Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Georges Bataille provides the theoretical means for developing a sociological-psychological theory of money in which the contradiction between reason and emotion serves as a centerpiece. This theory cannot be developed without Weber's analysis of formal rationality in money matters (wherein an important issue concerns how money becomes impervious, in epistemological processes, to "the thought that thinks it"). After introducing the notion of rationality in money, and examining it in relation to modern economics and Freudian psychology, I will discuss the role of the rationalized social construction of visceral, and especially "scent-based" (and tangentially, touch based) human qualities in money. I will explore the implications of the control and suppression of this visceral quality vis-à-vis reciprocal processes that "bulk up" psychological identities between money and self-consciousness and money and fantasy. These will be counterposed to Freud's theory that connects money to more noxious (symbolic) aspects of the body. Finally, I will explain the essentializing limitations of Bataille's conceptions of the polarity of our emotional/animal nature, a move that brings us back to Weber's qualified rationalism. I will discuss a notion of power in this same contradiction in an argument, linking money to depression, via a multi-disciplinary explanatory bridge provided by evolutionary psychology.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This presentation aims at describing the role of the G7/8 in the anti-money laundering global regime. It will provide an insight of the G7/8 mechanisms that are often not clearly understood and have contributed to the elaboration of norms against money laundering and, more recently, terrorist financing. The goal is then to give an understanding of those specific norms, which have circulated among several international institutions, in particular in the European Union and the G7/8. The diffusion of these norms has been facilitated by actors engaged in the global mobilisation against money-laundering, specifically by those 'experts' of Member States' public administrations. A sociological approach will be used to look at these experts' professional background, highlighting convergences, but also divergences that have framed the existing anti-money laundering global regime.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper will examine the global regulatory regime for surveillance of suspicious money transactions. Measures to counter money laundering and terrorist funding are the subject of thin regulation through a few international organizations, but the deepest regulation seems to happen through the coordination of the Egmont Group, the global network of government offices called financial intelligence units (FIUs). FIUs exchange evidence of money laundering and terrorist financing in order to enable law enforcement efforts to stop these activities. As an organization that is not treaty-based, the Egmont Group functions despite the absence of supranational authority. In some ways the authority of the group rests on the authority of FIUs as a bureaus within their own governmental structures. In other respects, the authority of the group emanates from the authority of the United States, which crafted the plan for the network. External legitimacy is formalized in the admissions process for FIUs wishing to join the group, with the requirements for admissions relating directly to this initial US plan. The conduct of surveillance relies on private firms -- primarily banks, which are required to collect information about transactions and transmit it to their FIU. The Egmont group provides a complex model of regulation through a hierarchy of authority within the global system, through subnational cooperation and epistemic community building, and through private efforts. This paper uses the Egmont Group as a case to explore how a tangled web of regulatory functions in the global political economy in the absence of supranational authority.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Advocates argue that local currencies are a way to protect communities from globalization, incorporate unemployed or marginal community members into the economy, and strengthen local social ties. Worldwide, a variety of local currency programs have met with a good deal of success, but in the United States local currencies have a comparatively weak foothold. This paper focuses on scrip-based local currency projects in the United States, exploring them as a challenge to one of the most institutionalized and reified elements of exchange: the dollar. The paper reviews work on local currency and then uses archival research to compare local currency to national money systems; this comparison is used to suggest a course of research that uses local currencies to illuminate processes of institutional change and the formation of alternative forms of organization.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Modern Couples, Sharing Money, Sharing Life is the result of a five-year-long collaboration of sociologists in three countries: Sweden, Spain, and the United States. In-depth, extended interviews with couples exploring many aspects of their daily lives provide significant insights into the impact of modernity, gender roles, and expectations concerning the meaning of money and the complex financial reality of households.