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 Europe. This subdiscipline of sociology is, for example, manifested in several readers, encyclopedia, theme issues, and The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Richard Swedberg is the person who has written most extensively on economic sociology—writings that have substantially contributed to the constitution of the field. Classical economic sociology can be found in the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, [Page 499]and Bronislaw Malinowski. Economic sociology has focused on the production side of the economy, stressing the role of coordination in firms and markets. Markets are a large field of economic sociological research; most studies deal with business-to-business markets and producers, some with labor markets, and fewer with consumer markets. Economic sociologists have shown less interest in the work done by sociologists who have studied the economy of consumption. The way economic sociologists have regarded, and made use of, the findings of sociology of consumption, however, is not much different from how consumer sociologists have treated the works of economic sociology. Both sides have to a large extent neglected the other and not made due use of each others' findings, and it is hard to see that anyone has gained by this division of labor and the current situation of mutual neglect.

The main contribution of economic sociology to the field of consumption is to show the relevance of production, and the implicit suggestion is that this matters also for consumption. In this way, economic sociology adds ideas of how producers organize their activities and affect markets and forms of sale, issues that are underdeveloped in consumption studies. To combine the study of production and consumption also opens up the possibility for a better understanding of the economy at large.