Bibliography of money and credit
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Introduction
Money is a central institution in modern economies. It quantifies economic worth according to a common metric; it plays a fundamental role in the commensuration of goods and social relations. As such, money is a social technology that permeates virtually all aspects of economic activity, and economic exchange in market societies would be impossible without the use of money. Yet neoclassical economics—the dominant school of economic thought— takes the most astonishing features of money for granted. Thus, in neoclassical economics, money is supposed to fulfill its functions without the interference of social and institutional constraints, and the cold logic of monetary computation is not supposed to admit cultural factors. Sociological analyses of money and credit pose a fundamental challenge to the conceptualization of money in neoclassical economics. Instead of seeing money as a neutral veil—a mere lubricant of economic exchange—sociologists examine how money is embedded in social relations, how social institutions shape money, and how monetary relations affect society. This research agenda yields important insights on the manifold dimensions of money in society. For instance, sociological research is particularly successful in examining how social factors such as trust underlie the functioning of money and credit in modern economies. In addition, there is a significant body of sociological findings on how cultural meanings and power relations shape the use of money in everyday life. In recent years, an increasing number of sociologists have begun to pay attention to the complex relations between monetary systems and politics. Sociologists who approach money as a topic of study often identify with other subfields of sociology, such as cultural sociology, economic sociology, and sociology of finance. As such, the research on money benefits from the venerable traditions and methods in other sociological subfields.