Theory for an age of crisis: seeing money as an organizational process

The worldwide financial crisis and the need to understand the conditions leading up to it and the associated responses highlight the importance of money in organizations. Yet, money is undertheorized in management theory and considered uninteresting or “inert” (Mitchel & Mickel, 1999 ). In contrast, related social sciences and organizational practices provide rich insights into the socially contingent and expressive qualities of money. This paper proposes a new multidimensional framework for analyzing money as a social construct and suggests how it can be used to theorize and research the collapse of financial markets and the Great Recession. Copyright © 2011 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.