Viviana A. Zelizer

Viviana A Zelizer is a Professor of sociology at Princeton University.

She is interested in how interpersonal connections enter into the production, distribution, consumption, and transfer of economic value. Her work highlights situations in which the relationship between economic activity and personal life is changing or in dispute.

In The Social Meaning of (1996) and The Purchase of Intimacy (2005), she shows we use money and more generally, economic activity to create, maintain, and renegotiate important intimate ties without necessarily damaging them. Far from corrupting intimacy, people regularly sustain their intimate ties with economic transactions.

Selected Publications:
The Purchase of Intimacy, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

“The Priceless Child Turns Twenty-Seven.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 5 (Fall 2012): 449-456. In special essay section, “Pricing the Priceless Child: a Retrospective.”

“How I Became a Relational Economic Sociologist and What Does That Mean?” Special issue on “Relational Work in Market Economies,” edited by Fred Block. Politics & Society, 40 (June 2012): 145-174.

“Caring Everywhere.” In Rhacel Parreñas and Eileen Boris and, editors, Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 267-279.

See her complete profile here.