Culture and the Economy

part ii THE ECONOMIC AS CULTURE 0001316365.INDD 115 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM 0001316365.INDD 116 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM   CULTURE AND THE ECONOMY carlo tognato Introduction A great variety of social theorists have repeatedly denounced the almost inexorable process of disenchantment within modern societies that allegedly leads technical rationality to progressively displace any non-instrumental cultural logic from social life1. Such a pessimistic understanding of modernity adds to a particularly grim picture of the economy. Supporters of this view, after all, consider that rational disenchantment has pushed furthest in the economic arena. The recent birth of the euro, they argue, provides a typical example of this. The euro, in the end, is a purely functional artifact—just money without identity: “No one loves it, all accept it” (Hörisch 2004, p. 122). If such a reading of the economy were correct, then romantics that entered the economic sphere after the spur of cultural reenchantment would be warned: “Abandon all your hope those who enter.” The reality of economic life, however, seems to point to a different direction. During the transition to the European Monetary Union, for example, a reader of the Financial Times summarized the reading as European governments made of the Maastricht criteria: “The difference between happiness and misery is a 0.2 per cent deficit of the gross domestic product! A 2.9 per cent deficit is fine and enables one to live in happiness and bliss, while a 3.1 per cent deficit condemns a country to chaos, misery, and eternal damnation.”2 On the occasion of the European Council meeting that launched the euro, in turn, the Portuguese Prime Minister saluted the new currency: “As Jesus Christ decided to found a church, he told Peter: ‘You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.’ Today we can say: ‘You are Euro, and upon this new currency, we will build 0001316365.INDD 117 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM 118 the economic as culture our Europe.’”3 Then, during the celebration of the appointment of the President and Vice-President of the European Central Bank, Hans Tietmeyer, then President of the Deutsche Bundesbank, one of the purest institutional distillates of modern technical rationality, addressed an audience of bankers and public officials with a prayer of Sarastos, high priest of Ancient Egypt.4 Finally, in a scientific colloquium, Otmar Issing, then Chief Economist of the Deutsche Bundesbank, confessed that any appointee to the Board of the Bundesbank experiences a transformation of his own identity that is comparable to the one Thomas Beckett underwent when Henry II appointed him Archibishop of Canterbury. Beckett turned into a strenuous defender of the Church’s interests, dared contradict the Crown of which he had been till then a faithful servant, and took up his new responsibilities to the point of accepting martyrdom (Issing 1991, pp. 7–8). These examples seem to suggest that cultural codes, metaphors, rituals, and identities still matter in the modern economy. Rational disenchantment, as a consequence, might be less pervasive than many social theorists would have us believe. Economists have traditionally underplayed the role of culture in the economy, fearing that cultural explanations would sacrifice the profession’s commitment to testable hypotheses (Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales 2006). In the past two decades, however, the establishment of a neo-institutionalist tradition within economics has marked a clear departure in this respect (North 1990, 1994). By drawing on the work of Banfield (1958), Putman (1993), and Fukuyama (1995), economists have started to systematically recognize the influence of culture on trust and hence on economic performance (Landes 1993; Knack and Keefer 1996; La Porta, et al. 1997). Economic sociology, in turn, has experienced in the past three decades a vibrant revival. During this period, a culturalist strand of scholarship has persistently claimed that culture has not at all been squeezed out of the market. On the contrary, it actively participates to shape economic action and even makes it viable. Still, its contributors could have pushed their cultural analysis even further. In this chapter, I will discuss how far they went and what they possibly missed. Doing so will provide a clearer picture of the intellectual mission of a cultural sociology of the economy, its theoretical horizon, and its pragmatic relevance in times of economic crisis. With particular reference to this latest point, I will suggest, people today are starting to doubt whether an economic profession that could not anticipate or prevent the current crisis will be able to repair it. Corporations across all industrial sectors are involved in scandals that are dangerously undermining the confidence of the public. And central banks are being forced to bring down interest rates to a level at which monetary policy simply becomes powerless before deflationary pressures. Soon enough, as deflation deepens and unemployment lines get longer and longer, the general public will start to wonder whether it is time to do away with independent central banks whose single-minded institutional task—the control of inflation—has suddenly passed out of fashion. At this historical juncture, economists and economic institutions may undergo a crisis of confidence with unpredictable consequences on the economic system. Scholars have a moral obligation to offer fresh insights into the mechanisms that sustain public confidence or help 0001316365.INDD 118 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM culture and the economy 119 to repair it. I will argue that a cultural sociology of the economy is specifically equipped to contribute in this respect. Over the past three decades, the culturalist strand of scholarship within economic sociology has tended to restrict its horizon of observation on single institutional settings. By putting the question of confidence and legitimacy at its analytical core, and by taking scandals as its primary empirical focus, a cultural sociology of the economy, instead, attempts to overcome the “middle range malaise” of such scholarship by concentrating on the connections between institutional settings on the one hand and the central myths that underpin the functioning of the economy on the other. Functionalists did try to push in this direction, but the analytical horizon of their value sociology fell short of letting them appreciate the full role of myth and ritual in economic life. A cultural sociology of the economy, on the contrary, capitalizes on the richer understanding of cultural structures and practices sociologists have gained since the demise of Parsonsian sociology. Before proceeding, I will lay out the structure of this chapter. I will start by briefly tracking the precursors of a cultural analysis of economic life within classical sociological theory. Then, I will do the same with reference to contemporary economic sociology. This will allow me to show in what way a cultural sociology of the economy builds on both sociologies, while at the same time distancing itself from them in important ways. After pinning down the intellectual vocation and the theoretical horizon of a cultural sociology of the economy, I will devote the second part of this chapter toward grounding its pragmatic relevance. A cultural sociology of the economy, I will suggest, promises to contribute to the advancement of three fields of inquiry that have experienced an exciting development in the past three decades— the literature on organizational legitimacy, on the sociology of financial markets, and on the sociology of money. Pushing the research frontier of these three literatures ahead into a more decisively culturalist direction will enable sociologists to tackle three of the most pressing problems that loom on the horizon of the current world economic crisis: the loss of confidence on the part of the general public for private corporations, the economic profession, and independent central banks. Classical Sources of a Cultural Sociology of the Economy Different classical sources provide a fertile ground from which a cultural sociology of the economy can draw for the purpose of nurturing its intellectual project. Economic sociologists have traditionally included Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, and Polanyi among their classics. These are important referents also for a cultural sociology of the economy, as well, although the later Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life tends to be far more important for cultural sociologists than for economic sociologists. Recently, Swedberg (2004) has recognized Alexandre de 0001316365.INDD 119 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM 120 the economic as culture Toqueville as an important classic in economic sociology. I will here suggest that Toqueville also deserves equal recognition within a cultural sociology of the economy. By directly addressing the cultural linkages between democracy and capitalism, after all, the French thinker touched on one of the core research interests of this field of inquiry that, I will argue, makes it most useful under the current historical circumstances. At a time when economists and major economic institutions run the risk of losing the confidence of the public as a result of the ongoing world economic crisis, shedding light over such linkages may help understand how to maintain and, if necessary, how to repair such confidence. Bearing this in mind, I will only briefly touch on the contributions of Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, and Polanyi that are most relevant for the construction of a cultural sociology of the economy and dwell instead a little bit longer on Toqueville’s Democracy in America, which has traditionally received lesser attention in economic sociology. Economic sociologists generally tend to emphasize the early Durkheim of The Division of Labour in Society, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, and Suicide. A cultural sociology of the economy definitely values the early Durkheim’s references to the autonomous role collective beliefs and morality respectively play in the emergence of private property and in the maintenance of contractual obligations. The later Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, however, is a much more crucial reference for a cultural sociology of the economy. Recently, Smelser and Swedberg (2005, pp. 10–11) have referred to it while stressing the central role morality plays in Durkheim’s economic sociology. Still, they do so in a rather tangential way. A cultural sociology of the economy, instead, places The Elementary Forms at its core. After all, people invest economic life with sentiment and meaning, and their understanding of economic reality is mediated by the collective representations of that reality. As a result, Durkheim’s analysis of the ritual mechanisms by which people establish shared meaning becomes especially critical. Max Weber constitutes another central referent for any cultural sociologist committed to recover the autonomous influence of culture on economic life. His conception of economic action as inherently meaningful and his extensive work on the economic ethics of Protestantism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Judaism constitute an important resource on which cultural sociologists can build (Weber [1922] 1978, [1904] 1998, [1915] 1946a, [1920] 1946b, [1946] 1971). A cultural sociology of the economy, though, will distance itself from Weber’s tragic thesis on the disenchantment of modernity and will instead strive to systematically recognize the instances of cultural reenchantment in modern economic life. Talcott Parsons, together with Neil Smelser, are other important referents for a cultural sociology of the economy. Their exploration of the boundary exchanges between the economy and the cultural-motivational subsystem spurs cultural sociologists to think of the role of culture in economic life in more systemic terms. Parson and Smelser’s Economy and Society (1956) as well as Smelser’s (1963, 1976) subsequent work in economic sociology, however, did not manage to relevantly impact the subfield. For a cultural sociology of the economy, their