Economic sociology is a rapidly expanding field, applying sociology's core insight--that individuals behave according to scripts that are tied to social roles--to economic behavior. It places homo economicus (that tried-and-true fictive actor who is completely rational, acts only out of...

Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim sought to understand modernity by comparing precapitalist societies with capitalism. Marx explored the transition from feudalism to capitalism; Weber the capitalist impulse that arose with Protestantism; and Durkheim the rise of capitalism's division of...

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic...

What is colloquially known as the "post-socialist transition" comes at an opportune time for economic sociologists, for we are in the midst of developing sociological ways of thinking about economic practices and structures. We had long ceded economic institutions to economists, satisfying...

When the economist Michael Piore (1996, p. 742) looked out over the field of economic sociology he saw “an enormous hodge-podge of ideas and insights, existing at all sorts of different levels of abstraction, possibly in contradiction with one another, possibly just incommensurate, without a...

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic...