The Social Meaning of Money in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huey-ling Lee
Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 551-552
Author(s):  
Thomas Willard

Shakespeare is well known to have set two of his plays in and around Venice: The Merchant of Venice (1596) and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). The first is often remembered for its famous speech about “the quality of mercy,” delivered by the female lead Portia in the disguise of a legal scholar from the university town of Padua. The speech helps to spare the life of her new husband’s friend and financial backer against the claims of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. The play has raised questions for Shakespearean scholars about the choice of Venice as an open city where merchants of all nations and faiths would meet on the Rialto while the city’s Senate, composed of leading merchants, worked hard to keep it open to all and especially profitable for its merchants. Those who would like to learn more about the city’s development as a center of trade can learn much from Richard Mackenney’s new book.


1989 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviana A. Zelizer

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick F. Wherry

This article extends both Viviana Zelizer's discussion of the social meaning of money and Charles Smith's proposal that pricing is a definitional practice to the under-theorized realm of the social meanings generated in the pricing system. Individuals are attributed with calculating or not calculating whether an object or service is “worth” its price, but these attributions differ according to the individual's social location as being near to or far from a societal reference point rather than by the inherent qualities of the object or service purchased. Prices offer seemingly objective (quantitative) proof of the individual's “logic of appropriateness”—in other words, people like that pay prices such as those. This article sketches a preliminary but nonexhaustive typology of the social characterizations of individuals within the pricing system; these ideal types—the fool, the faithful, the frugal, and the frivolous—and their components offer a systematic approach to understanding prices as embedded in and constituents of social meaning systems.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Hayes

This study seeks to extend the social meaning of money to account for the valorization of distinct forms of household wealth, using the 401(k) retirement account as an exemplar. In doing so, particular economic shocks are framed within the disasters literature for the first time. The institutional shift from corporate pensions to individual retirement accounts since the 1980’s changed the social and economic logics of retirement, making this financial location salient, where shocks to the stock market reveal a distinct pattern of economic action. Using the 401(k) retirement account data, I show that bear market years in 2002 and 2008 caused retirement savers to orient their portfolios toward durable conservatism – a finding that deviates from predictions made by either neoclassical or behavioral economic theory. Rather, a sociological mechanism developed in the disasters literature – the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) – provides a plausible explanation for the empirical findings. Interestingly, the practical rule of conservation that works well for many disaster scenarios, for retirement savers creates an unfortunate discrepancy between the objective chances of retirement security and the subjective aspirations of 401(k) savers by causing underinvestment in stocks that can produce suboptimal portfolio returns manifesting itself as latent retirement inequality, especially impacting the youngest savers who have the most at stake.


Author(s):  
Nina Bandelj ◽  
Christoffer J. P. Zoeller

This chapter reviews the literature on cognition and social meaning in economic sociology, with special attention to the case of money. The first part discusses subfields related to economic sociology that have carved space for attention to the role of cognitive processes, or cognitive embeddedness, including the institutional logics, conceptions of control, and classification/categorization perspectives. The second part takes up one central economic object, money, to compare and contrast the behavioral economics perspective on mental accounting with the research on the social meaning of money and relational work, which emphasizes how money’s multiple meanings and forms influence the negotiation of social-economic relations.


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