A Mechanism Approach for Money

Abstract

Money, a central topic for classical sociologists, has been rediscovered in recent times. The chapter briefly introduces the concept of money found in the writings of Parsons, Marx, Simmel and Weber. The study of money in the social sciences has been affected by the intellectual labour division since then: economists have abandoned all theoretical interest in the nature of money, while the sociologists have turned their attention to the cultural and social conditions that allow money to circulate. The theoretical debate over the nature of money and its social effects was abandoned until the 1980s, when it re-emerged thanks to the research carried out by Viviana Zelizer, Geoffrey Ingham, Nigel Dodd and, more recently, Jens Beckert. The contemporary study of money lacks, a fine-grained explanatory model able to explain the reciprocal influences between money and society. To this end, the chapter introduces the recently developed debate around social mechanisms and analytical sociology and their possible application to the study of money. The sociological explanation of money functioning needs to consider technical characteristics, together with individuals’ characteristics (e.g. values, norms, beliefs and preferences). For this purpose, a socio-material mechanism framework has been proposed.