American Bar Foundation and Illinois State University
aaron.pitluck@IllinoisState.edu
Over the past two years, two International Sociological Association Research Committees, Economy and Society (RC02) and Conceptual and Terminological Analysis (RC35) have collaborated on a common research project. We have explored well-established concepts from other fields or sub-fields that are currently missing, underappreciated, or misconceptualized in economic sociology. You may have even attended one of our three joint sessions on this topic at the XX ISA World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne in 2023. I am pleased to share with our community that this research has been published as Current Sociology monograph, Volume 72 Issue 2. The journal is freely available to ISA members and three of the articles are currently available worldwide as Open Access. If you are unable to access one of these articles, you are most welcome to contact Aaron Pitluck or the article’s author.
Aaron Pitluck’s initial impetus for the project was to experimentally explore how international scholars might apply the heuristic tool of brokering in a novel concept to generate new insights for analysing economic life. This has produced five articles and five concepts, each illustrated with original empirical research.
Dialogues with anthropology
Dana Kornberg brokers in ‘transactional pathways’ from economic anthropology to demonstrate that the genealogy of specific markets is inextricably intertwined with the genealogy of groups creating and reshaping social identities like class, race, gender, and caste. Her article deploys the concept in Delhi to explain the curious failure of a well-funded, formalized public-private partnership program controlled by upper-caste groups to displace lower-caste and Muslim informal waste collection and recycling workers. Another value of her research is to position Jane Guyer’s concept within cultural and relational approaches to economic sociology.
Similarly inspired by anthropology, Sally Schnapper was compelled to broker in concepts from family and kinship anthropology to better understand her fieldwork of shopkeepers in rural France. From her ethnographic and historical reflections, she induced the concept of the ‘trading house’ to better understand family businesses. Both Kornberg’s and Schnapper’s contributions are noteworthy for engaging with anthropological theory to transcend ossified binary categories in sociological theorizing such as the distinction between formal and informal markets, and between households and businesses.
Dialogues with interdisciplinary fields
Several of the articles broker in concepts from interdisciplinary fields that economic sociology has neglected. For example, a ‘fiduciary relationship’ is a well-established concept in law, theology, and ethics, and is already well institutionalized in diverse academic fields, including economics—but rarely in economic sociology. Jordi Mundó’s research seeks to correct this omission by demonstrating the utility of the concept in key sites of economic sociological inquiry, including analyses of property, public goods, and to help frame normative debates in environmental sustainability.
Two theories broadly used in economic sociology (and the discipline broadly) is Jens Beckert’s concept of ‘fictional expectations’ in the economy, as well as Ann Swidler’s concept of a toolkit or repertoires approach in cultural sociology. In a provocative argument, Dustin Stoltz critiques the presuppositions of both theories by drawing on research in the cognitive sciences and then advances an ‘embodied’ approach to cognition. He deploys this concept to collect data about elite professional advisory firms to explore how they conduct (and sell) their imaginative labour. The article is filled with insights, regardless of whether your interest is in cognitive embeddedness, culture in the economy, the temporality and embodiedness of agency, or the power of transnational consulting firms to format economic life.
In The semiosis and the market, Jean De Munck and Tom Duterme remind us that economic sociologists extensively study the role of signs when studying consumption (e.g., the advertising industry’s manipulation of signs), and many sociologists draw on the interdisciplinary Socio-economics of Convention literature to study how one type of sign—the convention—enables coordination in markets and production. But why focus only on conventions or the role of signs in consumption? De Munck and Duterme advocate for exploring the full spectrum of signs and their contextualized evolution (semiosis) by drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. To demonstrate the utility of Peircian sociology for economic sociologist, they draw on original research on stock market indices to explore their semiotic power in financial markets.
Openings and Closings
The heuristic metaphor of ‘brokering in’ an idea from one field to another requires that we attend to—and potentially question—the existing borders between disciplines and sub-disciplines that we have absorbed from our national sociologies and our diverse graduate trainings. In the monograph’s opening article, Aaron Pitluck traces the (increasingly poorly named) New Economic Sociology (NES) that arose in the mid-1980s by scholars primarily based in the United States and subsequently exported world-wide within the historical context of the rise of neoliberal capitalism and the demise of the USSR. On one hand, the NES was an improbably successful brokering between several isolated research communities that was united by a persuasive ‘fall and rise’ narrative that sociological research on the economy had declined since the era of classical sociology and that a sub-discipline of Economic Sociology was necessary to challenge the hegemony of economists. On the other hand, this renascent rhetorical framing excluded as irrelevant sociological work on the economy conducted from the 1920s to 1970s, including dependency theory in Latin America, neo-Marxism, and international political economy. The NES conception of economic sociology is therefore simultaneously the product of successful brokering as well as of durable resistance to brokering from nearby fields.
In the monograph’s closing article, Alexander Ebner excavates one such significant historical exclusion—the work of Joseph Schumpeter, particularly his insights on technological and organizational innovation as the driving force of capitalist evolution. Ebner carefully disaggregates key ideas in the New Economic Sociology to demonstrate a shared undertheorization of novelty and disruption in contemporary capitalism. Ebner’s article provides numerous promising ideas with which economic sociologists could broker in ideas from contemporary evolutionary economists to better theorize the internal dynamics of capitalism.
We invite you to join us in our reflections on economic sociologists’ conceptual toolkit.