Ariel Wilkis

The Moral Power of Money

Morality and Economy in the Life of the Poor

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Ariel Wilkis is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) and Co-Director of the Center for Social Studies of Economics at the National University of San Mart¿ Argentina.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Dezember 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 147mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 386g
• ISBN-13: 9781503602861
• ISBN-10: 1503602869
• Artikelnr.: 47769452

Autorenporträt

Ariel Wilkis is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) and Co-Director of the Center for Social Studies of Economics at the National University of San Martín, Argentina.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Money and Moral Capital
chapter abstract
Money is an insightful way of understanding the relations between
macro-social processes and the experiences of the poor. Understanding these
dynamics helps to identify the current conditions for social integration
among those who have the least to benefit from processes like
globalization, financialization and neoliberalism. This book reveals that
sociology is interested in the social realities money helps to shape. Money
is morally ubiquitous because it has a hand in social orders, moral
hierarchies and power relations. No piece of money is more moral than the
next: all revolve around the efforts to establish, appropriate and
accumulate moral capital. Money appears as a conceptual and methodological
tool. This book offers a new focus for interpreting the multiple power
relations that configure the world of the poor. The moral dimension of
money plays a critical role in forging economic, class, political, gender
and generational bonds.
1Lent Money
chapter abstract
By examining how consumer credit began expanding to low-income sectors in
2003, this chapter unveils the moral hierarchies rooted in the circulation
of lent money. This chapter shows the moral ubiquity of money lent in
heterogeneous situations, both formal and informal where money circulates.
It also reveals how moral capital becomes a guarantee that sustains the
power relations at the core of these situations. For those with scarce
economic and cultural assets, the daily management of finances involves
fighting to have their values acknowledged. Moral capital is their
passport. However, like all forms of acknowledgment, it is rare and thus
can become a form of domination that some are forced to accept in order to
access the material benefits capitalism has to offer.
2Earned Money
chapter abstract
This chapter analyzes how the underground economy operates as a moral space
of income. This exploration will reveal the dynamics of questioning and
legitimizing what has to be done to earn money. The concept of moral
capital is a useful instrument for understanding how this piece circulates
or is taken out of circulation in response to a moral assessment of
people's actions. Having moral capital is the way in to these economic
transactions that are not regulated by law. Informal and illegal markets
are moral spaces where the legitimacy of money earned comes into play. To
get involved in these transactions, moral hierarchies are established among
participants and they are the also the prerequisites for successful
participation.
3Donated Money
chapter abstract
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become the paradigm of the
struggle against poverty. These programs have progressively expanded to
around thirty countries in the region that has come to be known as the
Global South. This expansion changed the household budgets of the poor and
became a focus of public debate. The use of money donated by the State
became a way to morally discredit the poor. This chapter reconstructed the
place of money donated by the state in different hierarchies of money. It
identifies the different strategies individuals use to elude the biases
associated with this type of money such as stigma cleansing rituals,
exclusion strategies and silence in response to such judgments. The
reconstructed scenes show how monetary hierarchies uphold power relations
among those who have the authority to judge and those who must acquiesce to
such biases.
4Political Money
chapter abstract
Through the processes of democratization in Argentina (and most of Latin
America) that began at the beginning of the 1980s, political scientists and
sociologists began examining money in political life through the financial
of political parties and the political clientelism. This chapter goes
beyond a narrative of money's instrumental use in politics. Has the
monetization of political activities dissolved values, commitments, and
loyalties among the poor? Is this corruption or an ethical exchange among
people who lack cash but possess moral capital? This chapter explores how
politics involves power relations that can be understood through the moral
dimension of money. This chapter shows how residents of a slum made
political money the accounting unit to acknowledge the fulfillment of
political obligations that bind leaders and their followers together in
relationships of power. To put it more succinctly, this community places
political money at the core of its collective life.
5Sacrifice Money
chapter abstract
This chapter narrates the competition between political and religious
leaders of Villa Olimpia. It shows how these power struggles are rooted in
the accumulation of moral capital associated with the pieces of money. Both
religious and political networks create social distinctions among their
members. While circulating, political and sacrificed money carry a series
of social orders and hierarchies of money that often overlap. Each piece is
indecipherable outside of the hierarchy of money and at the same time
projects a social hierarchy. Between the two pieces, there is fiery
competition for the range of objects and people involved. These two puzzle
pieces, regulated by specific systems of feelings and perspectives, compete
with one another.
6Safeguard Money
chapter abstract
The pieces of money produce a hierarchy among family members to determine
each family's ranking in the social order. The different pieces of money
form a unit that allows us to observe and understand the family universe.
On the one hand, they help us understand intergenerational relations. This
piece of money shows how people create and recreate the family social order
in the sphere of money, which involves both mutual assistance and
conflicts, helping complete family projects or tearing them apart. On the
other hand, they help us understand gender relations as well. Safeguarded
money's circulation carries gendered obligations. Poor women are viewed
positively when they safeguard their households both emotionally and
economically. In the hands of women money had to be used to guarantee
family continuity. Any other use of the money would be questionable,
transforming the safeguarded money into suspicious money.
Conclusion: Conclusion
chapter abstract
This book analyzes the way in which social orders founded on money come
into being. Each chapter of this book contributes to a better understanding
of the moral sociology of money, which in turn contributes to other areas
of knowledge within sociology. These contributions from the moral sociology
of money stem from an ethnographic reconstruction of the everyday life of
poor people who live in Villa Olimpia. This work identified and assembled
the pieces of money that best captured the dynamics of solidarity and
conflict that characterized social bonds. However, this book takes the
arguments, concepts and empirical evidence presented in the hope of
reimagining economic sociology outside Villa Olimpia and the world of the
poor. The moral sociology of money that is a theoretical and methodological
toolbox that can be applied to other social worlds, establishing bridges
with other areas of knowledge in sociology.