“In my head, I have a cleaning lady:” Symbol form and symbolic intention in the everyday use of money
-
Marie McNabb
,
Karl Chan-Brown
Abstract
Money is a symbol. Beginning with this simple notion, we have completed a qualitative study of how money exists in people’s everyday lives and how it is used symbolically. A review of the financial, economic, psychological, and semiotic literature shows that even though money is written and talked about exhaustively, little symbol theory appears in economic writing, and we rarely found money mentioned in semiotic texts. We used a qualitative, phenomenological approach to identify critical thematic elements and underlying structures of participants’ experience. We also incorporated an accepted symbol-structure template in our analysis of the functions, emotions, actions, and reactions in the transactions our participants described. Participants refer to money both as wealth in the abstract and as concrete amounts about to be used. Our analysis of money in the abstract describes a structure of experience involving belonging, privacy and secrecy, unequal distribution, quantitative uncertainty, reflections of life history, and values. Our analysis of money in the concrete reveals a symbolic intention and a variety of “Others” engaged in the symbolic action.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Re charged emblems: Hawthorne and semiotic metamorphics
- The spectrum of subjectal forms: Towards an Integral Semiotics
- Peirce, Aristotle, metaphor – and comments to Factor
- Charles Peirce and firstness: The category of origins
- Image and word as forms of iconic depiction
- Embodied ekphrasis of experience: Bodily rhetoric in mediating affect in interaction
- Semeiotic time
- “In my head, I have a cleaning lady:” Symbol form and symbolic intention in the everyday use of money
- The form of the traditional bamboo house in the Makassar culture: A cultural semiotic study
- Garroni, the late Peirce, and the issue of creativity
- Collocational semiosis in the academic discourse of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): The case of AFRICA
- Book Review
- In the footsteps of the semiotic school of Moscow-Tartu / Tartu-Moscow: Evaluations and perspectives
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Re charged emblems: Hawthorne and semiotic metamorphics
- The spectrum of subjectal forms: Towards an Integral Semiotics
- Peirce, Aristotle, metaphor – and comments to Factor
- Charles Peirce and firstness: The category of origins
- Image and word as forms of iconic depiction
- Embodied ekphrasis of experience: Bodily rhetoric in mediating affect in interaction
- Semeiotic time
- “In my head, I have a cleaning lady:” Symbol form and symbolic intention in the everyday use of money
- The form of the traditional bamboo house in the Makassar culture: A cultural semiotic study
- Garroni, the late Peirce, and the issue of creativity
- Collocational semiosis in the academic discourse of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): The case of AFRICA
- Book Review
- In the footsteps of the semiotic school of Moscow-Tartu / Tartu-Moscow: Evaluations and perspectives
