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This is the working paper form of an essay later published as "One Sphere or Two?"
American Behavioral Scientist 41 (10), August 1998, 1467-1471.
Discussant comments for session on "Changing Forms of Payment," American
Sociological Association Annual meeting, August 9, 1997, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada.
Julie A. Nelson
Money is often understood, by both sociologists and economists, to be a
homogeneous, unconditionally interchangeable substance which, by making everything it
touches commensurable, levels out and "rationalizes" every social relationship it enters.
By my tribe--I'm an academic economist--this "rationalizing" function is most often
regarded as benign and even beneficial. Sociologists, I am led to understand, tend to
regard the spreading influence of money more negatively. Because of money's
impersonal and "colorless" nature, monetization is associated with the flattening of social
relationships. Money is often seen as an objectifier and commodifier that destroys
personal relationships and undermines nonpecuniary values. Money invades and changes
social life.
I've gotten involved in this session due to my interest in Viviana Zelizer's works
which suggest that this view can also be turned on its head. That is, contrary to the usual
beliefs in both our disciplines, social life can also invade and change money. (Nelson,
1995). This theme is elaborated on in various ways in the papers presented here, although
I will argue that the paper by Bruce Carruthers and Wendy Espeland is a bit more
schizophrenic on this issue than the other two.
Let me pose the question this way: Is money something used by people, or by
"the economy"? Do people, with all their complex motivations, emotions, relationships,
and affiliations create and use money, or is it only their "economic aspects" that go off
and use money, in negotiating the exchange of commodities on impersonal markets? If,
as in the former view, money is created and used by people in all our complicated glory,
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then markets and money are within the realm of the social and economists and
sociologists are really operating in the same territory. On the other hand, the latter view,
of a "social" and relational realm distinct from an "economic" and impersonal realm,
underlies our actual disciplinary specialization. Eric Helleiner claims in the written
version of his paper, and I agree, that because of this specialization "writings on money
tend to be dominated too much by economists," to the detriment of our ability to
"interpret developments in the contemporary world" (p. 26).
Economists, it may be suprising to note, are also a bit baffled by money--what it
is, what it does. A long running controversy in economics that in recent years caused an
eruption of papers concerns how to incorporate money into macroeconomic models (e.g.,
Ostroy and Starr, 1990; Wallace, 1997).
The problem, as it is seen, is this: at the heart
of contemporary mainstream economic theorizing lies the Arrow-Debreu general
equilibrium model of a frictionless, competitive economy inhabited by perfectly rational,
utility-maximing agents. Unfortunately, this model hums along perfectly well without
money; there are prices in the model, yes, but no need for people to hold money-like
objects to grease the wheels of exchange. A huge (and usually highly technical literature)
has been spawned to "fix up" the model to incorporate a need for holding money, since
for other of economists' tasks (like explaining the effects of changes in the money supply)
this would seem necessary. Note that this research project is model-centric, not
"contemporary-world"-centric. That is, it is never questioned whether the general
equilibrium model and its assumptions about economic agents are a good place to start to
understand real world phenomena; real world phenomena enter only insomuch as they
reveal the need for a patch on the emperor's new clothes.
I would argue, however, that both economists enthralled with models of efficient,
leveling, depersonalizing, self-interest-rewarding markets and sociologists afraid of the
advance of such markets are in one way very much in the same boat: they both agree on
the existence of THE MARKET as a supra-human, supra-social entity. And it is along
this line that I find some limitations in the analysis of Carruthers and Espeland: while
they argue that money often has meaning and qualitative variation (and give lots of
tremendous and meaty examples), they seem also to believe that there exists a substantial
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realm of strictly impersonal, asocial money. For example, they reiterate a firm distinction
between gift exchange and commodity exchange, where the former is assumed to help in
maintaining social relations while the latter is strictly impersonal, self-interested, and
calculating. They uncritically quote, "...where gifts link things to persons and embed the
flow of things in the flow of social relations, commodities are held to represent the drive-largely free of...cultural constraints--of goods for one another, a drive mediated by money
and not by sociality" (p. 14, emphasis added). To paraphrase: people interact with each
other in society; goods interact with each other on markets. This is curiously impersonal:
how can a good have a "drive" for another good? What happened to the people in this
market?1 The authors do recognize the possiblity of an economy being "embedded" in
society, but give only the example of early Christian Ireland (p. 18).
