Abstract
Like all new research fields, the “new economic sociology” was produced by the redeployment of relatively diverse researchers under a single academic label. Academic entrepreneurs in the second half of the 1980s took up the traditional term of the European “founding fathers” claiming they were renewing the discipline while distinguishing themselves from (1) the old homegrown denomination “economy and society,” (2) anti-disciplinary currents such as neo-Marxism, and (3) interdisciplinary movements like “socioeconomics.” The relative unity of the new economic sociology was due more to this set of demarcations than to a specific intellectual approach. The new economic sociology obtained its scientific legitimacy by bringing together two promising new currents: network analysis and neo-institutionalism, along with a more marginal cultural mode of analysis. While there had been very little exchange among these currents, mutual references became more ecumenical once a common label had emerged and distinct intellectual programs were launched. Institutional legitimacy was quickly obtained thanks to the support of the Russell Sage Foundation, enabling a process of expansion that in Europe developed far more slowly. The case of the “new economic sociology” demonstrates that the creation of new subdisciplines cannot be understood merely through the analysis of direct interactions among persons linked to each other by inter-acquaintanceship. In accordance with a field theoretical approach, academic entrepreneurs function under structural conditions which must also be taken into account. Among these structural conditions were changes in the academic field itself (due to demographical effects, the imperialism of economics, and the surge in Business Schools) as well as in the political sphere (the rise of neo-liberalism).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Andrew Abbott (2001). Chaos of disciplines. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Johan Heilbron (2004). A regime of disciplines: Toward a historical sociology of disciplinary knowledge. In Charles Camic and Hans Joas (Eds.), The dialogical turn: New roles for sociology in the postdisciplinary age (23–42). (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield).
Pierre Bourdieu (2001). Science de la science et réflexivité (129). (Paris: Raisons d’agir).
On the history of economic sociology see Jean-Jacques Gislain and Philippe Steiner, La sociologie économique (1890–1920) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), and Richard Swedberg, “Economic sociology: Past and present,” Current Sociology, 35 (1987): 1–221.
Randall Collins has most systematically highlighted the interactive dynamics of intellectual creativity, see The sociology of philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Interaction ritual chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Pierre Bourdieu has, in various works, focussed more strongly on the structural dynamics of the intellectual field, even in those cases such as the literary field where the degree of institutionalization is comparatively low, see Pierre Bourdieu, The field of cultural production (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).
Sharon Zukin and Paul DiMaggio (Eds.), Structures of capital: The social organization of the economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), re-edition of a special issue of Theory and society (1986); Roger Friedland and A. F. Robertson (Eds.), Beyond the marketplace (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990); Richard Swedberg (Ed.), Explorations in economic sociology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993).
Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg (Eds.), The sociology of economic life (Boulder, CO, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1992).
See historical introduction to Granovetter and Swedberg (Eds.), Sociology of economic life, and Richard Swedberg, “New economic sociology: What has been accomplished, what is ahead?” Acta Sociologica, 40/2 (1997).
The lists of key authors excludes authors who were only occasionally involved in the events in question (A. F. Robertson, Sharon Zukin), as well as younger authors whose primary contributions were published after 1989 (Bruce Carruthers, Frank Dobbin, Brian Uzzi).
Pierre Bourdieu, “Vive la crise! For heterodoxy in social science,” Theory and Society (1988) 17: 773–788 and Science de la science, 41.
Data in Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner, The impossible science: An institutional analysis of American sociology (London: Sage, 1990), especially p. 138.
William D’Antonio, “Recruiting sociologists in a time of changing opportunities,” in Sociology and its publics, ed. Terence Halliday and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 99–136.
Lowell Hargens (1991). Impressions and misimpressions about sociology journals. Contemporary Sociology, 20, 343–349.
O. E. Williamson’s Market and hierarchies was published in 1975; Becker’s manifesto, The economic approach to human behavior, in 1976.
For a partisan’s programmatic statement, see Gordon Tullock, “Economic imperialism,” in Theory of public choice, ed. James Buchanan and Robert Tollison (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), 317–329. The expression was later used critically; see for example Gerard Radnitzky and Peter Berholz (Eds.), Economic imperialism: The economic approach outside the field of economics (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987).
On the gender issue, see Viviana Zelizer, “Enter culture,” in Mauro F. Guillén, Randall Collins, Paula England, and Marshall Meyer (Eds.), The new economic sociology: Developments in an emerging field (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 101–125.
White developed and transmitted most of his thinking on network analysis in the “Introduction to Social Relations” course he gave at Harvard, which attracted many of the future “structural school” protagonists.
