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The Sociology of Markets ANRV316-SO33-06 ARI 22 March 2007 21:26 V I E E W R S I E N C N A D V A The Sociology of Markets Neil Fligstein and Luke Dauter Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720; email: fl[email protected], [email protected] Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2007. 33:6.1–6.24 Key Words The Annual Review of Sociology is online at fields, networks, institutions, performativity, culture, politics http://soc.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: Abstract 10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131736 The sociology of markets has been one of the most vibrant fields in Copyright c 2007 by Annual Reviews. sociology in the past 25 years. There is a great deal of agreement All rights reserved that markets are social structures characterized by extensive social 0360-0572/07/0811-0001$20.00 relationships between firms, workers, suppliers, customers, and gov- ernments. But, like in many sociological literatures, the theory camps that have formed often seem to speak by each other. We show that some of the disagreement between theory camps is due to differ- ences in conceptual language, and other disagreements stem from the fact that theory camps ignore the concepts in other theory camps, thereby making their theories less complete. We end by considering deeper controversies in the literature that seem open both to new conceptualization and further empirical research. 6.1 ANRV316-SO33-06 ARI 22 March 2007 21:26 O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim their attempts to understand the origins, op- For preacher and monk the honored name! erations, and dynamics of markets as social For, quarreling, each to his view they cling. structures, the primary perspectives that have Such folk see only one side of a thing. emerged tend to remain separate and distinct at the theoretical level. Much like the blind (from the text of Jain and Buddhist origin, monks and preachers who fail to see the whole Udana 68–69, “Parable of the Blind Men and of the elephant in Buddha’s famous parable, the Elephant”) scholars have often focused on a particular so- cial aspect of markets and acted as if it was a INTRODUCTION more general understanding. The sociology of markets has been one of the This theoretical separateness produces most vibrant fields in sociology in the past two problems. First, because many scholars 25 years.1 Starting with a trickle of empiri- use similar concepts but identify them by cal and theoretical papers, it has grown to a different terms, confusion results about the river. One of the seminal pieces in the field, degree to which people are saying different Granovetter’s (1985) “Economic Action and things. For example, most scholars, regardless Social Structure: The Problem of Embedded- of their approach, believe that culture (shared ness” has been cited over 2500 times since its meanings, normative understandings, identi- publication, making it the most cited paper in ties, local practices) plays an important role sociology in the postwar era.2 Although so- in market projects. Much of this conceptual ciologists have made significant progress in overlap is hidden by the use of jargon (for ex- ample, the use of terms like frames, logics, per- 1We want to distinguish the sociology of markets from formativity, scripts, conceptions of control, or the broader project of economic sociology (Fligstein 2001). local knowledge). Thus, scholars who purport Following Polanyi (1957), economic sociology is the gen- eral study of the conditions of the production and repro- to approach their subject matter from a partic- duction of social life. Such a study would include studies ular perspective actually share concepts with of consumption, the family, and the links between states a wide variety of other scholars. and households, schooling, and economic life more broadly (Smelser & Swedberg 2005, p. 3). The sociology of markets Second, to the degree that scholars are refers more narrowly to the study of one kind of social ex- really saying different things, assessing how change, that of markets, and to the structuring of that kind much their theoretical views are complemen- of social exchange, under the conditions we call capitalist. This focus includes the study of firms, product markets, and tary or contradictory is difficult. When one labor markets as well as their broader linkages to suppliers, viewpoint complements another, theory is ad- workers, and states and the role of local cultures (i.e., local vanced. Takinginto account other possible el- in the sense of belonging to a particular market), systems of meanings insofar as they influence what products are, and ements in the social structuring of markets the role of morality in the generation of particular kinds of yields a more complete view of market pro- markets. cesses. But when theories contradict, scholars 2 Recently Jerry Jacobs (2005) calculated the most cited need to understand why their perspectives dif- papers in the American Sociological Review in the postwar era. The paper with the most citations was DiMaggio & fer and how those differences can be usefully Powell’s (1983) “Institutional Isomorphism” paper, with explored to further both theory and research. 