This is a guide to the double-starred readings that will be on the exam.

Hirschman, A., 1986, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays. New York: Viking ch.5: Rival Views of Market Society, pp. 105-41

• Covers different organizations of economy:
  • Subsistence
  • Fuedal
  • Capitalism
• Interpretation and evaluation of capitalism is historically contingent
  • “The idea that the social order – intermediate between the fortituitous and the unchangeable – may be an important cause of human unhappiness became widespread only in the modern age” (105)
  • Idea of changing social order to increase happiness is modern
  • Coincides with idea that human actions can have unintended consequences
  • Arguments rooted in existance
  • Precedence of embededness
  • Capitalism evocative (simple models implausible)
  • Response based/dialectec transformation theory
• The Doux-Commerce Thesis: commerce is a civiling agent of considerable power and range
  • According to Hume and Smith, fosters industriousness and assiduity, frugality, punctuality, and probity)
  • Market becomes cetral positon for the satisfaction of human wants
• The Self-Destruction Thesis: capitalist society tends to undermine moral foundations on which society must rest
  • Appeals to individual self-interest over collective interest (Capitalism has within it the seeds of its own destruction)
  • Capitalism throttles all other institutions (commodifies everything)
• Eclipse of the doux-commerce thesis
  • Doux-commerce questioned and set aside in the latte rpart of the 18th century (industrialism wreaked havoc)
  • Durkheim appears to generate a neo-doux commerce thesis, but is aware that any esnse of harmony generated by the division labor was an unintended consequence (superficial at best)
• The Fuedal Shackles Thesis
  • Contends that the capitalist revolution was never finished, left hanging as bourgeoisie market-bearers bowed to the demands of aristocrats and traditional authority figures
  • Less than fully mature capitalist system (peripheral nations from World Systems theory – these theorists will try and explain why capitalism never matured)
  • American exceptionalism: America came into being without the confines of a feudal past (also a curse according to Hartz – less ideological diversity)
• This is a survey of different conceptions of capitalism – a coherant but complex analytic (tableau ideologique)

Granovetter, M., 1985, “Economic Action and Social Structure”, American Journal of Sociology 91(3):481-510

• Rejects “over-socialized” view of some sociologists who think that choice is meaningless but also rejects the “under-socialized” view of economists who think that morals and values are not important
• Creates concept of “embeddedness” – that economic action is “inside” social relations (i.e. larger structure provides opportunities and creates incentives)
  • Uses the term “social networks” – and many attendant measures – to describe aspect of social structure that affects economic outcomes
• Institution is durable way of doing things at national level (different from Stinchcombe, DiMaggio, and Powell, Scott, and Meyer and Rowan conceptions of institution)

Akerlof, G., 1982, “Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 97:543-69

• Economics piece: notices that people work more than required, conceptualizes “gifts” to firm
  • Gift in the sense of Mauss
• Models gift giving in wage contracts
• Conclusion: labor contracts are partial gift exchanges
  • Wages determined by and influence worker’s effort and worker’s effort determined by norms (exchange)

Geertz, C., 1978. “The Bazaar Economy,” American Economic Review, May: 28-32

• Focus on the role of information, communication, and knowledge in exchange processes (through bazaars)
  • high degree of spatial localization and “ethnic” specialization
  • search for information (not balancing options, but figuring out what options are)
• Theorizes clientization (repeatative purchasers)
  • Adversaries in the word for clientship relations that are not dependency relations
• Notes paradox of bazaar buying: need to surround oneself with good communication links, but links are forged in antagonistic interactions driven by information imbalances

Biernacki, R., 1997, “Work and Culture in the Reception of Class Ideologies,“pp. 169-192 in J.R. Hall (ed.), Reworking Class. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

• Notion of culture in concrete research has misled investigators into embracing economically reductionist accounts
• Offers alternative model of culture’s role in the crystallization of worker’s movements, a model that centers on the signifying practices of manufacture in the workplace
• Cross-culural comparison of conveyance of power/commodification in labor (labor power in German context, embodied labor in British contexts)
• Analytic he proposes “theorizes history [but also] historicizes theory”

Zelizer, V., 1996, “Payments and Social Ties,” Sociological Forum 11:481-95.

