Social relationships channel information, influence, and access to scarce resources. As a consequence, social networks - the patterns of these relationships across the members of a community - influence who comes up with important innovations, whether and how rapidly those innovations get...

In this article I develop a proposal for the theoretical vantage point of the sociology of markets, focusing on the problem of the social order of markets. The initial premise is that markets are highly demanding arenas of social interaction, which can only operate if three inevitable...

Die Problematik der Ungewissheit hat sich zu einem zentralen theoretischen Ausgangspunkt wirtschaftssoziologischer Forschung entwickelt. Das Papier diskutiert die Frage, inwieweit Ungewissheit tatsächlich als paradigmatischer Ansatzpunkt zur Untersuchung wirtschaftlicher Phänomene aus...

Der Beitrag reflektiert theoretisch die gegenwärtige Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise, wobei die Ausführungen im Zusammenhang mit bestehenden Krisentheorien stehen. Meine These ist, dass die Krisentheorien der "Unregierbarkeit" und des "Spätkapitalismus" darin falsch lagen, den Ausgangspunkt von...

What do we value? For markets to operate and for economies to grow, producers must attract purchasers to the products they offer. In advanced capitalist economies, market saturation and decline of demand are constant threats to markets. But how do we understand why actors desire the things whose...

The article provides an overview of the state of the art of sociological research on price formation. The dominant trait of the sociological approach to prices is to understand price formation not as the outcome of individual preferences but as the result of the social and political forces...

Starting from the assumption that decision situations in economic contexts are characterized by fundamental uncertainty, the paper argues that the decision-making of intentionally rational actors is anchored in fictions. “Fictionality” in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an...