Economic Sociology

Economic sociology, or new economic sociology, is defined as the sociological approach applied to the economy. This broad definition raises two questions: what is the sociological approach and what is the economy? Sociology is usually defined as the science of society or of the social, and economy (derived from the Greek notion of “household”) as the management of scarce resources. Economic sociology then becomes the study of the social dimension of the management of scarce resources. This not entirely successful definition, furthermore, suggests that whenever a sociologist studies what is called the economy, he or she is doing economic sociology.

New economic sociology was developed in the late 1980s in the United States, primarily at top-ranked universities, and it is today a well-established field also in ...