• Taxonomy of the social life of money: gift (a person’s voluntary bestowal on another), entitlement (a right to a share), and compensation (direct exchange)
  • each corresponds to a significantly different set of social earmarking techniques to distinguish those categories of social relations (earmarking and control are key!)
  • People sort ostensibly homogenous legal tender into distinct categories
• Bureaucratization, Commercialization, and monetization significantly altered the scope, form, and content that taxonomy of money
  • Studied discretionary payments in the sexual economy, discretionary payments in bureaucracies and routinized payments in bureaucracies

Baker, Tom, 2001. “Blood Money, New Money, and the Moral Economy of Tort Law in Action.” Law and Society Review 35(2): 275-319

• Qualitative study of personal injury lawyers in CT, implications of professional norms and practices that govern tort settlement behavior
  • Moral and practical barriers to collecting “blood money” (money from indvidual defendents, as opposed to liability insurance companies which give “insurance money”)
  • Very little changes hands, but important social tool
  • Challenges conventional understanding that tort law in action is simpler, more streamlined than textbook tort law
  • Client is liability insurance company
  • Taking blood money requires more justification than a simple mistake (moral and practical explanations)
• Compensation and retribution figure far more prominently in tort law in action in action than does the deterrence emphasized in much of the theorhetical and doctrinal literature

Helleiner, E., 2003, “One Market, One People: The Euro and Political Identities,” pp.183-202 in P. Crowley (ed.), Before and Beyond the Euro. London: Routledge.

• Examines Euro’s role in eroding national identities and developing pan-European identity (one money to one market, but one people?)
• According to Simmel and Marx, money turns traditional social and personal ties, into ones characteriseed by impersonal and instrumental economic calculations
• Some key ideas:
  • Imagery on money and the construction of political identities
  • Currencies as a medium of social communication
  • Collective monetary experiences and communities of shared fate
  • Money and popular sovereignty
  • Modern money as the fiduciary standard

Velthuis, O., 2003, “Symbolic meanings of prices. Constructing the value of contemporary art in Amsterdam and New York galleries,” Theory and Society 32:181-215

• Arguing for a multiplicity of meanings in prices (not just signaling/profit as in econ, not just contaminating or corrosive as in humanities)
• Nothing But
  • Complicated because art dealers are price maximizers and not profit maximizers
  • Econ holds unconditional commensurability of goods (no distinction between price and value – “commodified conceptual scheme”)
• Independent Spheres
  • Complicated because artworks of equal size within the oeuvre of one artist almost invariably have the same market price
  • Bourdieu called the art market “a trade in which things have no price”
  • Humanist perspective grounded in Marxist conception of value – “[the commodification of culture] stifles our critical faculties, induces alienation, degrades artworks, and protects the capitalist system against internal challenges”

• Pricing is signifying act

  • Following Zelizer’s work
  • market for “sacred” goods (infused with non-market values and extra-economic logics that modify the alleged instrumental orientation of the market)
  • to come to terms with the market as commensurating process, [humanists] dichotomize price and the cultural value of art (hostile worlds view)
  • Also following Polyani (price is embedded and social)
  • Price allows dealers to enact role as gatekeepers, express identities, provide structure to the art world historically and geographically, and transmit a notion of sacrifice
    

• Prices in primary art dealerships based on conventions

  • example of “institutional isomorphism” (c.f. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell) wherein deviating from these norms may produce confusion or damage reputation

Fourcade, Marion 2011, “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Values and the Nature of ‘Nature’ in France and America.” American Journal of Sociology 116 (6) (May 2011): 1721–77.

• Do routinely commensurate “peculiar goods” with money
  • money has the power to “flatten, abstract and homogenize qualitatively different things”
• “Socio-historical conditions and processes through which something that stands normally outside market exchange comes to be attributed an economic (monetary) value”
  • economic valuation processes are contingent but in socially patterned ways (so intelligible through sustained analysis)
  • economic valuation bound up in the law, politics, economic expertise, and ecological knowledge
• Sociology of economic valuations has to answer three questions: Why (general place of money as metric for worth), How (specific techniques and arguments laymen and experts deploy to elicit monetary translations), Then What (feedback loop from monetary value to social practices and representations)

Uzzi, Brian, and Lancaster, Ryon, 2004 “Embeddedness and Price Formation in Corporate Law Markets.” American Sociological Review, 69(3): 319-44.