attention to the 0001316365.INDD 120 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM culture and the economy 121 role of norms and values in economic life is surely important but falls short of being sufficient. After all, symbols, cultural codes, narratives, genres, and cultural practices as well deserve to be considered. Karl Polanyi, in turn, has become particularly fashionable among economic sociologists since the birth of the new economic sociology, which has borrowed from him the concept of “embeddedness” (Polanyi [1944] 1957, [1957] 1971; Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson [1957] 1971). Polanyi attacks neoclassical economics for its formalism and for conceiving the economy as a process that is totally disembedded from institutional and cultural contexts. Instead, he points out, economic activities and institutions are embedded in noneconomic motives and institutions, and, therefore, social and institutional contexts in the end permeate the logic of meansends (Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson [1957] 1971). Polanyi further develops this thesis as he discusses his typology of exchange relations—reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange. The first two, he suggests, are embedded in social relations (Polanyi [1944] 1957, p. 46). In particular, reciprocity builds on friendship, kinship, among other different social ties, whereas redistribution relies on other political and religious underpinnings. On the other hand, the other pattern of integration—market exchange—is guided according to Polanyi only by the pursuit of gain: “A market economy is an economic system controlled, regulated, and directed by markets alone; order in the production and distribution of goods is entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism” (Polanyi [1944] 1957, p. 68). Economic sociologists have recently criticized such a conclusion and have shown, instead, that market exchange as well is embedded into noneconomic norms and institutions (Lie 1991). A cultural sociology of the economy surely coincides with such a reading of this important classic. Swedberg (2004, p. 3) has recently argued that Toqueville’s Democracy in America deserves a place among the classics in economic sociology. His book, after all, provides an important complement to Weber’s Protestant Ethics. On the one hand, Toqueville shows that consumerism, rather than ascetism, was an important building block of the American religious practices and that the endless drive among Americans to consume more and more without ever being fully satisfied5 crucially contributed to keep the American economy dynamic. On the other hand, Toqueville reminds us that the American Christian tradition managed to exercise some control over consumerism, thereby avoiding the anomie and the anxiety that an endless pursuit of unsatisfiable desires would otherwise trigger within the population (Swedberg 2004, p. 18). In short, the spirit of American capitalism according to Toqueville could build both on the spirit of American traditional religion and on the spirit of freedom that characterizes American civilization (Tocqueville 1956, p. 43; in Swedberg 2004, p. 27). These elements in Toqueville’s analysis are clearly relevant for a cultural sociology of the economy, as well. I would argue, though, that Democracy in America deserves its inclusion among the classics of this field even more because of Toqueville’s analysis of the linkages between American democracy and American capitalism. According to Toqueville, a free democratic society leads to a vibrant 0001316365.INDD 121 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM 122 the economic as culture economy. Democracies cultivate an ideal of the individual—rational and calm— that is particularly suitable to the market arena. They stimulate the creation of voluntary organizations, thereby developing those organizational skills that are so valuable in the economy. They make people comfortable with chance and uncertainty, a necessary disposition to survive in the market arena. And they orient their citizens toward the present rather than the past as in aristocratic societies or than the future as among the followers of religion. Such orientation, in turn, positively contributes to sustain market activities. Teasing out, as Toqueville does, the values and cultural practices that democracy and capitalism have in common is one first step toward a comprehensive understanding of the cultural linkages between democracy and the capitalist economy. What is missing, though, is an acknowledgment that democracy occupies a central position in modern societies that turns it into a pillar of collective identity. As a result, linkages between democracy and the economy are not only conducive to enhance functional performance in the economic arena, but also help to shift the economy and its institutions to the center, root them into collective identity, and make them more robust as a consequence of their cultural reenchantment. After referring to the five classics, a cultural sociology of the economy would be well advised to refer to for inspiration. I will now consider the body of scholarship within contemporary economic sociology that has systematically pursued a cultural analysis of economic life. This literature, after all, provides the launching pad from which a cultural sociology of the economy can take off. Cultural Analysis in Contemporary Economic Sociology In the course of the 1980s, a new economic sociology, built on Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness (Polanyi [1944] 1971, 1957), took shape. This new research program set out to recover the role of social relations in market processes. The works of White (1981) on production markets as role structures: Burt (1983) on networks and market competition; Baker (1984) on the social structure of securities markets; and Granovetter (1974, 1985) on social ties in labor markets set the beginning of this research tradition. Later, its contributors made an effort to complement the early structural orientation of the field. Baker, for example, added interactionism to White’s network perspective (Baker and Faulkner 1991). Podolny (1993) focused on status order and positions rather than roles in the analysis of production markets. Fligstein (1996) complemented the embeddedness approach with the cultural frame perspective. And Granovetter (1990a, pp. 108–110; 1990b, pp. 95–106) made an effort to bring Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) constructivism into the network approach (Swedberg 1997, p. 165). More recently, Carruthers and Babb (2000) have accepted that “modern markets are filled with meaning.” Therefore, to understand production 0001316365.INDD 122 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM culture and the economy 123 and consumption, it is necessary to take stock of the systems of cultural meaning in which they are embedded. This later turn on the part of Carruthers and Babb (2000) appears to make an effort to respond to those critics who have complained that previous efforts to bring culture into the horizon of the new economic sociology have not gone far enough (Lie 1997; Zukin and DiMaggio 1990; Nee and Ingram 1998; Krippner 2001). In particular, according to Krippner (2001), the social embeddedness approach that sprung out of Granovetter’s seminal work did away with the very social relations it meant to recover and focused exclusively on the structure of the ties. As a result, neither their social content nor their different meanings played any role. On such ground, Krippner concludes, the new economic sociology has not met its promise of recognizing, along with Polanyi, that the study of economic life calls for the analysis of the concrete institutions that shape economic practice and that “markets, even in ideal form, are not the expression of primal, timeless instincts; they are rather fully social institutions, reflecting a complex alchemy of politics, culture, and ideology” (Krippner 2001, p. 782). While new economic sociologists have apparently run into such difficulties, a culturalist strand of scholarship within economic sociology has instead managed to strike a more effective balance between social-structural and cultural analysis. Different contemporary anthropologists, cultural historians and cultural studies specialists, mostly working on consumption and money, have served as a source of inspiration for this literature (Douglas 1967; Geertz 1973; Sahlins 1976; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Crump 1981; Agnew 1986; Appadurai 1986; Reddy 1984; Taussig 1986; Miller 1987). Karin Knorr Cetina, Mitchel Abolafia, Nicole Biggart, and Viviana Zelizer are possibly the four most accomplished contributors to this line of research. Karin Knorr Cetina is one of the leading figures of a new field of inquiry—the sociology of finance—that has emerged over the past decade out of a fruitful convergence between economic sociology and the social studies of science. Unlike the other three major contributors to the culturalist strand within economic sociology, her work has a markedly phenomenological character. Global currency markets, she observes, are “collective disembodied systems generated entirely in a symbolic space” (Knorr 2005, p. 38). The global world they contribute to bring about is delivered to its participants by a “constellation of technical, visual, and behavioral components packaged together on financial screens.” Such screens, she insists, are not windows on physically different realities. They are the reality of financial markets. They are the core of the market and most of its context (Knorr 2005, p. 45). Through the screens the market “brings out its life-like depth. . . . As an omnipresent complex ‘Other’, the market on screen takes on a presence and a profile in its own right with its own self-assembling and self-integrating features” (Knorr 2005, p. 48). By focusing on the interaction between human and nonhuman actants, Knorr Cetina opens up a fascinating window into the lifeworld of financial markets. One gets the impression, though, that the horizon of meaning she adopts for the purpose of capturing such a lifeworld is too narrow to account for the semantic richness 0001316365.INDD 123 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM 124 the economic as culture of some of her ethnographic material. For example, in one occasion she observes that “when traders arrive in the morning, they strap themselves to their seats, figuratively speaking” (Knorr 2005, p. 44). Abolafia finds in his ethnography of Wall Street that traders compare themselves with fighter-jet pilots. If this is the case, then their strapping to their seats is a bit more than just figurative. Rather, it echoes a dimension of their lifeworld that apparently escapes Knorr Cetina’s horizon of interpretation. In her study with Urs Bruegger on the foreign exchange market in Zurich, in turn, she remarks that sex and violence permeate the vocabulary by which traders describe their relation to the market (Knorr and Bruegger 2000, p. 154). References to sex and violence have traditionally characterized military talk and therefore appear to be consistent with the finding that traders see themselves as fighter-jet pilots. If this is the case, one may start to wonder whether the morning after a particularly “bloody” day of trading, traders will get back to their computers and feel they “love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Or alternatively, whether in the course of a coordinated attack against a currency, they will hear the trumpets of Wagner’s Walkiries. If one believes that meaning is not just the endogenous product of a given setting of interaction but rather has a citational character, then one will be bound to expand the horizon of interpretation in order to correctly pin down the lifeworld of a given object of analysis. For the case at hand, this implies that scholars will have to push the analysis much further in order to capture the cultural embeddedness of trading. Doing so will enable them to track the spurs of those intertextual references that might pin down the “global” lifeworld of financial markets to specific cultural contexts. And this could ultimately give away the fact that what appears to be global might be in the end just a prolongation of some cultural specificity. Like Knorr Cetina, Mitchel Abolafia has