While economists continue to probe into social life, a growing academic subfield known as economic sociology is doing just the opposite--bringing tools and concepts from sociology to bear on the economy. We cannot understand how people earn, spend, and invest their money, economic sociologists argue, unless we understand social relations. If, as economists contend, incentives and choice are everywhere, so are social conventions and personal connections.
''The economy is social. It's a set of social relations. The economy is as social as a family or religion," says Viviana A. Zelizer, a Princeton University sociologist who studies how cultural attitudes and consumption patterns influence each other.
A leading figure in economic sociology, Zelizer is sharply critical of the dichotomy she calls ''hostile worlds," which juxtaposes ''a world of rationality, efficiency, and impersonality, on one side" with ''a world of self-expression, cultural richness, and intimacy on the other--with contact between the two worlds inevitably corrupting both of them." Real human beings, she argues, don't divide their rational and emotional, or personal and commercial, lives that way.
So, contrary to both the simplified models of some economists and the anti-commercial zeal of many social critics, she and other economic sociologists argue that the marketplace and social relations aren't separate spheres. They're completely entangled.
Read the whole thing here. VP once again has produced a marvelous, concise, and thought-provoking piece. We need more like her.
Regarding her subject -- I'm a bit skeptical. I remember all too well the last wave of enthusiasm for inter-disciplinary studies. That didn't turn out too well. Conceptual borrowings tend to undermine the integrity of the disciplines involved and the misapplication of techniques can lead to spurious, if provocative, results. Leavitt's work contains some particularly egregious examples.
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