ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY
Sociology 920:375
Location and time: Beck Hall 250, MW 1:10-2:30
Office Hours: Mondays,
Phone: 445-3705
E-mail: pmclean@rci.rutgers.edu
Website : http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~pmclean/
A basic feature of any society is that it produces
and/or distributes goods and services necessary for survival. Yet this production and distribution is not
only economic in character, but also profoundly social, in that production and
distribution originate in a social context, are guided by and in turn affect
social structures, involve organized institutional and symbolic practices, and
have a variety of important social outcomes. Economic sociology purports to
study the various connections between economic action and social life. It is one of the most burgeoning and
heterogeneous fields in the discipline of sociology today, encompassing a huge
variety of theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and empirical foci. Yet there remains a great deal of contention
over just what economic sociology is and how broadly it should be construed. This class is designed as an overview of some
of the different perspectives and key arguments comprising the field, including
both classical texts and contemporary books and articles.
A number of texts are available for purchase from
the Livingston Campus Bookstore. These
are:
1) Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (
2) Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty
Classics, 1982)
3) Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd
edition (Norton, 1978)
4) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press,
1980)
5) Malcolm Gladwell, The
Tipping Point (
6) Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (
7) Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the
Inner City (RSF, 1999)
8) Bruce
Carruthers and Sarah Babb, Economy/Society: Markets,
Meanings, and Social Structure (Pine Forge Press, 2000)
Most of the required
readings come from one of these books.
However, there are a handful of required journal articles and other
short readings, marked with a double asterisk (**), which generally you can
obtain by looking under the Economic Sociology heading on my website. I may also place a few items
on electronic reserve for you. During
the course of the semester on various occasions, I will provide one-page
handout readings from the New York Times that illustrate some of the ideas
and arguments we will be talking about.
I encourage you to look for the same kinds of materials! Finally, there are also LOTS of other
readings I can suggest for those of you interested in pursuing a particular
topic.
I will spend a good deal of time
each class lecturing on the assigned readings and other topics or arguments
relevant to them. Nonetheless, I also
encourage you to ask questions and to generate discussion of the themes we
consider. To further the object of
having lively discussions, groups of students will rotate through the
responsibility for assisting me with activating and maintaining discussion each
class. These students must come to
class with a three-sentence outline of the main argument of that day’s reading,
and three questions prompted by it. They
will have circulated their questions to everyone in the class, including
myself, via email by
1) TWO 5 to 6-page papers, one
due around sixth week, the other due around 12th week, based on
topics I will provide, that draw on key ideas from the readings. Each essay is worth 20% of the final grade.
2) A final exam, held in Beck
250 on Tuesday, May 13,
January
22 Introduction to the course
January
27 The foundations of the
commercial economy
Read:
*The Wealth of Nations,
volume I, pp. 1-23 (NOT the editor’s introduction, but starting with Smith’s
own “Introduction and Plan of the Work”), 291-293, 351-364
January 29 The
dynamics of the market, and the introduction of ‘orders’ (i.e., classes)
Read: *The
Wealth of Nations, volume I, pp.26-35, 62-82, 88-97, 275-278
Week 3
February 3 International
trade: An argument for today’s politicians
Read: *The Wealth of Nations,
volume I, pp. 450-455, 472-480, 513-515, 519-524
February 5 The
proper functions of the state
Read: *The Wealth of Nations, volume II, pp.
213-247, 301-318
February 10 The other Adam Smith?
Read: *The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 9-26
(NOT the introduction, but starting with Part I, section I), 43-45, 50-57,
61-64, 77-78 (par. 10 only), 109-117, 179-187 (including par. 1 of ch. 2)
February
12 Marx on exploitation: Power
as the foundation of the capitalist economy
Read: *Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 203-219 [For a
longer and more detailed version, you could read pp. 329-361, 376-388, 397-415,
419-431, but I don’t advise it for this class]
February 17 Alienation as the foundation of the capitalist economy
Read: *The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 67, 70-81,
93-105, 319-328
February
19 NO CLASS TODAY
February
24 Karl Polanyi on the time(s)
before the market economy
Read: *Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, chapters 3-5, 7
Also helpful: **Karl Polanyi, “The Economy as
Instituted Process,” in The Sociology of Economic Life, edited by Mark
Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, pp. 29-51 (Westview Press, 1992)
February
26 The institutional
preconditions of the free market
Read: *The Great Transformation, chapters 11-14,17
March
3 Transaction cost
economics
Read: **Oliver E. Williamson, “The Economics of
Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach,” American Journal of Sociology
87 (1981):548-577. [Warning: Everyone’s
least favorite reading!]
