economic sociology

economic sociology, the application of sociological concepts and methods to analysis of the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services.

Economic sociology is particularly attentive to the relationships between economic activity, the rest of society, and changes in the institutions that contextualize and condition economic activity. Although traditional economic analysis takes the atomistic individual as its starting point, economic sociology generally begins with groups, or whole societies, which it views as existing independently of and partially constituting the individual. When economic sociologists do focus on individuals, it is generally to examine the ways in which their interests, beliefs, and motivations to act are mutually constituted through the interactions between them. This focus on economic action as social—that is, as oriented toward other people—allows economic sociologists to consider power, culture, organizations, and institutions as being central to an economy.

The themes of power and culture, as well as the focus on organizations and institutions, in economic sociology have naturally led its practitioners to examine the relationship between the state and the economy. Economic sociology has generally asserted that the state and the economy exist in a symbiotic relationship: the state depends on the economy for revenue, and the economy depends on the state for the rule of law. This runs counter to much of the economic literature on markets in economics, which tends to portray markets and states as existing in opposition to one another. The symbiotic relationships between economies, the state, and civil society are what economic sociologists mean when they say that economies are embedded in social and political structures. The relationship between the state and the economy has been an area of inquiry central to economic sociology since its genesis.

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History of economic sociology

The birth of economic sociology can be found in the writings of Karl Marx. Marx made it his mission to combat the legacy in Germany of G.W.F. Hegel’s idealism. The tendency of Hegelians to give causal primacy to idealist factors was replaced by the emphasis Marx and Friedrich Engels placed on the material roots of social change. Marx worked to provide a general theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of capitalism but criticized the political economists for their naïve understanding of how the market produced class antagonism. The general theory of economic development Marx proposed placed class at the centre of analysis and posited the inevitable decline of capitalism to be replaced by socialism. Marx did not champion the idea of the mutual constitution of state and economy but, rather, saw the political structure of a society as growing out of, legitimating, and obscuring the exploitation upon which an economic order is based.

Although Marxist historical materialism was a powerful strain of economic sociology, the German sociologist Max Weber developed another distinct strand. Weber disliked both the overly rigid theoretical framework of Marxist historical materialism and the atheoretical just-so studies of his German historicist predecessors. Weber’s work refocused analysis on the institutions that condition the motivations, goals, and possibilities for economic action ignored by Marx, and, as such, Weber’s concern with the state was much deeper than was Marx’s. Weber’s focus on “social action,” or action oriented toward another person, made him consider power, belief, habit, and the role that organizations play in economic life as central to his economic sociology. Weber emphasized that the political order was linked with the legal order that provided the basis for the economic order in a given society. Although Weber had a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between state and economy than Marx did, his concern with how institutions condition the meanings that individuals attach to economic action obscured the ways in which economic and political institutions are systemically linked at a level above the individual.

Émile Durkheim was not explicitly concerned with economies in most of his writings, but his positivist institutionalism forced him to consider the relationships between the state and the economy. Durkheim criticized the utilitarian vision of human action and placed a much greater emphasis on the institutional preconditions of market-oriented action. Durkheim went through great pains to show that the division of labour is not the result of individually based action but, rather, a precondition for such action. Durkheim was especially concerned with the negative effects of capitalism arising from the lack of development of the proper institutional structure, especially the state, which he thought was needed to support healthy market exchange. Durkheim saw an underdeveloped state as likely resulting in compulsory labour and labour conflict, as well as anomie and social disintegration.

After the Great Depression, a new economic sociology began to develop that dealt explicitly with the decline and transformation of liberal capitalism. Karl Polanyi crystallized the idea of an economic system as the object of study for economic sociologists. An economic system is how economic activity is conditioned by an institutional form of integration. These forms of integration were connected to institutions that defined the goals of economic action and the appropriate means to achieve these ends. It must be stressed here that these forms are ideal types. Polanyi thought that various forms of integration might be present in a given economic system to a greater or lesser degree. Thus, primitive societies were characterized primarily by a system based on reciprocity. Under this system, production, distribution, and exchange are regulated by the direct social obligations of parties involved with one another over an extended period. Meanwhile, feudal systems were characterized by redistribution. In this form of economic integration, political institutions regulate the production and distribution of goods. Production is regulated through forms of directly controlled labour, the products of which are distributed through norms of honour and through administrative means. The 19th century was characterized by an economic system based on the market. Market trade as a form of integration involves the production of goods for sale in a market and the distribution of goods through market means. Polanyi’s key point, however, is that society and economy are not separate, and, thus, he emphasized how early markets were price-regulated markets rather than free markets. In the Great Depression and the two World Wars, Polanyi saw the collapse of a civilization in which the market had become increasingly independent from social regulation. The destruction that the self-regulating market caused was met by attempts to assert social control over market processes.

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