• Considers how social structure shapes prices
  • Firm’s embedded relationship influence prices by prompting private - information flows and informal governance arrangements
• Longitudinal dataset on the pricing of legal services by law firms
• Three forms of embeddedness (embeddedties, board memberships, and status) affect prices in different directions and with different magnitudes

Smith, Ch., 1993. “Auctions: From Walras to the Real World”, pp. 176-192 in R. Swedberg (ed.), Explorations in Economic Sociology. New York: Russell Sage

• 5 types of auctions: English, Dutch, Japanese, Sealed-Bid, Second-Price - Push back on neo-classical model of auctions (everyone self-interested, purest display of the market)
• In real auctions:
  • Buyers lack clearly defined preferences
  • PRice is secondary to (and the result of) allocation
  • Legitimacy of price is tied to consensual/social nature of auction
  • Collusion, signaling, and other strategies differ by type of auction
  • Participants have defined roles that deteremine rights and responsibilities
  • Instrumental Rationality is secondary to emotional processes
  • Price and allocation are socially determined; participants are more concerned with establishing these consensual definitions than with the transactions themselves
• Illustrated using four anecdotes (Actioning join property during divorse; two contrasting auctions in Manhatten; Two contrasting auctions in Kentucky; Repossessed Automobile auctions)
• Distinction between commodity vs. collectible/dealer auctions

Abolafia, M., 1996, “Hyper-Rational Gaming,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 25(2): 226-50

• Explores how bond traders construct a local form of rationality out of resources and conditions in which they are embedded
• In hyper rational games, actors train to face choice changes/risk at moment’s notice
  • involves interdependence and rationality
  • Provides decision tools and identity tools individuals can choose from
• Decision tools include scripts or strategies (styles and ethos, habits/customs); Vigilence (dealing with continuout information overload using prescribed modes like resources and training or networks); Intuitive Judgement (feel for market)
• Identity tools include enhancements to performance and craft occupational identity; emotional stability; risk seeking and self-reliance
• Paradoxes in Hyper Rational Gaming:
  • Vigilence and intuitive judgement are opposite cognitive styles
    • Vigilence requires research and deliberate calculation while intuitive judgement lacks analytical thinking
    • Used simultaneously
    • Employed in situations of financial consequence
  • Risk Seeking and Emotional Control contrast
  • Employed in situations of unstructured problems + uncertainty
• Local rationalities mean decision making processses are context specific
  • decision and identity tools dependent on speed, volume and ambiguity of information
  • to understand – identify usage of knowledge and tools
  • ethnography shows construction of tools
• Bond traders are still hyper rational decision makers (utility maximizers)

Knorr Cetina, K. and U. Bruegger, 2002, “Global Microstructures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (4), 905-50.

• Goals: (1) Offer analysis of global social form; (2) Extend economic sociology through the analysis of a global market variant
• Global microstructures: respond to the perception that dispersed domains linked by information technologies tend to be drawn together as if they were all in one place
• Conversations are an important vehicle of global transactions as they disperse information across networks
• Microsociology appears relevant to the understanding of transnational fields of transactions that are not aggregated into systems of governance but are structured more in terms of horizontal associations
• Cambist (trader) markets
  • FX is a second order trading arragement related to the first order economy indirectly, through the profits that they generate or the effects that they have on currencies
  • Term marks the character of these arrangement as pure or non-intermediary, trading cultures
    • Two types of markets: network architect markets where social relationships specify market behavior, vs. disembedded markets that have a more flow architecture
    • Differ in re: intersubjectivity (temporal conditions, reciprocity, unification) i.e. Codes of Conduct like conversation guidelines, Shared Language and Identity in the Workplace (increased sense of vulnerability)
  • Characteristics:
  • Distinctive institutional arrangements and agenices
  • Conversational realization throuhg exchange of knowledge and information
  • Transnational character of markets

Fligstein, Neil and Adam Goldstein 2012. „A Long Strange Trip: The State and Mortgage Securitization, 1968-2010.“ In Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda (eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• How the financial crisis of 2008 unfolded through macro mechanisms
  • Governments as pioneers (not just regulators) of financial markets
  • Governments, financial firms and financial products form a field
• Fed raising interest rates spurred sub-prime investment
  • HUD’s report shows that it is not the state’s fault for extending credit to historically underserved communities (Community Reinvestment Act)
• Misapplication of agency theory
  • Agency theory: principal actor and agent each agree to proprotionate amounts of risk
  • Behavior of individuals in financial services and housing incompatible
  • Both parties highly leveraged due to negligence/opting out of systems intended to proportion equity and debt