While they
recognize that human moral sensibilities about things such as "fairness" can have a role in
price setting in markets, they also attribute to market prices qualities of "naturalness" or
"inevitability"--that is, the idea that they exist independent of "political and conflictual"
negotiations. And, from the point of view of social life; money "threatens" (p. 25);
money is "dangerous" (p. 27)--for the reasons of flattening out of social life and
incommensurabilities, as I mentioned above.2 The Godzilla of heartless money is poised
to flatten the social and relational Tokyo.
The papers by Helleiner and Siegel, in contrast, tend towards, I believe, a more
thorough-going analysis of the meaning of money that is not tied to a "society vs.
It is interesting to note a very similar phrasing in a recent macroeconomics article-though with the economists arguing for bringing the people back in: "One difficulty is
that the proposal [of a cash-in-advance constraint] originates from a rather synthetic
position--that exchange is a relation among commodities. A closer look at the rationale
for a common medium of exchange reveals a more satisfying starting point: exchange is a
relation among individuals" (Ostroy and Starr, p. 8). It should be noted, however, that the
"individuals" these economists want to bring back in are still envisioned, however, has
having the usual extremely limited psychological and social dimensions of "economic
man."
2
There is another curious example of an impersonal referent on p. 27: "But it discounts,
downplays, or even ignores those aspects of value which cannot be reduced to a single
number." The identity of the "it" involved is unclear from the previous sentences, but the
grammatical construction would be more consistent with a subject of "money" itself
1
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economy" territorial split. In Helleiner's paper, it is clear that the creation of monies and
the creation of national identities is a mutually reinforcing dynamic: currencies are the
creations of people and nations. Currencies serve multiple purposes, only one of which
has to do with efficiency in exchange. The idea of money as a social creation perhaps
reaches its apex in the discussion of "token" (or what economists call "fiat") money-money that has no intrinsic value. When I teach macroeconomics classes, some students
are always rather shocked when I pointed out to them that what backs the value of the
dollar is simply trust and belief--not gold, not silver, not ingots in Fort Knox. We believe
that people will take dollars in exchange when we go to spend them; we are willing to
hold on to dollars (at least for a while for a while) because we trust the government not to
destroy their value by inflation tomorrow. Economists are well aware of this issue,
though--since emotions are thought to be over there in the pschology territory--we have
done very little actual investigation into money's emotive basis.
While Carruthers and Espeland keep around a bit too much of the
society/economy dualism, I think, and Helleiner helpfully stirs up the waters around
contrasts on a political/economic axis, Siegel most straightforwardly and explicitly
challenges the inevitability of a family/market dualism. In the nineteenth century, she
writes, "market and family were discursively constructed as distinct and complementary
domains." The story is about the social definition of work, of wages, of marriage, of
"labor" and non-"labor"--neither "THE MARKET" nor "the family" is a given. When we
consider Siegel's suggestion that "the joint property demand is an antecedent of the
modern comparable worth claim," we can see the contrast between this and the views
about the market expressed in part of Carruthers and Espeland's piece. Siegel explains
that one reason the idea of a "wage" for homemaking was dismissed, was that the
advocates "did not view the labor market as a neutral arbiter of value, but instead saw the
market as shaped by norms and practices of gender caste" (p. 5) That is, the advocates
explicitly dismissed the idea that market prices had any quality of "naturalness" or
"inevitability," but instead saw the market as a part of society, and prices as therefore
(impersonal and acting outside of society) rather than "those who get entralled with
money" (people).