worked on financial markets. In his 1996 ethnography, Making Markets (1996), the author shows in what ways the exercise of self-interest within three different trading floors reflects a panoply of local institutional and cultural mechanisms—the “elaborate occupational cultures that prescribe manners, attitudes, and styles of play,” the “scripts defining who can play and how the game should be played,” and the broader cultural horizon within which such scripts are embedded (Abolafia 1996, p. 231). While recognizing that trading is a deep play in which there is much more at stake than just money (Abolafia 1996, p. 17), Abolafia clearly draws from Geertz (1973). Still, this is not the only inspiration the author draws from anthropology. Victor Turner’s notion of social drama, as well, helps him pin down the cultural structure that underpins the unfolding of Michael Milken’s scandal, which he discusses at the end of his book. His analysis of the dramatic dimensions of such a scandal, however, never gets him as far as taking a performative turn in his study. His discussion of the scandal also sheds light over the limits of his approach to the analysis of cultural embeddedness. For example, when Milken justifies financial innovation as a means to overcome discrimination among entrepreneurs with regard to access to funding, Abolafia does not seem to hear the echo in Milken’s argument of that discourse of the American civil society within which the principle 0001316365.INDD 124 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM culture and the economy 125 of equality among citizens is inscribed, and which constitutes the cultural horizon within which Milken may have possibly articulated his argumentative strategy. Surely, Abolafia accounts to some important extent for the cultural embeddedness of trading and pushes it far enough to capture the linkages between trading and other fields of action like gambling and combat, which in turn lead traders to compare themselves with fighter pilots and professional athletes—disciplined, coolheaded, focused, and emotionally distant (Abolafia 1996, p. 18). Yet, he does not seem to count on a clear analytical criterion that enables him to decide how far one should push the analysis in order to adequately account for the cultural embeddedness of the object under inquiry. Finally, Abolafia draws from Swidler’s (1986, p. 284) understanding of culture as “a repertoire of capacities from which varying strategies of action may be constructed.” However, since Abolafia shows that identities and emotions also play an important role in the way traders carry out their job, one wonders whether a deeply instrumental and totally malleable understanding of culture can actually reflect their experience. After all, one would expect that the internal logic of culture and the emotional investments traders make on particular cultural scripts would increase their rigidity and therefore their autonomous effects on traders’ actions. Together with Knorr Cetina and Abolafia, Nicole Biggart is one of the most accomplished contributors to the culuralist strand within economic sociology. In her Charismatic Capitalism (1989), Biggart uses a Weberian framework to show that modern capitalism has allowed the survival of organizational forms such as directselling organizations that seem to have escaped the iron-cage logic of rational disenchantment. Such organizations, she points out, are charisma-based rather than legal-rational. They allow and foster cooperative rather competitive relations within their staff. They encourage rather than repress emotions on the part of their members. And they use social networks to reach their business goals rather than cutting them off. In her analysis of direct-selling organizations, Biggart devotes her attention to the role values, collective representations and beliefs, narratives, and rituals play in their operation. Echoing Toqueville’s insights on the spirit of American capitalism, she observes that in the nineteenth century Protestant ethics in America got twisted, and wealth was no longer seen as a sign of God but rather as a result of individual accomplishment and character. On such ground, meritocracy, initiative, and perseverance were positively valued and ended up by constituting the core set of values that still inspires direct-selling organizations. After pinpointing the ethics that underpin the operations of such organizations, Biggart could have addressed the cultural codes that most directly inspire such values. Alexander and Smith (1993), and Alexander (2006) would provide a neat basis to start from. Instead, she pursues, in a different direction, the analysis of collective representations and beliefs as well as the narratives that set them in motion. For example, the author shows that the idea of family structures both identities and actions within direct-selling organizations (Biggart 1989, p. 14) Kinship terms, as a result, describe work relations as between daughter-dealers and mother-managers. Meetings are represented as family 0001316365.INDD 125 7/14/2011 4:26:36 PM 126 the economic as culture reunions. And home parties, where the selling is conducted, are referred to as dates. Apart from family, religion also provides a constellation of metaphors that contribute to structure the experience of direct-selling organizations. For example, their members attribute a transformational power to the products they sell to the point that they “obscure the financial transaction that in fact is taking place: they present themselves as direct-selling companies that paradoxically do not sell” (Biggart 1989, p. 116). Quite interestingly, while Biggart refers to Douglas and Isherwood’s work on the anthropology of consumption to discuss the transformation in meaning that products undergo in direct-selling organizations, she does not push her analysis to the point of systematically discussing the performative dimensions of such a process and therefore the elements that influence its authenticity. Despite that, Biggart’s analysis goes as far as hinting at performance when she addresses the ritual dimensions of direct-selling organizations. For example, she points out, public confessional rituals set the stage for witnessing the transformation of the self members of direct-selling organizations undergo as they grow within such organizations. Also, public celebrations serve as rituals in which the miraculous powers of leaders get reaffirmed. Together with Knorr Cetina, Biggart, and Abolafia, Viviana Zelizer is another outstanding contributor to the culturalist strand within economic sociology. Surely, she is the scholar who has carried out such an approach with the greatest coherence over the longest period of time (Zelizer 1979, 1985, 1994, 2005). Zelizer’s analysis successfully integrates cultural with structural analysis. To explain the emergence of the American insurance industry; or the social construction of the economically useless and yet emotionally priceless child between 1870 and 1930 in America; or the changing social meanings of money, Zelizer takes stock both with the effects of cultural frames as well as of class and family structures. All along in her career, Zelizer has stressed the importance of overcoming the “mythology” within economic sociology that conceives two hostile worlds—one of rationality, efficiency, and impersonality, on the one side, and one of self-expression, cultural richness, and intimacy, on the other—which are crucial to keep separate in order to avoid mutual corruption. At the same time, her work must be commended for resisting the temptation to reduce economic phenomena to economic calculation culture, or power and for insisting that “we have no choice but to pave crossroads connecting continuously negotiated, meaning-drenched social relations with the whole range of economic processes” (Zelizer 2005a, p. 349).6 Finally, it is important to remember Zelizer’s insistence, particularly in her later works, on one pragmatic point. By vindicating the salience of culture in modern economic life, a culturesensitive economic sociology will not be doomed to marginality. Instead, it will be able to add value to the analysis of important macroeconomic phenomena that economists have not quite fully grasped. Although Zelizer is particularly vocal on this point, immediate pragmatic relevance is apparently also one of the characterizing features of the contributions by Biggart and Abolafia to the culturalist strand of economic sociology that distinguishes their work from the culture-sensitive work of other sociologists. 0001316365.INDD 126 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 127 Zelizer’s work has systematically shed light over the pervasive intrusion of different cultural logics into the market sphere. In this sense, she has contributed to the line of research within sociology that has been vindicating for the margin for cultural reenchantment in modern life. Also, she has paid constant attention to the cultural embeddedness of economic action. Like Abolafia, however, it is unclear whether she relies on a clear analytical criterion that helps her decide whether her analysis of cultural embeddedness has gone sufficiently far and how far ahead it could possibly push. Without making such a criterion explicit, the reader cannot decide whether her treatment of cultural embeddedness is sufficiently encompassing. Finally, Zelizer acknowledges that economic phenomena can undergo a process of cultural transformation that is mediated both by culture and social structure. Still, she does not directly address the contingency and the instability of such a process nor does she explicitly tackle it as a matter of cultural performance. The need for a performative turn in her analysis cannot but be all the more urgent as her research moves into the field of economic ethics. Zelizer (2007, p. 9) has recently stressed the importance for sociology to understand how ethical questions arise in economic life, what their distinctive properties are, how economic actors respond to them, what produces violations, and what effects such responses have on economic performance. To answer such questions, she continues, it is not sufficient to look at the work moral philosophers, feminist thinkers, economists, and economic sociologists have produced in their studies of professions, crime, inheritance, consumption, care, and corruption. Rather, it is necessary to examine the relationship between general ethical contexts and the specific forms of code organizations adopt. “National ethical traditions,” after all, “shape contrasting approaches to both the construction and the contents of formal ethical codes” (Zelizer 2007, p. 20). Still, the scripts people resort to in order to come across as economically ethical are only part of the story. Discursive competence is not sufficient to come across as authentically committed to ethical behavior in the economic arena. Actors, instead, need to be performatively competent in this respect. This is why a performative turn in Zelizer’s most recent research agenda is all the more urgent. Outline of a Cultural Sociology of the Economy The debate among economic sociologists over the opportunity to introduce cultural analysis within their horizon of inquiry has traditionally focused on the question of whether cultural analysis should replace social-structural analysis or whether it should complement it. Zelizer, for example, has advocated for the latter. Similarly, DiMaggio distanced himself from a full-scale cultural analysis of the economy and has suggested instead that economic sociology “should include a ‘cultural’ component—but not more” (DiMaggio 1994, p. 27). 