50602 - Culture, Value(s), and Relationships in Economic Life

Description

This session explores how culture, value(s), and relationships infuse economic life. Papers examine how economic relationships and understandings are shaped by cultural meanings, values, and inequalities at a range of scales. Papers illuminating this theme include the following topics: how social and cultural shifts increased the social value of pets and propelled a burgeoning financialized pet economy; how legal inheritance disputes around non-normative intimate economic ties reinforced intersecting inequalities in Dallas in the early 1900s; how doomsday preppers assign value to particular currencies depending on their imagined futures and degree of social trust; the cultural and social meanings and values underlying the Mexican government’s disbursement of disaster and preservation monies; and how debt transfer networks between elite families and marginalized “debt bearers” in China in times of crisis subvert the social credit system while exacerbating inequality. The session as a whole builds on a rich sociological tradition interrogating the relational and cultural underpinnings of economic life, offering comparative and generalizable theoretical insights.

Sub Unit

• Economic Sociology

Presider

• Nicholas Aaron Pang, London School of Economics

Individual Presentations

• Debt Shifting: Networks of Debt Transfer Among Chinese Elite Families During the Financial Crisis - Jingjia Xiao, University of California-San Diego; qing Xiao

• The Meanings of Government Monies: Disaster Money and Historic Heritage Preservation Money in Mexico - Daniel G. Fridman, University of Texas-Austin; Eldad J Levy, Rollins College; Benjamin Ibarra Sevilla, University of Texas-Austin

• The Pet Economy - Nina Bandelj, University of California-Irvine; Yana Kuchirko, CUNY-Brooklyn College; Michelle Spiegel, Stanford University

• Unnatural Wills: Estate Litigation and Inequality - Shay O'Brien, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Valuing Uncertainty: Money, Value, and Imagined Futures among “Preppers” - Jonathan Nathaniel Redman, California State Polytechnic Univ-Pomona

Session Organizer

• Kathleen Griesbach, University of Texas-Austin