Trespassing into economic life: Alexander and Zelizer,Alexander and me

Introduction

Jeffrey Alexander presented culture as acting autonomously in shaping outcomes in the civil sphere, by way of narratives, symbolic binaries and social performances. Using Viviana Zelizer and her academic progeny as his touchstone, Alexander analysed from above how cultural structure shaped economic action and the workings of markets, entering the territory of economic sociology and of economics where the dynamics of dramaturgical performances remained limited to Erving Goffman, religious-like performances to Randall Collins. With Zelizer, he was aligned, though his analysis worked from the top down, while her relational work discerned the cultural structure from the bottom up. For the economists and for traditional economic sociologists, culture had trespassed into territory they controlled.

Alexander and Zelizer − setting the stage for trespass

Both advised by Talcott Parsons, Neil Smelser and Bernard Barber focused on social systems, even as they independently advised Alexander and Zelizer, respectively. The two men introduced their former students to one another, out of intellectual kinship, though the lines of inquiry seemed to be going towards opposite targets − one towards civil society, the other into insurance, money and economic life.

Smelser served on Alexander's dissertation committee and by 2004, they had co-edited Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Alexander et al., 2004), among other works. But Smelser is perhaps best known for his foundational Economy and Society as well as his co-editorship with Richard Swedberg of The Handbook of Economic Sociology (Smelser and Swedberg, 1994). That handbook launched the new economic sociology in the 1990s (along with a few other key works), where culture had a small but significant say. Social network analysis and studies of corporate settings populated the literature; however, Zelizer and a few others insisted that markets and the monies on which they relied were meaningful; that meanings drove outcomes (Bandelj et al., 2017; Zelizer, [1994] 1997, 2011).

Alexander admired Zelizer's analysis of the life insurance market because it demonstrated how culture can block or modify business as usual. In the life insurance market, the nonmarketable (sacred value of human life) seemed to be inappropriately treated like something marketable (or profane). And although life insurance agents initially focused on the financial case for taking out insurance, they had to switch to the meanings that insurance could have for families honouring a death ritual. ‘Official rhetoric urged agents to remain above materialistic concerns, performing their task with the spiritual devotion of a missionary. The rewards, however, went to the successful salesman who solicited the most policies’ (Zelizer, 2011: 33).

Zelizer recognized that Emile Durkheim treated the sacred as if it could not be handled in a ‘calculating, utilitarian manner’ (Zelizer, 2011: 31); at the same time, she revealed that what we take as ‘utilitarian’ is yet another social accomplishment, dependent on a structure of meanings and a range of animating emotions (affect) that get worked out and amplified in interaction (social performances) (Alexander, 2010: 477; also see Alexander, 2004, 2008).

When a society experiences a collective trauma, there are payments to victims, once the victims of the categories are established. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the survivors and the families of the dead received payments for their bereavement, for the lost wages of their loved ones and for their ongoing suffering. Kenneth Feinberg (2005) oversaw the Victim Compensation Fund that had $7 billion to disburse. Critics claimed that he either did not provide enough for the bereaved or that he cheapened the lives of the dead by virtue of his mathematical calculations for their ‘value.’ Zelizer (2011: 13) effectively addressed this dilemma as one in which ‘trauma monies’ (my term, not hers) made visible how culture works in economic life. The dignified deployment of monies reflected collective understandings of the sacred; their sullied narratives indicated trespass into the profane.

Although Alexander examined the social performances, the narratives performed and the carriers of those narratives, he did not centre monetary payments as props in the play. Monetary flows did not indicate how identity was being affirmed or threatened in the narratives of trauma. Those payments were end-products of a reparative process, such as the return of some assets to Jews after the Holocaust, casinos generating payments for Native Americans, or programmes and monetary entitlements for Aborigines in Australia. Such demands have also led to payments to repair anti-Black discrimination in the United States (Hunter, 2024).

Alexander's student Shai Dromi brought these research streams together in his examination of payments to Israeli settlers who were evicted from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 2005. The settlers argued simultaneously that they deserved monetary compensation for the properties they no longer had and that talk of money was inappropriate for the losses they experienced. What lay at the core of the complaints were the damages to their collective identity. Rather than focusing on ‘the pernicious effects of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinian people and the complicity of state institutions with the settlement project’ (Dromi, 2014: 296), Dromi analyses the debates that settlers had with the Parliament's Finance Committee; in doing so, he shows how the reparations process disturbed and revealed the meanings of collective identity for the settlers and the constraints that those meanings placed on what should happen next as well as the ways those meanings enabled further action. Dromi writes:

‘…group members’ wish to perform their suffering to others and to have others believe and identify with their experience (Alexander, 2004). To do so, actors draw on scripts, symbols, and tropes they assume to be salient for their audiences (e.g., state actors, the media, uninvolved viewers), constructing elaborate narratives in an appeal to the cultural frameworks they believe to be shared in their societies’ (Dromi, 2014: 298).

