The Social Meaning Of Extra Money

Why do ordinary people who used to engage in domestic and leisure activities for free now try to make a profit from them? How and why do people commodify their free time? This book explores the marketization of blogging, cooking, craftwork, gardening, knitting, selling second-hand items, sexcamming, and more generally the economic use of free time. It outlines how the development of web platforms, the current economic context and post-Fordist values can account for this extension of market and labor. Drawing on a range of interviews, ethnographic observations, and quantitative surveys, the contributors question the empowering effects of commodification, with a specific focus on how gender and class inequalities affect the social meanings of extra money. Ultimately, the collective findings demonstrate how commodification pervades even the most mundane social activities. This research will be invaluable to scholars and students with a focus on gender and digital sociology, the sociology of work and labour, and the marketization of leisure.

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.

Both volumes of Creative (and Cultural) Industry Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century map and elucidate the adaptations and challenges faced by the creative professionals and the entrepreneurial solutions they have co-developed.

Revealing the human side of economic life 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.

The book presented here describes an outstanding attempt, not only to include children’s views but to partner with children to develop the concept of well-being and to study the phenomenon as the children understand it. The authors do this by placing the concept of children’s well-being within the existing discourses on the topic and by developing their unique theoretical approach to the concept. Then, and based on what children told them, the authors identify different domains and dimensions of children’s well-being and touch upon its multifaceted nature. The book concludes with drawing research and policy implications from an integrated summary of the study’s findings and lists indicator concepts that present an alternative framework and conceptualisation of well-being from a child standpoint.

This book offers a fresh and uniquely sociological perspective on money and credit. As basic economic institutions, money and credit are easy to overlook when they work well. When they malfunction, their importance becomes obvious and demands further investigation. Bruce G. Carruthers and Laura Ariovich examine the social dimensions of money and credit at both the individual and corporate levels, from the development of personal credit in a consumer society to the role of government in the creation of money. In clear prose, they illustrate how the overall economy is governed by the financial system and the flow of capital into, and out of, firms. They also explore the social meanings of money, and how people distinguish between "dirty" and "clean" money. This accessible and engaging book will be essential reading for upper-level students of economic sociology, and those interested in how the bills, coins, and plastic in our pockets shape the world in which we live.

What the financial diaries of working-class families reveal about economic stresses, why they happen, and what policies might reduce them Deep within the American Dream lies the belief that hard work and steady saving will ensure a comfortable retirement and a better life for one's children. But in a nation experiencing unprecedented prosperity, even for many families who seem to be doing everything right, this ideal is still out of reach. In The Financial Diaries, Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider draw on the groundbreaking U.S. Financial Diaries, which follow the lives of 235 low- and middle-income families as they navigate through a year. Through the Diaries, Morduch and Schneider challenge popular assumptions about how Americans earn, spend, borrow, and save—and they identify the true causes of distress and inequality for many working Americans. We meet real people, ranging from a casino dealer to a street vendor to a tax preparer, who open up their lives and illustrate a world of financial uncertainty in which even limited financial success requires imaginative—and often costly—coping strategies. Morduch and Schneider detail what families are doing to help themselves and describe new policies and technologies that will improve stability for those who need it most. Combining hard facts with personal stories, The Financial Diaries presents an unparalleled inside look at the economic stresses of today's families and offers powerful, fresh ideas for solving them.

Sex Typing and Social Roles: A Research Report is based on a sociological survey that includes topics regarding changes in sex roles. The book deals with information derived from surveys and reports on the differences and similarities between the behavior, experience, and attitudes of men and women. The book addresses, more particularly, the ongoing changes in the social positions of the sexes, for example, from women's rights and privileges as a "private issue" to a public-policy issue. The book also reviews the work motives, the female role, constraints, and emotions (sadness) encountered. The text analyzes alienation versus engagement—why women say that they are indeed happier at work. The book then discusses the role of civics and sex as regards politics, institutional performance, and rule compliance. The text analyzes the role of religion and the involvement of husbands and wives in social affairs. The role of husbands and wives as partners in marriage is explained in terms of education, division of labor, and marital values. The book also investigates methods of rearing children, parental or expectations, and the response patterns on child-related task items. The text will prove beneficial to psychologists, sociologists, pediatricians, civic leaders, lay ministers, and educators.