Property, Sociology Of

Since the inception of modernity, property has been at the center of social and political thought. If there has been one great divide about what modern societies are and what they may become, that has been the issue of property. Remarkably, in the field of sociology, for several decades property has not attracted a great deal of attention and it is difficult to find a major work on social theory that treats it as a theoretical problem worth being explored. Ralph Dahrendorf's critique of Marxist conceptions of property under capitalism was the last relevant attempt in that respect; since then, the question of property has been diluted into debates on other concepts, such as class and power. Although it is difficult to find a major sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century denying the importance of property, it is even more difficult to find an explicit treatment of property as part of contemporary social theory. On the other hand, property still attracts theoretical interest in political philosophy (including Jeremy Waldron's work), in economics, and in political science (such as Elinor Ostrom's work). In particular, neo-institutionalism and the economic analysis of law have been the context for a growing concern on property.

In the absence of a sociological debate on property in general, this entry will show the way a sociological approach can contribute to understand the multiple meanings property have for social agents in different situations. In an increasingly complex world, it is difficult to find a single meaning to property, given the variety of things that can be owned (from houses to software, from financial capital to genetic information) and the variety of persons that can own those things (from flesh and bone individuals to multinational corporations, from states to indigenous communities). The main argument here is that a sociological analysis can account for the complexities of property to the extent it recognizes in it a dual character, that is, that it can be seen both as a social relation and as a legal institution. In contrast to most neo-institutional analyses, which define property only as a right to exclude others from the use of something (thus focusing on the norms and rules that define that right), a sociological approach starts with a more general view by looking at property as the power to exclude, that is, as a social relation with many aspects that cannot be derived from the legal rules that govern it.