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influenced by general social and political struggles. The notion that many typically female
jobs pay less simply because women do them--the comparable worth argument--makes no
sense if one believes in economists' models of competitive, anonymous markets. But
should we? We might bring back in a spin on Helleiner's analysis here, too: perhaps in
addition to talking about how currencies fortify national identities, we should also
examine how monies fortify gender identities. How much of male gender identity is still
tied up with bringing home the "real" paycheck? How much might male gendersolidarity, and a desire not to "dilute" male gender-identity, be threatened by women
getting the same "stuff"?
The only question I have about Siegel's paper is how the existence of "community
property" states, which she does not seem to mention, could fit into her analysis of marital
property. In these eight states, in the West plus Louisiana, most income received during
the marriage is considered to be property of both the husband and wife, on the principle
that both spouses are contributing in their various ways to the marriage. An interesting
note is that, while perhaps such a view was advocated as liberatory for women in the
nineteenth century when women were less in the paid labor force, the community
property issue forms an important part of the history of the U.S. tax code's current
"marriage penalty" for dual-earner couples (Nelson, 1996, Chap. 7).
Returning to the notion of seeing markets and money as part of society, rather
than as separate and antithetical to social relations, I find recent works on
commodification, value, and value incommensurability by philosophers Elizabeth
Anderson (1993) and Margaret Radin (1996) to be helpful. Radin, for example, argues
that particular interactions can simultaneously have both commodified and
noncommodified understandings. I am currently involved in debates within feminist
economics on the issue of "paying for caring labor," in which this notion of a "plurality of
meanings" (Radin, xiii) is crucial. That is, if we really believe that money is "flattening,"
while only altruistic, gift interactions build social ties, we will tend to suspect that
children in paid childcare are receiving something relationally second-rate, if not debased.
But few parents or caregivers perceive the market as purely an impersonal exchange of
money for services. The actual childcare market tends to be "thick" or "rich" in personal
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contact, trust, and interpersonal interaction. The specter of the all-corrupting market
denies that people can do work they love, among people they love, and get paid at the
same time. Examination of actual markets, however, replacing our belief in the spectral
MARKET, says that maybe this isn't the case, or at least not all the time.
My own particular interest has been in feminist theory and the construction of the
social sciences, since I think that gender-value gesalts tend to underlie much of our
reliance on dualisms like society/economy, family/market, personal/impersonal--and
sociology/economics (Nelson, 1996). The nineteenth century ideology of "separate
spheres" for women and men (discussed by Siegel) is breaking down. I hope we can do
the same for the ideology of "separate spheres" for sociologists and economists.
References
Anderson, Elizabeth S. (1993). Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press.
Carruthers, Bruce G. and Wendy Nelson Espeland (1997). "The Price is Right: On
Money and Morality." Paper presented at the American Sociological Association
Annual meeting, August 9, 1997, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Helleiner, Eric (1997). "National Currencies and National Identities." Paper presented at
the American Sociological Association Annual meeting, August 9, 1997, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada.
Nelson, Julie A. (1996). Feminism, Objectivity, and Economics. London: Routledge.
Nelson, Julie A. (1995). "Review of 'The Social Meaning of Money'" Contemporary
Sociology 24(3), May, pp. 382-384.
Ostroy, Joseph M. and Ross M. Starr (1990). "The Transactions Role of Money," in
Handbook of Monetary Economics, Volume 1, ed. B. M. Friedman and F. H.
Hahn. Elsevier Science Publishers, pp. 4-62.
Radin, Margaret Jane (1996). Contested Commodities. Cambrige: Harvard Univ. Press.
Siegel, Reva B. (1997). "Valuing Housework: Nineteenth-Century Anxieties about the
Commodification of Domestic Labor." Paper presented at the American
Sociological Association Annual meeting, August 9, 1997, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada.
Wallace, Neil (1997). "Absence-of-Double-Coincidence Models of Money: A Progress
Report," Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 21(1), Winter,
pp. 2-20.
Zelizer, Viviana A. (1995). The Social Meaning of Money. NY: Basic Books.