Quinn Sarah
University of California, Department of Sociology, Barrows Hall 410, Berkeley, California 94720-1980, USA.
AJS. 2008 Nov;114(3):738-80. doi: 10.1086/592861.
This article adopts an institutional approach to describe the changing secondary market for life insurance in the United States. Since the 1990s, this market, in which investors buy strangers' life insurance policies, has grown in the face of considerable moral ambivalence. The author uses news reports and interviews to identify and describe three conceptions of this market: sacred revulsion, consumerist consolation, and rationalized reconciliation. Differences among the conceptions are considered in view of the institutional legacy of life insurance and its success in organizing practices, perceptions, and understandings about markets and death. From this case, the author draws implications for analyses of morals in markets, an important and emergent topic within economic sociology.
本文采用一种制度主义方法来描述美国不断变化的人寿保险二级市场。自20世纪90年代以来，这个投资者购买陌生人人寿保险单的市场，在面临相当大的道德矛盾情绪的情况下不断发展。作者利用新闻报道和访谈来识别和描述这个市场的三种观念：神圣的厌恶、消费主义的慰藉和合理化的和解。鉴于人寿保险的制度遗产及其在组织有关市场和死亡的实践、认知及理解方面的成功，对这些观念之间的差异进行了考量。作者从这个案例中得出了对市场道德分析的启示，这是经济社会学中一个重要且新兴的话题。