Six of the authors studied here wrote their PhD dissertations at Harvard (see Table 1); five of them were White’s students (Granovetter, Useem, Schwartz, DiMaggio, Eccles); see Reza Azarian, “The general sociology of Harrison White” (PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 2003), 213–216. The second generation of authors (including Mintz, Mizruchi, Abolafia, Brewster Stearns, McGuire) often wrote their dissertations under the direction of former students of White’s, namely Schwartz and Granovetter, then young professors at Stony Brook. White also had profound direct and indirect influence on several other authors in this group: Burt wrote his thesis at the University of Chicago with Edward O. Laumann, another student of White’s; Fligstein was a colleague of White’s at Arizona; Baker wrote his thesis at Northwestern but corresponded regularly with White and some of his students.
An anatomy of kinship: Mathematical models for structures of cumulated roles (1963). (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall).
With Cynthia White (1965). Canvases and careers: Institutional change in the French painting world. (New York: Wiley).
Chains of opportunities: System models of mobility in organizations (1970). (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
“Uses of mathematics in sociology,” in Mathematics and the social sciences, ed. J. C. Charlesworth (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1963). For the field of mathematical sociology at the time, see Aage Sorensen and Annemette Sorensen (1975). Mathematical sociology: A trend report and a bibliography. Current Sociology, 23/3, 9–153.
Interview with Mark Granovetter in Richard Swedberg, Economics and sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Interview with Harrison White in ibid., 79.
Ibid., 82. Among economists attending the seminar were Stephen Marglin, Tom Schelling, Mike Spence, and Richard Zeckhauser.
Harrison. C. White, “Markets as social structures” (paper presented at a conference of the American Sociological Association, 1978), quoted in Swedberg, Economics and Sociology, 17.
Michael Useem and S. M. Miller (1975). Privilege and domination: The role of the upper class in American higher education, Social Science Information, 14, 115–145.
Michael Useem and Paul DiMaggio, “Social class and arts consumption: The origins and consequences of class differences in exposure to the arts in America,” Theory and Society, 5 (March 1978): 141–161, and Michael Useem and Paul DiMaggio, “The arts in class reproduction,” in Cultural and economic reproduction in education, ed. Michael Apple (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
Michael Useem (1984). The inner circle: Large corporations and the rise of business political activity in the U.S. and U.K. (New York: Oxford University Press).
In the 2005 US News and World Report ranking of US universities, Harvard is first whereas Stony Brook is 106th.
Charles Perrow, “Markets, hierarchies and hegemony: A critique of Chandler and Williamson,” in Perspectives on organization design and behavior, ed. A. van de Ven and W. Joyce (New York: Wiley, 1981) (includes a response from Williamson), and Charles Perrow, “Economic theories of organizations,” in C. Perrow, Complex organizations, 3rd ed., (New York: Random House, 1986), text republished in the special issue of Theory and Society (1986) and Structures of Capital (1990). Mitchell Abolafia, for example, says his theoretical approach developed out of the combined influences of Perrow and Granovetter; see preface of Making Markets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
In the book version of his thesis, Radical protest and social structure (New York, Academic, 1976), XI, Schwartz thanks both White and other academics and a number of other figures and associations for their ideas, help, and encouragement, namely the Black Panther Party, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, and Karl Marx. In the words of one of our respondents, “The Stony Brook crowd were really Marxists who caught on to network analysis.”
Cf. P. Bonacich (1972). A technique for analysing overlapping memberships. In Herbert Costner (Ed.), Sociological methodology. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass).
The book versions of these studies became “classics” of new economic sociology: Beth Mintz and Michael Schwartz, The power structure of American business (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1985); Mark Mizruchi and Michael Schwartz (Eds.), Intercorporate relations: The structural analysis of business (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987); Mark Mizruchi, The American corporate network, 1904–1974 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982).
Mark Granovetter (1981). Towards a sociological theory of income differences. In I. Berg (Ed.), Sociological perspectives on labor markets. (New York: Academic).
Granovetter (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91/3.
Cf. Ronald Burt (1982). Toward a structural theory of action: Network models of social structure, perception and action. (New York: Academic). Burt’ actors seek to maximize their utility but under the structural constraint defined by the fact that they occupy a certain position in the networks they are part of.
Cf. Ronald Burt (1983). Corporate profits and cooptation: Networks of market constraint and directorate ties in the American economy. (New York: Academic).
Wayne E. Baker (1990). Market networks and corporate behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 96/3 (November).
Wayne E. Baker, Robert R. Faulkner, and Gene A. Fisher (1998). Hazards of the market: The continuity and dissolution of interorganizational market relationships. American Sociological Review, 63, 147–177 (April).
