The Toolkit of economic sociology

• Autor(a) principal: Swedberg, Richard
• Data de Publicação: 2006
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/1981
• topic: Economic Sociology; Economic Policy; Game Theory; Methodology

In this brief paper I will argue that economic sociology would do well to follow the example of political economy in this respect and pay more attention to analytical economics and its ideas. Contemporary economic sociology, I argue, focuses far too much on social relations and views the impact of these as the explanation to most of what happens in the economy. What is wrong with this approach is that it disregards the importance of interests or the forces that drive human behavior, not least in the economy. What needs to be done – and this will be the red thread throughout this paper – is to combine social relations and interests in one and the same analysis. If we do this, I argue, we may be able to unite some of the basic insights from economics, with some of the basic insights from sociology (e.g. Swedberg 2003). As opposed to modern economics, economic sociology does not have a core of basic concepts and ideas, welded together over a long period of time. Instead economic sociology, mirroring sociology itself, consists of a number of competing perspectives, some more coherent than others. Many economic sociologists, for example, draw on social constructivist perspective, others on a Weberian perspective; some follow Mark Granovetter in emphasizing embeddedness, others Pierre Bourdieu in approaching the analysis of the economy with the concepts of field, habitus and different types of capital. The reader who is interested in an introduction to these different perspectives is referred to The Handbook of Economc Sociology (Smelser and Swedberg 1994; second edition forthcoming in 2005). In what follows I shall first discuss two of the most important concepts in modern economic sociology – embeddedness (including networks) and field. I will then proceed to a discussion of two concepts that I argue should be at the center of contemporary economic sociology: a sociological concept of interest and an interest-based concept of institutions.