Money and value

Twenty years after the publication of Viviana Zelizer’s book on the social meaning of money, this interdisciplinary file presents an overview of the question of value in economic life, by combining different theoretical and methodological approaches.

Viviana Zelizer

In the work The Social Meaning of Moneypublished in English in 1994, Viviana Zelizer offered a seminal analysis of the social and moral characteristics of money. In the United States, Zelizer’s work largely contributed to the revival of economic sociology. A new generation of researchers inspired by Zelizer has redefined the boundaries of the disciplinary field, including in the analysis subjects that until then were not considered part of economic life. serious » (and largely masculine). Beyond businesses, networks and markets, attention has shifted to the economic production of households, everyday monetary exchanges, the economy of human organs, care work, and even art.

Zelizer’s influence goes far beyond the North American context. French-speaking anthropologists, sociologists, historians and economists welcomed his analyzes with enthusiasm. His book was translated into French and published in 2005 in the Liber collection (Le Seuil), at the initiative of Pierre Bourdieu. Similarly, in Argentina, a dynamic stream of research emerged after the 2001 economic and financial crisis around daily monetary exchanges. Zelizer’s work was published in Spanish in 2010.

Organized on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the book and the tenth anniversary of the French translation under the title The social meaning of moneythe international conference “ Quantify, evaluate, calculate: The question of value in economic life » (École Normale Supérieure, June 29-1er July 2015) organized with Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde and Ilka Vari-Lavoisier, brought together researchers from these different disciplinary and national contexts, who today continue to analyze the social and moral foundations of economic phenomena. The presentation of research on the role of calculation, evaluation and pricing in various organizations, social scenes and markets, made it possible to explore and cross-reference different theoretical and methodological approaches, different disciplinary orientations. and national, which today shape the analysis of economic processes.

This file of The life of ideas presents an overview of the questions and debates that structured the conference. There first section of the file, entitled “ Twenty years later The Social Meaning of Money » (in English) is devoted to the genesis of the book, its distribution, its reception and its influence ; it brings together contributions from Jeanne Lazarus, Florence Weber, Nina Bandelj, Marion Fourcade, Fred Wherry and Viviana Zelizer. A second sectionwhich could be titled “ The question of economic value: Contemporary perspectives », will offer, through a selection of articles by Laurence Fontaine, Laurent Feller, Mariana Luzzi, André Orléan, Alexandre Roig, Caroline Oudin-Bastide & Philippe Steiner, an overview of the research presented, the variety of their disciplinary inscriptions and the diversity of their objects, from the controversial value of slave labor to the complexity of prison economies.

Twenty years ago, Zelizer’s work opened a new research program at the crossroads of sociology, history and economics. We hope that the articles brought together in this file will contribute to the dialogue between empirical social sciences and the different theories available today, from sociology and anthropology to cognitive sciences and economics, and that they will make it possible to overcoming imperialism and mutual ignorance to construct a renewed analysis of the question of value and evaluation in economic life.