Richard Swedberg (1987). On economic sociology: An interview with Mark Granovetter (1985/86). Research report, 14. Department of Sociology, Uppsala University.
Stinchcombe’s classic article, “Bureaucratic and craft administration of production” (1959), was republished in Granovetter and Swedberg (Eds.), The sociology of economic life, (Boulder, Co.: Westview, 1992). Lazerson’s study on the Italian districts and Perrow’s on “small firms networks” were published in Swedberg, ed., Explorations in economic sociology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993). See also Nicole Biggart Charismatic capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and on the Asian economy, see Gary Hamilton and Nicole Woolsey Biggart “Market, culture, and authority: A comparative analysis of management and organization in the Far East,” American Journal of Sociology (supplement 1988), and Marco Orrù, Nicole Woolsey Biggart, and Gary Hamilton, The economic organization of East Asian capitalism, (London: Sage, 1997). Similar studies aiming to identify forms of economic organization other than the one described by Chandler and Williamson include Charles Sabel and Michael Piore’s in The second industrial divide (1984), and Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin’s in World of possibilities, ed. Sabel and Zeitlin (1997).
See contributions in Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio (Eds.), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For a view on the proliferation of “neo-institutionalisms” in various disciplines, see P. Hall and R. Taylor, “Political science and the three new institutionalisms,” Political Studies, 44 (1996): 936–957, and Paul DiMaggio, “The new institutionalisms,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economicsm, 154/4 (1998): 696–705.
Bernard Barber, “The absolutization of the market” in Markets and morals, ed. G. Dworkin, G. Bermant, and P. Brown (Washington D.C: Hemisphere, 1977), 15–31; Viviana Zelizer, Morals and markets: The development of life insurance in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children (New York: Basic, 1987), and The social meaning of money (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
Charles Smith published studies on traders and the functioning of auctions; Mitchell Abolafia used an ethno-cultural approach to study the stock market, and Paul DiMaggio contributed chapters on cultural aspects of economic life to Beyond the marketplace (1990) and the first edition of the Handbook of economic sociology. Yet only Viviana Zelizer worked to realize a consistent intellectual project around a historical and cultural approach to the economy.
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell were at the Yale School of Organization and Management; Mark Granovetter at the Stanford School of Business for a time and Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Wayne Baker and Mark Mizruchi run the Center for Society and Economy of the University of Michigan Business School, while Michael Useem runs the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School of Management. Marshall Meyer and Useem are involved in the Penn Economic Sociology and Organizational Studies (PESOS) Center of the Wharton School of Management and are members of the University of Pennsylvania’s sociology department. Paul Hirsch and Brian Uzzi teach at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Nicole Biggart at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis; Ronald Burt at the University of Chicago Business School and l’INSEAD at Fontainebleau.
As Charles Perrow put it, the field of organization studies “is swamped by the interest of business schools,” cf. Perrow, “An organizational analysis of organizational theory,” Contemporary Sociology, 29/3 (2000): 469–476.
Wayne E. Baker, Networking smart: How to build relationships for personal and organizational success (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994) and Achieving success through social capital: Tapping hidden resources in your personal and business network (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000); Michael Useem, The leadership moment: Nine true stories of triumph and disaster and their lessons for us all (New York: Random House, 1998) and Leading up (New York: Random House, 2001). For a critical account of network analysis, see Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The new spirit of capitalism (London: Verso, 2006).
Amitai Etzioni, “Toward socioeconomics,” Contemporary Sociology, 14 (1985): 178–179 and “Founding a New Socioeconomics,” Challenge, 29/5 (1986): 475–482.
Harrison C. White (1981). Where do markets come from?” American Journal of Sociology, 87/3, 518.
Mark Granovetter “Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness,” 493. It is interesting to note that Granovetter identifies Domhoff‘s and Useem’s work on economic elites as “sociological study of business” and describes Mintz and Schwartz’s book as “recent Marxist literature on ‘hegemony’ in business life.”
Azarian, “The general sociology of Harrison White” (PhD dissertation), 201–212.
Arthur Stinchcombe (1983). Economic sociology (255). (New York: Academic).
Granovetter, unpublished note of August 1985, quoted by Richard Swedberg in “New economic sociology: What has been accomplished, what is ahead?” Acta Sociologica, 40/2 (1997): 161–182.
Published in Roger Friedland and A. F. Robertson (Eds.), Beyond the marketplace.
Richard Swedberg, Ulf Himmelstrand, Göran Brulin, “The paradigm of economic sociology,” Theory and Society 16 (1987): 169–213. The paper was originally published in June 1985 as a Research Report by the Department of Sociology of Uppsala University. The same series also published Swedberg’s interview with Granovetter (published in 1987) and Talcott Parsons’s Marshall Lectures (published in 1986).