0001316365.INDD 127 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM 128 the economic as culture The narrow focus of such a debate has prevented the profession from systematically discussing how scholars should go about accounting for the cultural dimension of economic life. Should they take a cultural-structural approach? Or should they rather adopt a pragmatic focus? Or, alternatively, should they resort to a framework that integrates both perspectives? Furthermore, taking stock with the role of culture in the economy implies addressing the phenomenon of cultural embeddedness of economic action. So, how far should scholars push the analysis of such a phenomenon? And where should they draw the line? These are the basic theoretical questions that structure the core of a cultural sociology of the economy. In this section, I will argue that the emerging field of neo-Durkheimian sociology, which in the past two decades has systematically addressed the phenomenon of cultural reenchantment in modern societies, can provide one possible set of answers to such questions. Answering them, I will suggest, will help distinguish the inner theoretical makeup of a cultural sociology of the economy from the culturalist strand of scholarship within economic sociology. To make my point, I will proceed by steps. I will start by showing how the later Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life can help make sense of cultural reenchantment in modern societies, and what the limits of Durkheim’s analytical framework are in this respect. This will allow me to introduce the neo-Durkheimian extension of his framework. Then, after teasing out the main analytical features of neo-Durkheimian analysis, I will be able to draw its implications with respect to the two questions I have introduced at the beginning of this section: how to study the cultural dimension of economic life, and how to go about the study of cultural embeddedness. Traditional communities constituted the main focus of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Still, the author explicitly envisaged the possibility of applying his framework to the analysis of social life in modern societies. After all, as Smith and Alexander (2005, p. 26) have recently acknowledged, Durkheim considered that the internal patterning of religious life and social organization in modern societies are homologous. He stressed the power and compulsion that characterizes both religious and social symbols. He showed that value-conflicts in modern societies get transfigured into an agonic struggle between the sacred and the profane. He recognized that actors still move to avoid pollution and to restore purity. And finally, he acknowledged the lasting power of the ritual in modern societies for the purpose of establishing solidarities. In other words, to put it with Alexander (1988, p. 177), Durkheim did not merely lay out a sociology of religion but rather put forward a religious sociology that used religion as a metaphor to understand society. Since the 1980s, a neo-Durkheimian tradition has emerged within sociological theory that has systematically applied Durkheim’s “religious sociology” to the study of different spheres of social life in modern societies (Smith and Alexander 2005, p. 14). As the research tradition consolidated, though, the limits of Durkheim’s framework have become increasingly apparent. Scholars have recognized that, as a result of structural differentiation, and due to conflict, competition, and reflexivity, social integration in modern societies is much more fragile and contingent than 0001316365.INDD 128 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 129 Durkheim envisaged. The experience of meaning is much less immediate as a result of its being mediated by drama and contrivance. These differences have led Smith and Alexander (2005, p. 26) to suggest that drawing a straightforward homology from Durkheim between traditional and modern societies is “not enough and too much.” As a consequence, neo-Durkheimians have had to resort to a more general analytical framework that enables them to approach modern social life as a cultural accomplishment without reducing its contingency and its instability. Alexander’s latest macrosociological theory of social action as performance has provided a powerful tool in this respect (Alexander 2006). On such a ground neo-Durkheimians have been able to argue that modern societies—to put it with Shils (1975)—still have a sacred center that works as their “ultimate and irreducible” transcendent core. They have been able to acknowledge that at the symbolic level all spheres of social life are still latently linked to the center and that whenever social action moves to the center, it can rise above the profane realm of routine function and partake in the sacredness of collective identity. This is what according to neo-Durkheimians makes cultural reenchantment possible in modern societies. On the other hand, they have recognized that for social action to move to the center, cultural linkages must be turned on effectively, and this constitutes a highly unstable performative accomplishment. These considerations bear two important analytical implications. First, taking stock of the cultural embeddedness of social action implies accounting for the rich web of cultural linkages that latently anchor it to the center.7 To adequately deal with cultural embeddedness, as a result, analysts must consider the center as their relevant horizon of interpretation. Second, since cultural reenchantment crucially depends on the effectiveness of the linkages—and since this is a matter of cultural performance—neither a purely cultural-structuralist nor a purely action-oriented framework is suitable to capture that. Rather, one must resort to one framework that integrates both perspectives. Alexander’s cultural pragmatics satisfies such a requirement. These conclusions surely provide an answer to the two basic theoretical questions that stand at the core of a cultural sociology of the economy. At the same time, though, it raises a new question that falls beyond the analytical horizon of the culturalist strand of scholarship within economic sociology. What stands at the sacred center of modern societies, after all? According to Alexander, democracy constitutes an important building block of the center and therefore contributes to define the identity of modern societies. Democracy, he maintains, is not just a set of technical rules. Rather, it is “a world of great and idealizing expectations, but also overwhelming feelings of disgust and condemnation.” This world, he insists, is articulated through “a transcendental language of sacred values of the good and profane symbols of evil” (Alexander 2006, p. 4), “a historically contingent final vocabulary,” to put it with Rorty (1989, pp. 190–192), by means of which people express what brings them together and what sets them apart (Alexander 2006, p. 56). Such a language consists of “a highly generalized symbolic system that divides civic virtue from civic vice in a remarkably stable and consistent 0001316365.INDD 129 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM 130 the economic as culture way.” Its general structure can be isolated and approached as “a relatively autonomous symbolic form” (p. 56). Alexander and Smith (1993) and subsequently Alexander (2006) show that such structure can be represented as a system of binary attributes that define legitimate and illegitimate motivations, social relations and institutions in democratic societies. Such cultural codes, in the end, are a core building block of the sacred center of modern societies. Baiocchi (2006) has recently shown that alternative discourses may compete against that of civil society in the makeup of the symbolic center of democratic societies. For example, in the specific case of Brazil, he shows that the codes of liberty and repression, based on the liberal tradition, must compete against a corporatist code that draws from a nonliberal political culture in which the collective primes over the individual. If the analysis of the above-mentioned authors is correct, then it is possible to conclude that in modern secular societies, different spheres of social life, for example, the economy, are latently linked to a sacred symbolic center. Such a center is structured by the discourses of political legitimation citizens resort to in order to determine who is in and deserves the solidarity of the other fellow citizens and who is out and can therefore be neglected. Alexander’s codes of liberty and repression, Baiocchi’s corporatist code, or Tognato and Cuellar’s codes of the patron and the populace are the cultural structures that can makeup the center of democratic societies at different stages of modernization. Understanding the meaning of economic action will therefore require that the analyst takes stock with the immediate cultural context within which economic action is embedded; but also on the one hand with the rich network of symbolic linkages that latently connect economic action to the cultural codes at the center and on the other with the performative conditions that turn such linkages effective. Such considerations help better qualify the topography that underpins Spillman’s (1999) map of a cultural sociology of the economy. According to Spillman (1999, p. 1047), such a field should concentrate on the analysis of three phenomena: the cultural construction of the objects of market exchange, the cultural construction of parties to market exchange, and finally the cultural construction of the norms of exchange. The literature on consumer culture (Tomlison 1990, Biernacki 1995) and the sociology of the state literature (Pusey 1991), as Spillman (1999, p. 1054) points out, have addressed the first phenomenon, that is, the commodification of previously uncommodified spheres. Still, Spillman continues, it is necessary to systematically account for such a process as one of contested reframing, as Zelizer (1985) did with reference to life insurance and Frenzen, Hirsch, and Zerillo (1994) did with regard to the transformation of debt into the socially more acceptable consumer credit. The cultural construction of the parties to market exchange, in turn, she adds, needs to be approached in terms of construction of a peculiar kind of imagined community (Anderson 1991). Cultural sociologists can help in this respect by shedding light over the relevant cultural boundaries: how they change and how they get redesigned. “The idea of imagined community,” she insists, “should be used to extend the notion of embeddedness typically understood in terms of structural 0001316365.INDD 130 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 131 dimensions of network” (Spillman 1999, p. 1058). Finally, she concludes, a cultural sociology of the economy must take stock with the plurality of logics of action and of vocabularies of motive that permeate market exchange.8 This implies tracking the norms, the narratives, and the rituals that underpin and help legitimize it (Spillman 1999, pp. 1061–1062). According to Spillman, three literatures have contributed to this respect: that of state/market relations (Carruthers 1996; Dobbin 1994; Fligstein 1996; Pusey 1991); consumer society and on advertising (Frenzen, Hirsch, and Zerillo 1994; Tomlison 1990) and the meaning of money (Zelizer 1994; Carruthers and Espeland 1997). Now, looking at Spillman’s map with neo-Durkheimian lenses will help realize that the three lines of inquiry she identifies are no isolated basins. Rather, their waters flow from the very same source—the sacred center of society. Distance from, and connection with, the center are in the end the topographic principles that organize such a map. After briefly laying out the central features of a cultural sociology of the economy, it is now possible to refer back to the authors I presented in the previous two sections and identify the main points of difference and contact between them. I will start with the classics. A cultural sociology of the economy builds on the late Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life but does not stop there. Rather, it follows the interpretative stream from Durkheim through Parsons, Shils, and Douglas to the neo-Durkheimian tradition that emerged in the 1980s and extended Durkheim’s analytical framework to better fit modern complex differentiated societies. Also, a cultural sociology of the economy is sympathetic with a systemic perspective that is keen to systematically track the boundary exchanges between the economy and the other spheres of social life. After all, if this were not the case, the field would not be interested in taking into consideration the rich network of symbolic linkages that connects the economy with the sacred center of society. This constitutes a point of contact with the Economy and Society perspective Parsons and Smelser advocated. On the other hand, the focus on the symbolic and the performative marks a clear departure from the value sociology that underpins Parsons and Smelser’s economic sociology. With reference to Weber, in turn, a cultural sociology