgé de 3 ans mourut d’une dose mortelle de fluorure dans une clinique dentaire publique ; le jury de la Cour suprême de l’État de New York accorda 750 000 dollars aux parents de l’enfant. Que s’est-il passé entre ces deux dates ?

Viviana A. Zelizer montre comment s’est opéré, entre 1870 et 1930, un double mouvement de sacralisation de l’enfance et de monétarisation de l’économie. Dédommagements, assurances-décès, adoption... À travers une série de controverses, ce livre retrace la genèse et les contradictions d’un XXe siècle qui interdit de penser économiquement les affects tout en ne cessant d''en fixer le prix. Devenu un classique aux États-Unis mais inédit en français, il ouvre de précieux horizons pour qui souhaite rompre avec ce modèle économique et moral.