This trifold theory of reproduction allows us to locate culture at the heart of economics. If we understand societies as composed, fundamentally, of patterns of reproduction, then patterns are always under negotiation, always changing, and are made up of uncountable individual actions that either reinforce or challenge (in subtle and blatant ways) that reproduction of the status quo. Reproduction in this sense does not refer to an automatic, unthinking, agentless process by which humans, drone-like, rehearse their social life in their habituated fashion. Reproduction at all three levels is a field of contestation, refusal, negotiation, compromise and experimentation.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 120