Money and Calculation

Emotions, reputations, relationships so many aspects of social and organizational life today are subject to quantification and other calculative practices. Calculation develops due to a demand for control and accountability. Money is one such instrument of calculation, and the foremost. As a unit of account and means of payment, it serves the purpose of exchange. Yet, money has itself increasingly become an object of calculation and exchange on financial markets tending less to the...
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Emotions, reputations, relationships so many aspects of social and organizational life today are subject to quantification and other calculative practices. Calculation develops due to a demand for control and accountability. Money is one such instrument of calculation, and the foremost. As a unit of account and means of payment, it serves the purpose of exchange. Yet, money has itself increasingly become an object of calculation and exchange on financial markets tending less to the production and exchange of real goods than the elimination of uncertainty by means of exchangeability. Has the economy therefore lost its measure? The essays collected in Money and Calculation investigate, from various viewpoints, how calculation and money bear upon the meaning of measure in contemporary economic life. They will excite and give much pause for thought to economists, sociologists, and all who have an interest in the meaning of life in our globalized world."