With the exception of Stinchcombe’s book and Neil Smelser (Ed.), Readings on economic sociology (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1965).
Richard Swedberg (1987). Economic sociology: Past and present. Current Sociology, 35, 1–221.
See Zukin and DiMaggio’s introduction to Structures of capital, 28.
Granovetter in “The old and the new economic sociology: A history and an agenda” (first version published in 1988) and with Swedberg in the introduction to The sociology of economic life (1992); Zelizer in “Beyond the polemics on the market: Establishing a theoretical and empirical agenda” (1988); Zukin and DiMaggio in the introduction to Structures of capital (1990), Friedland and Robertson in the introduction to Beyond the marketplace (1990).
Swedberg, Himmelstrand, and Brulin, “Paradigm of economic sociology.”
Although Granovetter more recently insisted on the compatibility of his model with analyses focused on “the essential influence exercised on individual actions and networks by cultural and political forces that exceed those actions and networks” (Le marché autrement [Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 2000], 37; this was only in the French edition of his work and after the agitation of the competitive struggle to define and dominate the field had subsided. As Granovetter recalled in 1999, he and other students of White were initially “agressively uninterested in cultural or mental states...” (see “Mark Granovetter on Economic Sociology in Europe” in Economic sociology. European Electronic Newsletter 1/1 (1999): 10–12, http://econsoc.mpifg.de).
The “Freeman betweenness centrality” of an actor measures the number of paths connecting pairs of authors that go through him.
Swedberg, preface to Explorations in economic sociology, 15–16.
It is not by chance that the economic sociology section of the ASA adopted the Handbook’s subject ordering. Its stated mission was initially as follows: “The mission of the Section on Economic Sociology is to promote the sociological study of the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of scarce goods and services. It does so by facilitating the exchange of ideas, information, and resources among economic sociologists, by stimulating research on matters of both theoretical and policy interest, by assisting the education of undergraduate and graduate students, and by communicating research findings to policy makers and other external audiences. Economic sociology is a distinct sub-field. It is ecumenical with respect to method and theory. Economic sociologists use the full range of qualitative and quantitative methods. No theoretical approach dominates; the field is inclusive, eclectic, and pluralistic.”
See, for instance, Swedberg’s call for recognition of Bourdieu’s work in Principles of economic sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) and Bourdieu’s “Principles for an economic anthropology,” which is included in the second edition of the Handbook of economic sociology (2005). On economic sociology in France, which re-emerged at about the same time as in the US but in a far more interdisciplinary setting and without the label of economic sociology, see Johan Heilbron, “Economic sociology in France,” European Societies, 3/1 (2001): 41–67, and Philippe Steiner, “Pourquoi la sociologie économique est-elle si développée en France?” L’Année sociologique, 55/2 (2005): 391–416.
Acknowledgments
Our thanks to Richard Swedberg, Loïc Wacquant, Viviana Zelizer, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this article. The text was translated from French by Amy Jacobs; the translation was funded by the Centre Lillois d’Etudes et de Recherches Sociologiques et Economiques (CLERSE) and the European network “For a European Research Space in the Social Sciences” (ESSE).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendices
Appendix 1
Inter-citation structure of the key authors, 1980–1985
Citation data is from the Social Science Citation Index. To analyze the inter-citation pattern we used the Concor method of Ucinet’s network analysis program applied to the “citing authors/authors cited” matrix. This method brings out “structural equivalents” in the network theory sense; that is, it divides the authors into groups (in this case, 4) whose individual members, while not necessarily linked to each other, are linked to the same set of other individuals; that is, in this case, individuals who cite or are cited by the same set of individuals. Once the authors have been sorted by this criterion, the program constructs a blocked matrix where ties between two individuals are represented by row–column intersections, rows designating source (citing author), and columns target (author cited). Self-citations are included.
Reading example: In the articles published between 1980 and 1985, Useem, second block, cited (= row Useem) himself 26 times, Block twice (Bl), Burt once (Bu), Mintz 3 times (Mi), Mizruchi twice (Mi), DiMaggio twice (Di), Granovetter once (Gr); he was cited (= column Useem) 26 times by himself, once by Burt, 3 times by Mintz, twice by Mizruchi, once by Friedland, 6 times by Schwartz, once by DiMaggio, once by Powell, once by Granovetter.
Appendix 2
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Convert, B., Heilbron, J. Where did the new economic sociology come from?. Theor Soc 36, 31–54 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-006-9020-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-006-9020-y