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...

The story of EU rail and transportation policy is about the inter-relation between economic and political integration. The European Union is often seen as a structure for enforcing discipline on governments in a free market. The idealized market is driven by transcendental economic laws of...

Why do firms do what they do? Why does one cut prices while its neighbor buys out competitors? Why does one diversify into new industries while its neighbor spins off subsidiaries to focus on its core competence? Why do some strategies rise while others fall? These are central concerns of both...

Institutions impose constraints on us all. In recent years the institution of the university press has constrained the publication of edited volumes, and the appearance of this particular volume might be seen as evidence against the notion that institutional constraints are real. But this is the...

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority...

Ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed employment discrimination; governments, colleges, and corporations have tried to understand what the law means. Employers have tried to integrate workforces, some with more enthusiasm than others. Change has been slower than those who passed the...

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...

The worldwide spread of economic and political liberalism was the defining feature of the late twentieth century. Free-market-oriented economic reforms -- macroeconomic stabilization, liberalization of foreign economic policies, privatization, and deregulation -- took root in many parts of the...

Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, diversification, debt...

In Adam Smith in Beijing, Giovanni Arrighi has given us a sequel to The Long Twentieth Century (Verso, 1994), which traces the center of the economic world from Italy to Holland to Britain to America. In that book he argued that the key to being a hegemon was to control finance and capital, not...