Because finances and money were described by other academic fields as far away from culture, the economy became cultural sociology's prized target. For Alexander (2010: 477), ‘To believe in the possibility of a cultural sociology is to subscribe to the idea that every action, no matter how instrumental or coerced, is embedded in a horizon of affect and meaning.’ In this way, the cultural school of Alexander found common cause with that of Zelizer. They merrily crossed over into territory that they did not own.

Fred and Jeff − extending the performance

When I met Jeff, I was actively trespassing into urban studies, where the economic growth machine pumped incessantly and non-cultural power predictably pushed outcomes. A newly minted assistant professor, I had just finished Global Markets and Local Crafts: Thailand and Costa Rica Compared (2008), which examined how artisans and market brokers perform the value of their works while responding to shared and shifting meanings about their cultural assets and the appropriate ways to care for them. I had already shifted my gaze away from the global to a Latino neighbourhood in Philadelphia where the arts and culture were being used to re-brand it and to redefine what resources the community deserved. There were formal rituals and a variety of social performances geared toward meaningful redemption, and the key actors articulated their battle to advance from one side of the civil society binary to the other. I was tidying up the first book while venturing into my second, during my first year on tenure-track. In both, culture was explained. It was not to be explained by meaningless material conditions.

Phil Smith saw me presenting my work at the American Sociological Association, affirmed how central the strong programme was in my analysis, and insisted that I join the party that Yale's Center for Cultural Sociology was hosting that very evening. Within a few years, I became active in the community and began to explain more explicitly how social performances drove economic outcomes. I did not know then that I would leave Michigan for a professorship at Yale or that I would serve as a co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University before receiving the call to return, as Jeff put it, to my ‘Doktormutter’ in Princeton.

The intermingling of Alexander and Zelizer became apparent in me. I sketched the concept of performance circuits, in which:

During the quarterly reports from the Federal Reserve chairman, I wrote, the performance was undeniable:

‘A word or phrase from the Fed chairman—or even a gesture—has the power to move financial markets. . . . Every detail of his public presentation will matter. Above all, he’ll need to seem confident, even as he fields what's likely to be aggressive questioning, image consultants say. “It's unfortunate that you’d be judged on posture, or looks, or tone,” said Gerard Carney, head of U.S. financial communications for the PR firm Fleishman-Hillard. . . . As for his attire, it's best to stay simple and conservative at the press conference, said Michael Christian, an image consultant at Manhattan Makeovers…. Christian suggested a white shirt and a navy suit, which he said convey credibility’ (William Alden quoted in Wherry, 2012: 204, emphasis added).

The same cannot be said for the major rituals in the life cycle. There are a range of social performances in which we wear costumes, including high school and college graduation ceremonies, marriages and deaths. These are rites of passage marking the movement from one status to another that individuals honour and that third-parties sanction. I termed these as moments of relational accounting, acknowledging the collectively held cultural codes shaping individual behaviours (Wherry, 2016, 2017). Economic sociologists Adam Hayes and Rourke O’Brien conducted experiments to demonstrate how relational accounting affects investment choices by shifting an individual's tolerance for risk (Hayes and O’Brien, 2021; Hayes, 2025). These researchers are not ‘culturalist’ or adherents to the strong programme, but they do recognize that critical parts of our theoretical apparatus can be verified and tested using traditional data, experiments and analytic techniques outside of cultural sociology.

My work on relational accounting, on household debt and on cultural markets relies on social performances that go beyond a Goffmanian strategic actor. The subjects of my work enact scripts and improvise on the storylines. They are able to do so with skill when attuned to the normative and cultural structures against which individual actors make sense of what's possible, desirable, or taboo.

In the sociology of consumption, marketing professors were taking up Alexander's theory of social performance to interrogate consumption patterns along with marketing and public relations strategies. Ian Woodward and I put together The Oxford Handbook of Consumption to showcase Alexander's kinship with consumer culture theory (Arnould and Thompson, 2019) and to build additional bridges between scholars and practitioners in business schools and in schools of communication with those in sociology departments (O’Guinn et al., 2019; Wherry and Woodward, 2019).

Jeff seemed pleased with how I roamed, understanding that I liked playing several roles across more than one genre. And he loved a good show. I studied how he did it, his playbook for advancement − barreling into territories marked by ‘do not trespass’ signs, putting on spectacular plays, donning signature turns of phrase, that tore the barricades down.