of the economy shows that economic life in modern societies is still linked to powerful sources of charisma that occasionally get turned on. Under such circumstances, economic interaction is transformed into a matter of collective identity and acquires the features that flow from the sacred. A cultural sociology of the economy relies on an analytical criterion that makes it possible to determine how far the analysis of cultural embeddedness of economic action should push. This enables cultural sociologists to meet Polanyi’s invitation to adequately address the embeddedness of economic action and economic institutions. On the other hand, unlike Polanyi, the field does not consider that the deepening of a capitalist economy necessarily implies a disembedding effect from social life. Market exchange, instead, is firmly embedded into culture. Only, this time, as 0001316365.INDD 131 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM 132 the economic as culture capitalism deepens, one witnesses a relative strengthening of the latent symbolic linkages between the economic sphere and the sacred center of society with respect to the linkages between the other spheres of social life and the center. Finally, a cultural sociology of the economy understands the relationship between capitalism and democracy in modern society in terms of the symbolic linkage of the economic sphere to the sacred center of society whereby the identity of society is coded. The field therefore reads Toqueville more from a Durkheimian perspective than from a Weberian one. With the culturalist strand within economic sociology, in turn, a cultural sociology of the economy shares the belief that the economic sphere in capitalist societies is still permeated by culture and cultural practices. Unlike such tradition, however, it explicitly acknowledges that the economic sphere is linked to the sacred center of society where the very identity of society is defined, and, therefore, whenever such linkages are effectively turned on, economic action turns into a matter of identity. This provides an analytical criterion to establish how far the analysis of cultural embeddedness should push, what it would call for, and why analysts should address the performative dimension of the cultural transformation of economic action into a matter of collective identity. In this section, I have suggested that a cultural sociology of the economy is characterized by a number of analytical questions and operational concerns that differentiate it from other culture-sensitive analyses of the economy within sociology. For the next question, on the other hand, following Zelizer’s recommendation, I will suggest that such a field is also immediately relevant at the pragmatic level. More precisely, it promises to contribute to push ahead into a more decisively culturalist direction the research frontier of three literatures—on organizational legitimacy, the sociology of financial markets, and the sociology of money—and enable, as a result, sociologists to tackle three of the most pressing problems that loom at the horizon of the current world economic crisis: The loss of confidence within the general public for private corporations, the economic profession, and independent central banks. The Use of a Cultural Sociology of the Economy As the world moves toward an economic crisis of historic proportions, the legitimacy of private corporations, economic professions, and independent central banks starts to shake. Around the world, private corporations have been hit by a long stream of scandals that has contributed to undermine their institutional credibility. Economists have not been able to anticipate or warn against the crisis, and people are now wondering whether they will be up to the task of steering the boat out of the current fog. Central banks, in turn, have responded to the deepening deflation by cutting interest rates to unprecedented levels. As monetary policy becomes 0001316365.INDD 132 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 133 increasingly powerless concerning the recession, people will start to wonder what the use of independent central banks is if their only institutional task—the control of inflation—has suddenly passed out of fashion as a result of the crisis. As private corporations, economists, and independent central banks run the risk of losing people’s confidence, it is imperative to understand the mechanisms that underpin its creation, maintenance, and repair. A cultural sociology of the economy can contribute in this respect by helping understand the deep sources of legitimacy of economic institutions in modern societies. To understand how private corporations can defend their legitimacy in times of crisis, I will first draw from the literature on organizational legitimacy that has been consolidating in the past three decades. Such a literature, I will suggest, misses the important dimensions of the defense of legitimacy a cultural sociology of the economy can instead help recover, thereby opening up a whole field of inquiry sociologists have not systematically yet explored. Different definitions of organizational legitimacy are currently available in the literature. According to Maurer (1971, p. 361), for example, legitimacy has to do with the process by which an organization justifies its right to exist. Suchman (1995, p. 574), in turn, suggests that organizational legitimacy is a “generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.”9 For the study of organizational legitimacy, Weber constitutes one important classical referent. Administrative systems, he suggests, draw legitimacy from either charisma, tradition, or law. In 1960, Parsons proposed a cultural institutional perspective and stressed the importance for organizational goals to link to wider societal values and functions. In the past three decades, two main approaches have contended the field of organizational analysis. On the one hand, the ecological perspective has treated legitimacy just as a parameter that influences the emergence and decline of organizational populations over time (Carroll and Hannan 2000; Hannan and Freeman 1992). As a result, it has not dwelt on the mechanisms that construct it. The institutionalist perspective, on the other hand, has done so by showing that organizations achieve legitimacy by adjusting their structures, procedures, policies, and goals with legal norms and regulations, field-level norms, or taken-for-granted cultural constructs. Within the institutionalist camp, then, some have emphasized passive adherence on the part of organizations to the structuration dynamics that unfold at the field level and have therefore downplayed managerial agency and managerstakeholder conflict (Barron, et al. 1986; Baum and Powell 1995; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Scott 2001; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Scott 1983; Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Zucker 1987). Others, on the contrary, have stressed active adherence, thereby pointing out that organizations instrumentally use and manipulate evocative symbols of conformity with widely held social values to obtain public support. Such a strand, to put it with Suchman, presupposes a high degree of management control over the legitimation process, an “almost 0001316365.INDD 133 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM 134 the economic as culture limitless malleability of symbols and rituals against the exogenously constrained recalcitrance of tangible, real outcomes” (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Ashforth and Gibbs 1990; Dowling and Pfeffer 1975; Pfeffer 1981). Organizational crises—accidents, scandals, and product safety incidents— constitute a privileged field to observe what the foundations of legitimacy are, how legitimacy gets maintained, and how it can be possibly repaired (Marcus and Goodman 1991; Bucholz, Evans, and Wagley 1985; Godson 1975; Keirmann, and Olsen 1972; Kemeny 1979; Perrow 1984; Sethi 1977; Sharplin 1985; Shrivastava 1987; Starling and Baskin 1984; Sturdivant 1985; Davidson, Chandy and Cross 1987; Fields and Janjigian 1989; Marcus and Goodman 1989; Boulton 1978; Fisse and Braithwaite 1983; Franklin 1986; Post 1978; Sampson 1973; Litschert and Nicholson 1977; Davidson and Worrell 1988; Goodpaster 1984; Sapolsky 1986; Starling and Baskin 1985; Whiteside 1972; Bromiley and Marcus 1989). On such terrain, institutional analysis has been fruitfully complemented by impression management studies. Institutionalists, on the one hand, have shown that organizations introduce structural reforms and changes in their procedures or staff in order to meet field-level norms. In other words, analysts working along this tradition focus on the content of the measures that help maintain, repair, or recover organizational legitimacy. Impression management scholars, on the other hand, have focused instead on the communicative techniques that organizations, and particularly their spokespersons, resort to for the purpose of defending themselves (Goffman 1973, 1974, 1981; Schenkler 1980; Tedeschi and Reiss 1981; Tedeschi 1981). Contributors to this approach have therefore been interested in tracking the verbal accounts by which organizations deny or admit their responsibility, blame others, offer excuses, explain or justify their deeds, and apologize (Elsbach 1994; Elsbach and Sutton 1992; Elsbach and Sutton 1998; Marcus and Goodman 1991; Sutton and Callahan 1987; Sutton and Kramer 1990; Suchman 1995; Leary and Kowalski 1990; Giacalone and Rosenfeld 1989, 1991; Staw, Mckechnie, and Puffer 1983; Bettman and Weitz 1983; Salancik and Meindl 1984; Metzler 2001; Fisse and Braithwaite 1983). Impression management scholars have also occasionally resorted to stigma theory while addressing the communicative tactics organizations adopt to eschew or deal with stigma (Sutton and Callahan 1987; Goffman 1963; Page 1984; Jones et al. 1984). Both institutionalists and impression management scholars, however, have missed out on a number of important issues crucial to the management of an organizational crisis and therefore to the recovery or repair of legitimacy. Focusing on the mere scripts organizations follow in their verbal accounts completely neglects all the other dimensions that make up the cultural pragmatics of apologies, denials, explanations, and justifications, and that ultimately determines whether they will be received by the public as authentic and therefore satisfactory. A script must distill a whole set of background collective representations—symbols, codes, narratives, and genres—that the public considers to be consistent with the meaning the script seeks to project on its audiences. Also, the actors must match the script they are uttering and the collective representations they are seeking to evoke through their performance. Similarly, the staging of the apologies, denials, explanations, and justifications, the means that are brought together to produce the performance, the 0001316365.INDD 134 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 135 way social power is perceived to be influencing it, and the composition of the audiences will crucially impact on the reception that organizations will get. In other words, it may well happen that the very same script will be received satisfactorily by some specific audience in a particular performative setting and will instead be rejected in an alternative one. Bringing in the performative horizon within which legitimacy can be maintained, challenged, repaired, and recovered yields two corollaries that help clarify two further elements both the institutionalist and the impression management perspectives miss and a cultural sociology of the economy, instead, helps capture. The logic of technical reason generally structures the profane realm of routine organizational life. When the legitimacy of an organization, and therefore its right to exist as such, are challenged, and when, as a result, the stakes of both the organization and its challengers soar, either party may consider escalating conflict by shifting the game by symbolic linkage onto some alternative arena in which each party can mobilize new allies in its favor, reverse the distribution of forces on the field, and possibly win the battle over the organization’s legitimacy. As a result of the process of competitive symbolic linkage among the players, the struggle will