1700 citations. Granovetter’s paper appeared in the Amer- The primary purpose of this review is to be- ican Journal of Sociology and, as far as we know, no one has created a similar list for that journal. But, with almost gin to untangle the theoretical and empirical 2500 citations, it is hard to believe that many papers outdid work on the sociology of markets, clarifying Granovetter’s. It should also be noted that the DiMaggio & what we know and where scholars really dis- Powell paper has greatly influenced the sociology of mar- kets as well. We argue that this paper has greatly influenced agree. at least one strain of thought in the sociology of markets The literature (and the way that peo- (i.e., institutional theory). If one takes both of these pa- ple teach their graduate courses) has of- pers as part of the foundation of the field, arguably the two most cited papers in the postwar era are at the core of the ten been divided into three theory groups sociology of markets. (Fourcade-Gourinchas 2007) according to 6.2 Fligstein · Dauter ANRV316-SO33-06 ARI 22 March 2007 21:26 whether scholars use (a) networks (Burt 1992; come to be created and sold, and in how the Granovetter 1974, 2005; White 1981, 2002), local cultures of particular markets form what (b) institutions (Dobbin 1994; Fligstein 1990, institutionalists call the institutionalization of 2001; Powell & DiMaggio 1991), or (c) perfor- particular markets. mativity (Beunza & Stark 2004, Callon 1998, Although these three approaches encom- Callon & Muniesa 2005, MacKenzie & Milo pass a large portion of the work done in the 2003, MacKenzie 2005) as explanatory mech- sociology of markets, they are by no means anisms in the emergence and ongoing dynam- exhaustive. Along with considering these par- ics of markets. Scholars in the network tradi- ticular perspectives with the goal of extracting tion have focused on relational ties between what sociologist have learned about markets actors as the material of social structure. Insti- and what remains to be resolved, we consider tutionalists focus on how cognition and action in this review the degree to which the differ- are contextualized by market rules, power, and ent theory groups offer incomplete represen- norms. The performative school of thought tations of the social structuring of markets. views economic action as a result of calculative The division of the field into networks, in- processes involving the specific technologies stitutions, and performativity excludes other and artifacts that actors employ. theoretical perspectives that should also be at This division of the field overemphasizes the core of thinking about markets as social the extent to which these perspectives are structures. We focus on two important ap- in fact separate theory groups. All three ap- proaches that have been underplayed in the proaches rely on viewing markets as social are- literature: political economy and population nas where firms, their suppliers, customers, ecology. workers, and government interact, and all Political economy has pioneered thinking three approaches emphasize how the connect- about the linkages between states, law, and edness of social actors affects their behavior. markets and the historical emergence of sys- Network analysis is a technique for finding tems of governance. The literature on the social structures in relational data. It is not a comparative study of capitalist arrangements theory of the underlying relationships in the and their effects on various outcomes, includ- data and the mechanisms that they represent. ing economic development, is part and par- Scholars who use network techniques invoke cel of the sociology of markets. Institutional theoretical constructs like power, resource de- theory is the approach that most frequently pendence, cooptation, information, and trust adds political economy into its analyses. It to explain the social structures that emerge focuses on the role of governments and law from their analyses. These mechanisms are in the creation of particular features of mar- common to institutional theory and to other kets, for example the types of alliances and theories relevant to the sociology of markets. forms of cooperation that are legal or forms of Institutional theorists are interested in how property rights (Campbell & Lindberg 1990, field-level phenomena diffuse to make fields Carrutherst & Ariovich 2004). But network isomorphic, often through social networks theorists and scholars interested in perfor- (Davis 1991). Performativists have explicitly mativity have generally ignored the possible connected their approach to network theory effects of government and law and the role in what Callon (1998) calls the actor-network of preexisting relationships between the own- approach.
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