This article argues that if we embrace a view of religion as a collection of theories about the world (e.g., about alertness and entrepreneurship) and a set of values about how we ought to approach our activities (e.g., value freedom), there are potentially positive aspects of thinking about...

The Protestant ethic which, according to Weber, contributed to economic development in the West is only one of a variety of work ethics that can be identified and studied. In the Bahamas, for instance, a definite Junkanoo ethic colors economic life. Junkanoo is a semiannual carnival-like...

Prominent economic sociologist Richard Swedberg has argued that economists have failed to develop a theory of the market that recognizes it as a “social phenomenon in its own right.” While this may be true of mainstream economics, the Austrian school's theory of the market is much richer...

Recent discussions of social capital within the public choice literature have tended to focus on its role in solving collective action problems and promoting political accountability. Consequently, two areas of inquiry remain underexplored: (1) the role social capital plays in facilitating...

The aim of this paper is to critically reexamine Ludwig Mises' attempt to separate the psychological aspects of understanding (thymology) from the “science of action” (praxeology). There are, we contend, legitimate distinctions between theory, on the one hand, and, on the other, psychology...

Donald Lavoie is best known outside of Austrian economics for his work on the “socialist calculation debate.” In his Rivalry and Central Planning (1985), published by Cambridge University Press, he argued that the traditional account of the debate over the possibility of rational economic...

In this essay, Storr examines what he identifies as an underdeveloped concept within Professor Douglass North's work; that of the 'ideological entrepreneur.' Ideological entrepreneurs are those who change institutional structure by cultivating a shift in shared ideology and through that process,...

Critics of the market worry that as it expands the communal sphere declines. They also worry that the market encourages vice and has little or no scope for virtue. As I argue, however, the critics fail to realize that the market is a social space where commercial as well as social bonds are...

Market skeptics have persuasively argued that the market is a social arena that is not simply amoral but that has negative moral consequences. Market apologists have offered two basic responses to this kind of charge: that the market is amoral and that it transforms private vice into public...

Since at least Max Weber, social scientists have looked closely at the nexus between markets and cities. Weber believed that cities and markets were inextricably linked. In his seminal work Economy & Society, for instance, Weber ([1921] 1978, p. 1213) describes the city as a market settlement....