Medicine, Money, and Meaning

This book explores the tension between money and medicine: how it emerges, how doctors of different medical disciplines deal with it in various contexts, and what its respective consequences are.

It empirically illustrates Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of money as an "absolute means" and simultaneously develops an action theory of money, based on money attitudes. The author draws on 38 semi-structured interviews with medical doctors in Austria and uses a pragmatist variant of Grounded Theory. While the book examines the attitudes of medical doctors toward money, it also raises a much broader set of existential questions that all of us must answer daily in both professional and personal life: what does money mean to me, and how does money relate to the things that are of the highest importance to me? It challenges dominant approaches within the American sociology of money, inasmuch as it points to a spectrum of money attitudes and corresponding actions which influence particular social relations. The book can therefore be understood as an attempt to foster renewed academic discussions by opening the discourse between the United States and Europe in a transcultural and interdisciplinary manner.

A fresh and challenging approach that moves the field forward, it will appeal to scholars and post-graduate students of economic sociology, medical sociology, and the sociology of money, with interests in ethics and morality and Simmel studies.