March
5 Principal-agent problems,
market failures, and game theory
Read: **George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons:’
Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” from An Economic Theorist’s Book of Tales, pp. 7-22 (don’t worry about
any of the math)
Read: **Thomas Schelling, Micromotives
and Macrobehavior, short online selections
Read: ** Robyn M. Dawes and Richard H. Thaler,
“Anomalies: Cooperation,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 2, no. 3:
187-197.
March
10 Embeddedness and social
networks: The ‘grand theory’ part
Read: **Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and
Social Structure: the Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985):481-510.
Read: *Carruthers and Babb, Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings, and Social
Structure, ch. 1
March
12 Empirical Analyses of
Social Networks
Read: *Carruthers and Babb, Economy/Society, chapter 3
Read: **Brian Uzzi, “The Sources and Consequences of
Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network
Effect,” American Sociological Review
61,4 (1996):674-698.
NO CLASSES MARCH 17 AND 19;
SPRING BREAK
March
24 Funky stuff on particular
networks and their effects, like contagion
Read: *Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point,
introduction and chs. 2 and 6, and pp. 276-280
March
26 The effects of status in
the market
Read: **Joel M. Podolny, “A Status-Based Model of
Market Competition,” American Journal of
Sociology 98 (1993):829-872.
Perhaps also helpful: **Joel M. Podolny, “Networks
as the Pipes and Prisms of the Market,” American Journal of Sociology
107,1 (July 2001):33-60. [This is a
tough read, but the first handful of pages of it describes how to bring
together the Granovetter-style and Podolny-style visions of networks in the
market as we have been examining them the last few weeks.]
Week 10 Business history: the emergence, transformation, and
environment of the firm
March
31 Control of the internal
labor force
Read: *Carruthers and Babb, Economy/Society, chapter 4
April
2 Deindustrialization
and its social effects
Film screening: Michael Moore, Roger and Me
Week
11
April
7 Size and environment
of the American firm
Read: *Gladwell, The Tipping Point, chapter 5
Also
helpful: **Neil Fligstein, The Transformation of Corporate Control, ch.
1 [This is a complicated and rich book which I no longer assign, but I will put
the first chapter on reserve or on my website in case you want to look at it,
and then talk about the argument in class.]
Culture
and economy
April
7 Symbolism and
meaning, especially in advertising
Read: *Carruthers and Babb, Economy/Society, chapter
2, and more discussion of Gladwell
April
9 The cultural
embeddedness of money
Read:
*Viviana Zelizer, The Social
Meaning of Money, chapters 1, 3, 6, 7
Week
12 Gender, race, and economy
April
14 Forms of inequality in
the contemporary world and apparent trends
Read: *Carruthers and Babb, Economy/Society,
chapter 5
April 16 Poverty in contemporary
America: Left out of the new economy, or left out of the New Economic
Sociology?
Read: *Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game:
The Working Poor in the Inner City, chapters 1-3
April
21
Read: *Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game:
The Working Poor in the Inner City, chapters 6-7
April
23 Poverty and the
Informal Economy
Read: **Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk,
chapters 2-3
Week
14 Transitions to capitalism
April
28 The first transition
Read: *Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book
III
Read: **Paul D. McLean and John F. Padgett,
“Obligation, Risk and Opportunity in the Renaissance Economy,” online
manuscript
April
30 Contemporary
transitions
Read: *Carruthers and Babb, Economy/Society,
chapter 6
Read: **David Stark, “Recombinant Property in East
European Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996):993-1027.
May 5 Review and Q&A session