Introduction: money and the morality of exchange
01 Nov 1989-pp 1-32
TL;DR: In this article, the symbolic representation of money in a range of different societies, and more specifically with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges, is discussed, emphasizing the enormous cultural variation in the way money is symbolized and how this symbolism relates to culturally constructed notions of production, consumption, circulation and exchange.
Abstract: This collection is concerned with the symbolic representation of money in a range of different societies, and more specifically with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges. It focuses on the different cultural meanings surrounding monetary transactions, emphasizing the enormous cultural variation in the way money is symbolized and how this symbolism relates to culturally constructed notions of production, consumption, circulation, and exchange.
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01 Jan 2002
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that both formalists and Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had been about distribution and exchange, and they argued that to understand a society, one must first of all understand how it continues to exist, or, as they put it, "reproduces" itself by endless creative activity.
Abstract: tive, both Formalists and Substantivists had entirely missed the point, because all their debates had been about distribution and exchange. To understand a society, they argued, one must first of all understand how it continues to exist—or, as they put it, “reproduces” itself—by endless creative activity. This was quite different from functionalism. Functionalists begin with a notion of “society,” then ask how that society manages to hold itself together. Marxists start by asking how what we call “society” is continually being re-created through various sorts of productive action, and how a society’s most basic forms of exploitation and inequality are thus rooted in the social relations through which people do so. This has obvious advantages. The problem with the whole “mode of production” approach, though, was that it was developed to analyze societies with a state: that is, in which there is a ruling class that maintains an apparatus of coercion to extract a surplus from the people who do most of the productive work. Most of the real triumphs of the MoP approach—I am thinking, for example, of Perry Anderson’s magisterial “Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism” (1974a) and “Lineages of the Absolutist State” (1974b)—deal with outlining the history of different modes of production, many of which can coexist in a given society; the way in which the dominant one provides the basis for a ruling class whose interests are protected by the state; the way that modes of production contain fundamental contradictions that will, at least in most cases, ultimately drive them to turn into something else. Once one turns to societies without a state, it’s not clear how any of these concepts are to be applied. One thing Marxism did introduce was a series of powerful analytical terms—exploitation, fetishism, appropriation, reproduction... —that everyone agreed Marx himself had used brilliantly in his analysis of Capitalism, but that no one was quite sure how to apply outside it. Different scholars would use these terms in very different ways and then would often end up quar-
604 citations
Cites background from "Introduction: money and the moralit..."
...…a problematic that crops up in a surprising number of authors we’ve been looking at: how to reconcile a lower sphere of self-aggrandizement with a higher one of a society’s eternal verities (e.g., Parry and Bloch 1989; Barraud, de Coppet, Iteanu, and Jamous 1994, also A. Weiner 1978, 1980, 1982)....
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TL;DR: The authors surveys anthropological and other social research on money and finance and emphasizes money's social roles and meanings as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circulation.
Abstract: This review surveys anthropological and other social research on money and finance. It emphasizes money’s social roles and meanings as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circulation. It reviews scholarly emphasis on modern money’s distinctive qualities of commensuration, abstraction, quantification, and reification. It also addresses recent work that seeks to understand the social, semiotic, and performative dimensions of finance. Although anthropology has contributed finely grained, historicized accounts of the impact of modern money, it too often repeats the same story of the “great transformation” from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms. This review speculates about why money’s fictions continue to surprise.
335 citations
Cites background from "Introduction: money and the moralit..."
...…good at containing our more exciting insights about money (conveyed in several exemplary edited collections, e.g., Akin & Robbins 1999, Guyer 1995b, Parry & Bloch 1989), while presenting to the outside world the comforting plotline we are always expected to relate, about the impact of money on…...
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TL;DR: All of the different dimensions of CEO pay were related to power distance, leading us to infer that CEO pay in a culture is most reflective of the strength of the power structure in a society, and total compensation and the ratio of variable pay to total pay are related to individualism.
