ON SEPTEMBER 12, 2014, a group of scholars came together at the Yale Law School, the School of Management, and the Center for Cultural Sociology for the Money Talks Symposium, which we organized to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Social Meaning of Money (1994) by Viviana Zelizer. Daniel Markovits at the Law School proved to be an excellent co-convener. Participants included legal scholars, behavioral economists, economic anthropologists, social psychologists, political scientists, and economic and cultural sociologists, as well as historians who had developed or extended different aspects of Zelizer’s landmark book. They ranged from established leaders in their fields to some of the most innovative younger scholars working on money. They all welcomed this pioneering effort to engage in sustained dialogue across our disciplinary boundaries. None had previously encountered collaborative sites such as the one afforded by the symposium. All became fully engaged in discussions about different approaches to exploring money’s new forms and about policy-sensitive issues such as those involving low-income household finances as well as considerations of money’s moral impact.
We were deeply inspired by conversations that flourished at the Money Talks Symposium and left the conference with a firm belief that a broader audience should have an opportunity to benefit from these conversations. With this purpose in mind, fourteen essays were further developed specifically for this volume. In this process, it became inevitable to recruit Viviana Zelizer as our coeditor. While her book provided the impetus for the conference, let us note that the book that has emerged from that meeting is not a festschrift to Zelizer, as the chapters develop new approaches to our understandings of money, and aside from Bandelj and Wherry, none of the contributors are Zelizer’s former students or close collaborators. Moreover, we also found out about a meaningful conversation between Zelizer and her cherished collaborator and friend, Charles Tilly. A decade ago they had discussed editing a volume of the kind that we have now assembled. Building on Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money, their envisioned volume would, in fact, include some of the same authors that are now part of this project and would forge an interdisciplinary conversation.
Then, the idea for the Zelizer and Tilly volume was filed into a manila folder, reopened by Zelizer a decade later. The time for collaboration had come. The volume before you fulfills that early Zelizer/Tilly vision about money talking across disciplinary domains, which continues to brim with relevance today, as we expect it will for decades to come.
Nina Bandelj
Frederick F. Wherry
Irvine, California and New Haven, Connecticut, July 2016