in the end land onto some arena that works as a focal point for the general public. This is what some sociologists would refer to as the symbolic center of society. When the crisis gets to the center, it is no longer something that has to do with the profane realm of routine institutional life in which technical arguments are enough to win an argumentative battle. Rather, it becomes something that pertains, and possibly shakes the values, beliefs, and symbols that identify society as such. It will have entered the absolute sacred space of identity. As Alexander has shown, the language and the structures of feelings that underpin democracy are one crucial building block of the center of modern societies. In the course of a crisis, as a consequence, both the organization and its challengers will have an incentive to recast the vocabulary of technical reason within the structures of meaning making up the codes of liberty and repression that constitute the center. Since in some societies, however, other discourses of political legitimation, based on alternative structures of meaning, contend the definition of the center, it is possible that, in the battle for legitimacy, the organization and its opponents will adopt different vocabularies. In this case, their confrontation may occasionally lead to a tragicomedy of errors. If the center of society is the relevant horizon within which the struggle for organizational legitimacy is embedded, then the codes that constitute the center will need to be considered in order to account for the full meaning of the organization’s announcements. This pushes the analysis further with respect to the reach of impression-management studies, but it also does so with respect to the cultural institutionalism Parsons supported, which in turn focused exclusively on norms and values and left out other important elements that make up the cultural environment of action (Alexander 1988a). Such a conclusion may also contribute to sharpen up the neo-institutionalist argument on rationality as a legitimizing myth (Meyers and Rowan 1977). When 0001316365.INDD 135 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM 136 the economic as culture organizations appeal to the rationality of their procedures as a legitimacy title, the meaning of such a rationality crucially depends on the horizon of interpretation within which one reads it and on the resolution of the lenses with which one looks at it. It can be pure and simple technical rationality. Or it can alternatively be technical rationality turned into a transcendent cultural logic that contributes to the composition of the sacred center of society. In this case, it may work as a myth. At the center, though, rationality turned into a transcendent cultural logic may be embedded within the different structures of meanings that can make up the center. For example, it may be part of the codes of liberty and repression that concurs to constitute the symbolic core of modern democratic societies. For this reason, the horizon of analysis a cultural sociology of the economy takes as reference can help sharpen up the neoinstitutionalist understanding of rationality as a legitimizing myth. In conclusion, nowadays private corporations have been hit by scandals of corruption, political irresponsibility, and greed. As they come under attack, public debate over their misbehavior will increasingly follow the cultural logic of the discourse of civil society that contributes to makeup the symbolic core of modern democratic societies and, occasionally, the logic of alternative discourses of political legitimation that may contend the control of the symbolic center of such societies. The battle over organizational legitimacy, in other words, will no longer be fought in terms of technical rationality but rather in terms of civic virtues and civic vices. Also, the battle may well stretch across multiple institutional arenas—mass media, legal, scientific, political-bureaucratic, aesthetic, and religious. Cultural sociologists are well equipped to show in what way, along the battle over their own legitimacy, private corporations may strive to translate their interests by resorting to the cultural codes that structure the symbolic center of their own societies in an effort to maintain, recover, or repair their own legitimacy. After hinting at the way a cultural sociology of the economy may contribute to address one pragmatic problem that is looming at the horizon of the current world economic crisis—the loss of public confidence into private corporations—I will now discuss how cultural sociologists may help shed light over the mechanisms that influence public confidence into the community of economists. To do so, I will first draw from the sociology of finance literature that has emerged over the last decade and show in what way a cultural sociology of the economy can complement it. During the last decade, a new literature has emerged—the sociology of financial markets—that has built on economic sociology and anthropology on the one hand and the social studies of science on the other. As Beunza, Hardie, and Mackenzie (2006) have recently pointed out, the new field does with trading floors what the social studies of science has previously done with laboratories. In other words, it approaches financial markets as “heterogeneous assemblages of human beings and technical devices, devoted to the production of workable knowledge” (p. 39) and seeks to recover their materiality, which, following Mackenzie (2007, p. 357), is not just about physicality but rather about physical objects, technological systems, human bodies, legal systems, cultures, procedures, beliefs, and social relations expressed by objects and bodies. 0001316365.INDD 136 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 137 With particular reference to culture, the sociology of financial markets has pushed the analysis far enough to take stock with different forms of it: cultural scripts, cultural styles, discourses, frames, the influences by fiction literature on economic reality, collective identities, and even the more performative dimensions of culture that involve emotions and the bodies. More concretely, Mackenzie (2007) has followed Thrift (2000) and Maurer (2001, 2005) in taking stock with the cultural geographies of derivatives and has shown that financial markets have their own internal cultures, follow different cultural scripts, and are characterized by different styles. For example, he contrasts Chicago’s rough and tumble style with London’s gentlemanly capitalism and observes how the cultural script that has traditionally related investment to gambling structures the market of derivatives (Goede 2005). MacKenzie (2007, p. 368) has also been keen on tracking down the concrete channels through which culture actually impacts economic reality. “ ‘Culture,’ ” he says, “is . . . not simply ‘the context’ within which derivative trading takes place. Via matters, such as the law of gambling, it shapes and is enmeshed with the detailed mechanics of this trading.” Yenkey (2007), on his part, has shown how the meaning of information and transparency in the U.S. securities markets has changed over time during the twentieth century. Information disclosure, he argues, was earlier justified as a measure to prevent a corporation from carrying out actions that would damage the interests of individuals. Later, however, it got grounded by quite a different discourse, that is, the right of investors to gain equal access to profit opportunities. Czarniawska (2005), in turn, has shown how fictional representations of women in finance may influence the way they are actually perceived in real life and has referred to Abolafia (1996) for the purpose of acknowledging that social processes can indeed get structured by cultural genres. Hardie and Mackenzie (2006) have introduced along with Callon (2005) and Callon and Caliskan (2005) the notion of agencement to capture the idea that agency is not only made up by human beings “embedded in institutions, conventions, personal relationships” but rather by human bodies as well as “prostheses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, etc.” Frames, the authors add, influence such agencement. Preda (2005), on his part, has drawn from Pollner (2002, p. 231) to conceive investors as an “imagined community” and has set out to establish what such an imagined community is about and how it comes about. His analysis of investors has also gone as far as acknowledging the influence of the literary field on the configuration of the investor. Moral pamphlets, comedies, satire, and visual allegories, for example, played a role in shaping the figure of the investor during the eighteenth century. Preda’s analysis has also taken into consideration some of the more performative dimensions of culture such as the mis-en-scene during the eighteenth century of the figure of the investor in a closed world of alleys and pubs. Hassoun (2005) has further contributed to address the performative side of culture by tackling the expression of various types of emotions—sympathy, aggressiveness, admiration, anger, rivalry, shame, and humiliation—on the trading floors and by shedding light over the categories of indigenous thought, to put it with Mauss ([1906] 1968), that signify such emotions. Finally, Zaloom (2003, 2004, 2006) has explicitly taken stock with the role 0001316365.INDD 137 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM 138 the economic as culture of the body in financial markets. For example, in her participative ethnography, Zaloom has reported that training had also to do with training “our bodies to operate as uninterrupted conduits between the dealing room and the online world, allowing our fingers to become seamless extensions of our economic intentions” (Caitlin Zaloom in Beunza, Hardie, and Mackenzie 2006, p. 731). Such an extensive engagement on the part of the sociology of financial markets with a broad spectrum of cultural phenomena, however, does not make a cultural sociology of the economy redundant within such a field of inquiry. To see why, it is useful to address the way the sociology of financial markets deals with the question of the performativity of economics. Callon’s thesis on the performativity of economics has been one of the shaping forces of the sociology of financial markets. According to Callon (1998, p. 30) “the economy is embedded not in society but in economics.” While showing the performative effects economics has on the economic reality of financial markets, sociologists working within this emerging field of inquiry have been careful to acknowledge that performativity becomes possible not in a social vacuum but rather as a result of the social embeddedness of economics. Mackenzie and Millo (2003), for example, explicitly show that the performative effects of economics are not brought about by homines oeconomici but rather by social agents who are influenced by cultures, moral communities, and places of political action. The cultural and legal barriers to the creation of financial derivative markets in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s were overcome by economics. Still, the peculiar culture and social structures of the Chicago markets influenced the chances that certain economic ideas had to become popular among traders and shape their activities as a consequence. For this reasons, the performativity of the classic option pricing theory was not “a matter of simple self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton 1949) or of the discovery of the correct way to price options. It was a contested, historically contingent outcome” (Mackenzie and Millo 2003, p. 138). “Economics indeed facilitated the emergence of derivative markets by disembedding derivatives from the pervasive moral framework in which they were dangerously close to wagers. However, neither economists on their own nor the unaided persuasive power of economic theory created” the institutions that would later preside over the organization of the derivative markets in Chicago (Mackenzie and Millo 2003, p. 139). Mackenzie and Millo (2003) plausibly argue that the justification of derivatives in terms of public interest that a number of prestigious Princeton economists put forward played an important role to overcome the suspicion the public had felt about derivatives since the 1929 crash. While the authors seem to