Paying with change: The purposeful enunciation of material culture

Recent work in cultural sociology has called attention to constraints imposed by material objects on interpretive processes, but is unclear as to how actors use such constraints to produce new meanings. In this article, we use novel newspaper data of people attempting to pay with large amounts of small cash and coins as a form of protest to highlight the material conditions under which actors are able to convey an alternative meaning of an object to an audience. We use computational linguistic and quantitative methods to examine when changes in the meaning of money are more likely to lead to emotionally-charged media reception. We find that emotionally-charged media reception is more likely when, typically, actors consciously attend to money and yet do not have to put in much cognitive work to assign meaning to it in the setting where the protest is attempted. We conclude by considering the implications of the study for broader projects within cultural sociology, economic sociology, organizational theory, political sociology, and social movement studies.