Abstract: The theory and research on chief executive officer (CEO) compensation tends to be dominated by assumptions and values reflective of those dominant in the national culture of the United States, where most of this work is done. This suggests that an underlying theme focuses on how CEO compensation is related to instrumental choices made in a competitive, capitalist culture. This study seeks to expand the understanding of CEO compensation by examining it in the context of other cultures, based on the premise that national culture plays a significant part in the nature of compensation strategies.We relate cultural dimensions (uncertainty avoidance, power distance, individualism, and masculinity-femininity) developed by Hofstede (Hofstede 1980a, 2001) to several dimensions of CEO compensation. These dimensions are total CEO pay, the proportion of variable pay to total compensation, and the ratio of CEO pay to the lowest level employees. The main findings of our paper are (1) all of the different dimensions of CEO pay were related to power distance, leading us to infer that CEO pay in a culture is most reflective of the strength of the power structure in a society, and (2) total compensation and the ratio of variable pay to total pay are related to individualism.We conclude that cultural dimensions can contribute to understanding cross-national CEO compensation. The implication of this conclusion is that there are different ways that CEO compensation fits into the cognitive schema of various cultures and, furthermore, that these cognitive schema vary across societies that affect the nature of the "cultural matrix into which [money] is incorporated" (Bloch and Parry 1989, p. 1). Moreover, our results imply that particular forms of CEO compensation do not mean the same thing in different cultures, but rather carry different symbolic connotations depending on the values dominant in a society. Thus, not only does the compensation structure of a firm within a culture have a symbolic meaning within organizations (e.g., Trice and Beyer 1993), but it can also be seen as an expression of deeper social values (Hofstede et al. 1990) that may differ across countries.
211 citations
TL;DR: A holistic understanding of how people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between different scales of value as mentioned in this paper, and attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the future has become synonymous with geographical mobility.
Abstract: Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people, the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This rethinking seeks to bring to center stage the complex ways in which people attempt to make life worth living for themselves and for future generations, involving not only waged labor but also structures of provisioning, investments in social relations, relations of trust and care, and a multitude of other forms of social action that mainstream economic models generally consider trivial, marginal, and often counterproductive. A holistic understanding of how people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between different scales of value. It is attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the future has become synonymous with geographical mobility. It is attentive to the fact that making a living is about making people in their physical, social, spiritual, affective, and intellectual dimensions.
210 citations
Cites background from "Introduction: money and the moralit..."
...Some of the most productive of the last half century have focused on the recognition that people simultaneously engage in different “spheres” or “regimes” of value in their daily life (Appadurai 1988a, 1988b; Bloch and Parry 1989; Bohannan 1959)....
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...Money figures centrally in the relationship between value calculation and morality (Bloch and Parry 1989; Gregory 1997; Guyer 2004; Hart 2000; Zelizer 1997)....
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TL;DR: Orientalism has been criticised for the distorted way that it constructs and presents alien societies as mentioned in this paper, with the focus on the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, 'them').
Abstract: Recently, anthropology has been criticized for the distorted way that it constructs and presents alien societies. While these criticisms have been made before (for example, in Asad 1973), the recent debate springs from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), a critical description of the discipline of Oriental studies. This discipline, like anthropology, has aimed to develop knowledge of a set of societies different from the Western societies that have been home to the scholars who have pursued that knowledge. Said's criticism is extensive, but central to it are two points about the image of the Orient that Western academics have produced and presented. First, that image stresses the Orient's radical separation from and opposition to the West. Second, that image invests the Orient with a timeless essentialism. Of radical separation and opposition, Said says that Orientalism presents an Orient "absolutely different . . . from the West," that Orientalists have "promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, 'them')" (1978:96, 43). Said identifies political and economic reasons for the concern with difference and opposition. However, he also points to a less contingent reason, saying that such concern helps "the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is closer to it and what is far away" (1978:55). Said's charge can be applied to much anthropology with little modification.1 Anthropology is the discipline that, more than any other, seeks out the alien, the exotic, the distant-as did Malinowski in the Trobriands and EvansPritchard among the Nuer. With political changes in the Third World, economic changes in Western universities, and intellectual changes in anthropology, this sort of research has become less possible and less necessary. However, for many anthropologists "real" research still seems to mean village fieldwork in exotic places (see, for example, Bloch 1988). Moreover, when anthropologists are exhorted to expand their disciplinary horizons, they are frequently told to look to history, which studies societies distant in time, not to sociology, which studies those close in place and time. When anthropologists do study Western societies, they are likely to focus on the marginal, the distant: rural villages in the Mediterranean basin, in Appalachia, on the Celtic fringe (see generally Herzfeld 1987).2 Of course some anthropologists do study central areas of life in industrial societies. Some recent published examples, drawn at random, include studies of notions of parenthood (Modell 1986), of the social nature
209 citations