take for granted that the general public would believe the opinion of such economists in that specific case, one cannot do so and expect that the public will always automatically believe economists and economics in any society and under any historical circumstances, which is in turn quite crucial to support Callon’s performativity thesis. The growing literature on the public understanding of science can serve as a platform to reflect on the mechanisms that help ground such belief (Farr 1993; Gross 1994; Nelkin 1994; Bud 1995; Baurer 1995; Michael 1998; Irwin 2001; Leggett and Finlay 2001; Valenti 2002; Bates 2005; Cretaz 2006; Wagner 2007).10 Still, 0001316365.INDD 138 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 139 such literature has not pushed far enough in the analysis of the cultural mediations that ultimately produce it. A cultural sociology of the economy may therefore come in to do the job by contributing, with its special sensibility, to the construction of legitimacy in the public sphere. Following my argument with reference to private corporations, one might conjecture that linking economics to the codes of liberty and repression at the symbolic center of democratic societies might work toward legitimizing it before the general public. Quite interestingly, though, the symbolic transformation that appears to have legitimized economics so far has pointed to a radically different direction. In modern western societies, in other words, economics has taken, in the eyes of the public, the position theology used to occupy before modernity. The theologian of secularization, Harvey Cox, for example, has drawn the attention to the covert operation in public discourse over the economy of myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. “The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek,” says Cox (1999, p. 19),“bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint’s Augustine’s City of God.” Behind descriptions of market reform, monetary policy, and the convolution of the Dow, he adds, it is possible to make out “pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right.” Within the community of economists, McCloskey has denounced economics as “modernist faith” with its own “Ten Commandments and Golden Rule,” its “nuns, bishops, and cathedrals,” its “trinity of fact, definition, and holy value,” its starting as a “crusading faith” and its later hardening “into ceremony” (in Nelson 2001, p. xx ). Heyne (1996, p. 1) has suggested that “any economist seeking to understand the world of human interactions with the hope to make them more effective operates within a theological framework.” Along a similar line, Cramp (1994, p. 187) has argued that, to understand the economy, one needs the “knowledge of who we are and why we are here,” which is a fundamentally theological question. And Nelson (1991, 2001) has suggested that economics embodies a hidden metaphysics that provides a way of ordering, interpreting, and giving meaning to events, as well as a source of ultimate meaning and purpose for human beings. At the core of such metaphysics, Nelson continues, there is the belief that scarcity is the primary cause of pain, suffering, and death, and that by virtue of its inspirational power, economics can save us from the consequences of scarcity. As Sahlins (2000, p. 531) puts it, humanity received pain and death as a punishment for Adam’s sin. “Still, God was merciful. He gave us Economics.” And it is out of such inspirational power that economists have come to claim their moral ground to exercise today the authority theologians used to exercise in the past (Nelson 1991, p. 8). And this is responsible for the ever-expanding role economics and economists have taken up in modern societies: An economics devoid of theological significance would be cautious, hesitant, retiring—a pale imitation as compared with the central role of economic thinking in the events of the past three centuries. Only a religion, and not a mere system of ordering practical affairs, could have had such vast power to shape the 0001316365.INDD 139 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM 140 the economic as culture modern era. Even when they intend otherwise, economists who join the economics profession may become part of the life and ritual of a community grounded in a powerful secular theology. (Nelson 1994, p. 236) Mackenzie and Millo (2003) have recently observed that in Malaysia in the late 1990s and early 2000s the legitimation of derivatives passed by enrolling Islamic jurists rather than neoclassical economists (Kamali 1997, Maurer 2001). The above-mentioned cultural horizon within which economics may have become legitimate in Western societies may suggest that the logic of the two situations is probably not that radically distant from a cultural standpoint. The logic of the cultural mediations that would appear to legitimize economics and the community of economists in modern societies would therefore seem to run counter to the logic supporting the legitimacy of private corporations. The latter, after all, appear to draw their legitimacy by linking themselves to the codes of liberty and repression that make up the symbolic center of modern democratic societies, while the former seem to have done so by undergoing a process of cultural transformation in the public sphere that has established them respectively as a secular theology and as a priesthood. Such a contrast is quite puzzling. Possibly, as a result of the current world economic crisis and of the possible crisis of confidence the economic profession may undergo, the discipline may be drawn to gradually tap into an alternative source of legitimacy by appearing less priestly and more democratic. A cultural sociology of the economy can help tackle the differences in legitimation between private corporations and the community of economists and can shed light over the possible shifts in the sources of legitimation the community of economists may experience in the near future. After hinting at the way a cultural sociology of the economy may contribute to address another pragmatic problem that is looming at the horizon of the current world economic crisis—the loss of public confidence into the community of economists—I will now discuss how cultural sociologists may help shed light over the mechanisms that influence public confidence for independent central banks. To do so, I will first draw from the sociology of money literature and show in what way a cultural sociology of the economy can complement it. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theory has stigmatized the amoral, or even the immoral, dimensions of modern money. Utilitarians, for example, considered money to be indifferent to nonpecuniary values. Marx, on his part, regarded money to constitute a reality without any intrinsic meaning (Marx [1844] 1964, p. 169; [1858–1859] 1973, p. 222; [1867] 1984, p. 96; [1858] 1972, p. 49).11 Weber and Simmel, in turn, saw it as a vehicle of the process of rationalization of modern social life (Weber [1946] 1971, p. 331; [1922] 1978, p. 86; Simmel [1908] 1950, p. 412).12 Collins (1979, p. 190) remarks that sociologists have traditionally regarded money as if it were not a social reality and have dismissed its ritual use as an example of “residual atavism” (Simmel [1900] 1978, p. 441; in Zelizer 1989, p. 345). In the course of the past two decades, though, a new body of literature—to put it with Maurer (2006, p. 19)—has turned “away from Western folk theories of monetary transformation (the root of all evil, the camel through the eye of the 0001316365.INDD 140 7/14/2011 4:26:37 PM culture and the economy 141 needle . . . ) embodied in influential accounts from Aristotle to Marx, Weber, and Simmel.” This literature has built on a number of contributions that, within anthropology, psychology, and sociology, have resisted the above-mentioned stereotyped representations of money. Anthropologists have documented how money is morally or ritually ranked within primitive societies and have been, as a result, far more sensitive to the fact that money can exist outside the market and can become a nonmarket medium (Polanyi 1957, pp. 264–266; Bohannan 1959; Dalton 1965; Einzig 1966; Thomas and Znaniecki [1918–1920] 1958, pp. 164–165; Akin and Robbins 1999; Guyer 1995b; Parry and Bloch 1989; Gamburd 2004; Znoj 1998; Crump 1981, pp. 125–130; Melitz 1970). Douglas (1967), for example, stressed that money can acquire a social or sacred character when it is used ritually or to amend status. Economic psychologists, in turn, have challenged the idea of fungibility of money (Lea, Tarpy, and Webley 1987, pp. 319–342). And within the sociological profession, Simiand (1934) provided a very rare statement about the extra-economic social basis of money and the symbolic, sacred, and magical significance it can manifest. More recently, Belk and Wallendorf (1990, pp. 35–36) have pointed out that the economic view misses “the more emotional, qualitative meanings of money” and the way in which affect, norms and values mediate the dealings with it. Following the psychoanalytic perspective, Belk and Wallendorf (1990, p. 46) agree with Krueger (1986, p. 3) that “money is probably the most emotionally meaningful object in contemporary life; only food and sex are its close competitors as common carriers of such strong and diverse feelings, significances, and strivings.” At the same time, Belk and Wallendorf (1990, p. 35) have remarked that “contemporary money retains sacred meanings” and that the crossing by money of the boundary between the sacred and the profane is regulated even within modern societies through ritual processes. “Contemporary consumer society,” Belk and Wallendorf (1990, p. 36) add, “has been characterized as one that often venerates money and imbues it with meaning. Money is revered, feared, worshipped, and treated with the highest respect. Money is, in sociological parlance, considered sacred” (Durkheim 1915). These authors find evidence of the sacredness of money in the sacrifices that are made for money, in its contaminating character, and in the myth, mystery, and ritual that are involved in the acquisition and use of it. Their reading echoes a similar reflection by Desmonde about the sacred dimension of money: To many of us, money is a mystery, a symbol handled mainly by the priests of high finance and regarded by us with much of the same reverence and awe as the primitive feels toward the sacred relics providing magical potency in a tribal ritual. As if in a higher plane of reality, the symbol seems to operate in an incomprehensible, mystical way, understood and controllable only by the magic of brokers, accountants, lawyers, and financiers. . . . Like spellbound savages in the presence of the holy, we watch in wonder the solemn proceedings, feeling in a vague, somewhat fearful way that our lives and the happiness of our children are at the mercy of mysterious forces beyond our control. . . . Apart from the esoteric rites of high finance, money seems to function in everyday life much like a miraculous talisman, bringing to us the gratification of almost every conceivable desire. Wherever we go, if we have money, people hasten to do our bidding, as if 0001316365.INDD 141 7/14/2011 4:26:38 PM 142 the economic as culture placed under a magical charm by the presence of these worn-down coins and soiled pieces of green paper. . . . Like a magical charm, money brings power, which can be used either for good or bad purposes. (Desmonde 1962, pp. 3–5)13 It is, however, Viviana Zelizer who, in the past two decades, has spearheaded a whole research program on money that has successfully countered the received wisdom within sociology about its nature and its functioning in modern societies. Zelizer’s work (1989, 1994, 1996, 2000, 2005) on the social meaning of money constitutes the culmination of a decade of research on the relations between market and morals. Along with Zelizer’s micro-cultural approach to the study of money, though, particularly in the past decade, a macro-cultural line of research has emerged that has recognized the role played by money in the consolidation of national space and in the production and reproduction of citizens within it (Carruthers and Babb 1996, Gilbert 1999, 2005; Gilbert and Helleiner 1999; Helleiner 1997, 1998, 1999; Hewitt 1994, 1999; Pointon 1998; Foster 1999; Zelizer 1999). Occasionally, this literature has stressed the transformation of national currencies into national symbols and has emphasized the highly emotional charge that is attached to them as a result of such transformation. A cultural sociology of the economy can build on it and help systematically account for the consequences that the linkage of a national currency to the symbolic center of society can have on the legitimation of the independent central bank. Tognato (2008) provides a clear example in this respect with reference to the Deutsche Bundesbank. Since World War II, he suggests, two different self-understandings of the German society have contended the symbolic center of the Federal Republic: the so-called Holocaust identity and the Wirtschaftswunder identity (Giesen 1998). The latter appealed to the economic miracle that the Federal Republic experienced in the 1950s and 1960s both as a medium to expunge the Angst for the recent past from the conscience of the average German citizen and as a pretext for reclaiming full sovereignty for the Federal Republic, thereby liberating it from the state of political submissiveness into which it had been boxed since World War II. Tognato observes that the experience of the hyperinflation in the early 1920s, the destabilizing effects that monetary chaos had on the Weimar Republic, the subsequent rise to power of Hitler and the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, the experience of World War II, the destruction and humiliation that came with it, and the horrors that were perpetrated in the concentration camps set the stage for a linkage of the D-Mark to the Wirtschaftwunder identity. The D-Mark, as a result, turned into “the national symbol”14, the only one which Germans could be proud of, 15 something that gave them back their self-esteem after the atrocities of the Nazi regime,16 that rescued them “from the political, economic, and moral ruins of the war,”17 and helped “the German Phoenix rise from the ashes of World War II.”18 The D-Mark, in a way, gave Germans “a piece of identity, even before that the national anthem and the national flag came.”19 As the D-Mark turned into a national symbol, the Deutsche Bundesbank became its custodian. And as the D-Mark acquired in Germany a profound existential value for the person in the street, the Bundesbank got transformed into an institutional solution to the Angst that the German past 0001316365.INDD 142 7/14/2011 4:26:38 PM culture and the economy 143 still produced. The Bundesbank was founded as an economic institution, but in the course of its history it took up the latent function of an existential device. A a result, it became absolute (Tognato 2008). Such transformations in meaning reflected the ongoing anchoring of German monetary affairs to the existential dimension of the Wirtschaftwunder identity. At the same time, symbolic linkage also applied to the political dimension of the Wirtschaftswunder identity. In other words, the Bundesbank turned into the instrument that enabled Germany to exercise its full sovereignty, at least within the monetary sphere, thereby breaking free from the regime of semisovereignty into which the Federal Republic had been embedded since World War II. As the Financial Times, for example, put it, the Bundesbank constituted a formidable “Bundesbunker,” which was impossible to penetrate.20 The reconstitution of German monetary affairs at the symbolic center of German society triggered a latent moralization of the German monetary arena. Inflation would take up a moral connotation, and central bankers would therefore be legitimized to ask the public for sacrifices in order to keep it under check. As money and monetary policy acquired moral meaning, then the central bank would also undergo a transformation and turn into the moral compass of a society, as David Horowitz, former President of the Bank of Israel, once put it. Its authority would no longer be strictly technical. As some observers have remarked with reference to the Bundesbank, its authority “stems from moral prowess as well as economic muscle.”21 Tognato (2008) shows that once the German monetary game got to the symbolic center of society and underwent a process of moralization, narrative frames drawn from the Christian tradition come into play and prevented it from losing its moral dimension. For example, the conquest of the moral ground that monetary stability can secure became framed as a perpetual challenge that never ends and that calls for a continuous struggle (Tietmeyer 1997). Following Tognato (2008), it would appear that the legitimacy of the most beloved independent central bank in the world did not stem from a symbolic linkage to the codes of liberty and repression that make up the symbolic center of modern societies, but rather correlated to a different set of cultural elements that make up German political culture and appear to constitute an important dimension of the German symbolic center. Kennedy (1991, p. 4) has observed that “in many respects the Bundesbank incorporates the ideals of an earlier age of political development. Largely immune to the pressures of pluralistic politics, it sees itself as the representative of a good higher than particular interests.” Such an ethos, she continues, is not just a technique or a policy style. Rather, it is rooted to the ideal of Rechtstaat and the German political theory that has traditionally attributed special dignity to the instruments of the state that are supposed to enhance the public good over particularistic interests (Kennedy 1991, pp. 2–3, 10–12). Furthermore, it rests on a civil service tradition that, since Hegel, has elevated German civil servants to the rank of a “universal class” that stands for the ethical interest of the whole. In May 1945, she continues, the Constitutional Court ruled for the so-called Traditionsbruch, according to which public officials would no longer serve the state as a living and permanent continuity but would rather serve the constitutional order” (Smith 1979, p. 68–69; in Kennedy 1991, p. 12). Despite such a break, however, the Bundesbank 0001316365.INDD 143 7/14/2011 4:26:38 PM 144 the economic as culture and the Constitutional Court have probably continued to constitute the only two institutional spheres in which the old tradition of German civil service has survived (Kennedy 1991, p. 28). As the world economic crisis deepens, one must therefore wonder what deep sources of legitimacy independent central banks around the world will be able to draw on in order to resist the consequences of an increasing skepticism on the part of the public about the maintenance of an institutional task—the control of inflation—that will appear as going out of fashion. A cultural sociology of the economy may help shed light in this respect. I have begun this section by indicating three possible fields of application of a cultural sociology of the economy. I have suggested that, as the ongoing world economic crisis deepens, private corporations, economists, and independent central banks may run the risk of losing people’s confidence. As a result, it becomes imperative to understand the mechanisms that underpin its creation, maintenance, and repair. A cultural sociology of the economy can contribute in this respect by enhancing our understanding of the deep sources of legitimacy of economic institutions in modern societies. To make my point, I have built on three different literatures—that on organizational legitimacy, the emerging sociology of financial markets, and the sociology of money. Conclusion Many believe that the economy constitutes one of the most disenchanted spheres of modern social life. Norms and values but also cultural codes, metaphors, rituals, and identities, however, still shape economic experience in our days. A cultural sociology of the economy is there to remind us of this. Different classics provide a fertile ground from which such sociology can draw for the purpose of nurturing its intellectual project. The later Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Weber, Parsons, Polanyi, and Alexandre de Toqueville constitute important referents in this respect. While economists have just recently started to take stock of culture, during the past three decades, a culturalist strand of scholarship within economic sociology has insisted on the persisting role of culture in modern economic life. Karin Knorr Cetina, Mitchel Abolafia, Nicole Biggart, and Viviana Zelizer are the four most accomplished contributors to this line of research. The debate among economic sociologists over the opportunity to introduce cultural analysis within their horizon of inquiry has traditionally focused on the question of whether cultural analysis should replace social-structural analysis or whether it should complement it. The narrow focus of such a debate has prevented the profession from systematically discussing how scholars should go about accounting for the cultural dimension of economic life. Should they take a cultural-structural 0001316365.INDD 144 7/14/2011 4:26:38 PM culture and the economy 145 approach? Or should they rather adopt a pragmatic focus? Or should they instead resort to a framework that integrates both perspectives? Furthermore, taking stock with the role of culture in the economy implies addressing the phenomenon of cultural embeddedness of economic action. So, how far should scholars push the analysis of such a phenomenon? And where should they draw the line? These are the basic theoretical questions that structure the core of a cultural sociology of the economy. I have argued that the emerging field of neo-Durkheimian sociology, which in the past two decades has systematically addressed the phenomenon of cultural reenchantment in modern societies, can provide one possible set of answers to such questions. Answering them, I have suggested, helps distinguish the inner theoretical makeup of a cultural sociology of the economy from the culturalist strand of scholarship within economic sociology. I have then concluded that, from a pragmatic standpoint, a cultural sociology of the economy can help tackle three of the most pressing problems that loom on the horizon of the current world economic crisis: the loss of confidence within the general public for private corporations, the economic profession, and independent central banks. And more precisely, it can do so by shedding light over the mechanisms by which such confidence can be maintained, recovered, or repaired. To make this point, I have shown how cultural sociologists can help advance the analysis in this respect further beyond the frontier of three relevant literatures—that on organizational legitimacy, the sociology of financial markets, and the sociology of money. NOTES 1. See for example Marx ([1844] 1964), Maine (1875), Tönnies ([1887] 1955), Durkheim ([1893] 1947), Weber ([1904] 1998), Simmel ([1900] 1978), Habermas (1984). 2. “No sense in strict 3% deficit as the magic figure for Emu. Letters to the Editor,” The Financial Times, June 3, 1997, USA Edition, p. 12. 3. Otmar Issing, “Wider die Papiergaunerreien,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 6, 1996, p. 17. 4. “O Isis and Osiris, give/the spirit of Wisdom to the new pair./Guide the steps of the wanderers./Strengthen them with patience in danger” (Tietmeyer 1997b, p. 11). 5. Toqueville ([1835–40] 2000, p. 511) stresses that people “dream constantly of the goods they do not have.” In Swedberg (2004, p. 8). 6. See also Zelizer (2007, p. 1060). 7. The analysis of such cultural linkages may entail tracking the metaphoric transformations of economic phenomena that help catapult them onto the center, the narrative strategies actors resort to, the specific genres they tap into, and even the visual representations they draw from. With particular reference to the latter, Emmison (1986) offers an interesting example. 8. See DiMaggio (1994, p. 39; 1990, pp. 117–119) and Davis (1996, pp. 213–226) in Spillman (1999, p. 1061). 9. See also Scott (2001) and Aldrich (2001). 0001316365.INDD 145 7/14/2011 4:26:38 PM 146 the economic as culture 10. See also the entire first volume of Public Understanding of Science (1992). 11. In Zelizer (1989, pp. 345–346). 12. In Zelizer (1989, pp. 344–346). 13. See also Crump (1992, pp. 669–677). 14. Jordan Bonfante, “A German Requiem,” Time Magazine, July 6, 1998, p. 21. 15. Ibidem. 16. 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