Dobbin, Frank and Jiwook Jung 2010. “The Misapplication of Mr. Michael Jensen: How Agency Theory brought down the economy and why it might again.” Pp. 29-64 in: Lounsbury,

• How the financial crisis of 2008 unfolded through micro mechanisms
• Four tenants of argument:
  • Homogenous equity + No penalities for loss = High Leverage and firm value
  • Expansion of de-diversified firms and stock options = Surge in bets on bad bet
  • No assets + Purchasing debt = +0 equity and increased risk exposure
  • Risk coded as high value + Pressure to keep risk as valuable = Risk
• Culture of internalized reckless risk (endogenous risk)
• Endogenous Risk = Finance Industry Management (Agency Theory) + Constraints of perceived risk (Unchecked behavior) + Volatile clusters (culture that rewards risk appetite)

Khurana, R., 2002: Searching for a Corporate Savior. The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEO’s. Princeton: Princeton University Press: chapters 6 and 7. Also consider Ch.2 for the CEO market and literature

• Corporations increasingly looking for CEOs based upon charisma and perceived reputation among business and media analysts (i.e. not based on tangible skills related to job function)
  • Highly irrational and inefficient process (culturally determined)
  • Leads to corporate instability and failure to address long-term strategy
• Study of hiring/firing CEOs at over 850 of America’s largest companies (interviews)
• Board of directors under pressure to secure a successor quickly, have an abstract notion of leadership and practice social matching to establish a candidate pool
• Candidates believe status may improve or diminish by moving firms, participate in deferential interview process, have strong bargaining power
• Other factors that influence the search and selection: some market bred executives are stars, social percpetions from financial markets and business media, candidate viewed as the solution for poor firm performance
• CEO labor market pretends to be an “open market” but is in fact a sealed-off system governed at every stage through institutional, social and structural norms
• The legitimized external CEO practice poses risks: financially and non-monetarily to the firm and society
• This practice is not a natural market phenomena it’s “constituted, set in motion and re-produced by the interaction of social and cultural values and structures”

Morrill, C., 1998, “Honor and Conflict Management in Corporate Life,” pp.230-259 in P. Smith (ed.), The New American Cultural Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

• Analyzes the need of complex organizations to balance flexibility and certainty during the era of hostile takeovers
• Rise of formal matrix management (ritualized, informal conflict management based on a symbolic honor code)
  • Conflict situations include: executive coordination and responsibility, focus on vision vs. logistics, organization of office space and personnel for teams, cancelled meetings and wastes of time, risk aversion, executive style, ethical issues, being overly emotional or personally aggressive
  • Matrix assesses social distance and reputation in conflict situation
  • Honorable language vs. Dishonorable language noted, Locations also important (public vs. private), as are tactics (aggressive/calculated talk vs. emotional outbursts or fights)
• Plays out at the mangerial level in large, multi-national toy company
• Matrix tried to achieve administrative flexibility by loosening authority relations, but led to great internal uncertainty when confronted by hostile takeovers
• Matrix also created the structural conditions conducive to highly ritualized conflict management framed in a code of honor
  • Code helped executives to make sense of turbulent business world

Bittman, Michael, Paula England, Nancy Folbre, and George Matheson, 2003, “ When does Gender Trump Money? Bargaining and Time in Household Work,” American Journal of Sociology 109: 186-214

• Contrasts Australia and the US to explore the effect of spouses contribution to family income on how housework is divided
• Consistent with exchange bargaining theory, women decrease housework as their earnings increase up to the point where both spouses contribute equally
  • Gender trumps money
• The base level of housework for women is much higher
• If women provide more than half of household income, compensate with a more traditional division of household work

Hochschild, A.R., 1989, “The Economy of Gratitude”, pp. 95-111 in T. Hood (ed.), The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Papers. Greenwich: JAI Press.

• Contemporary economic trends drastically altered the reality of women’s lives but create a “culture lag” – a strain between the economic reality and the cultural code applied to it
• Contrasts consensual traditional economy of gratitute, consensual equalitarian economy of gratitude, a larger number of marriages in which conflicting notions of gender transformed gratitude into an object of struggle
• Marriage is shock absorber of dissonance between cultural and economic realities
• Broader understanding of marital problems (ripple effect of larger social trends around understanding of the gifts)

Hoang Kimberly Kay, 2014, “Flirting with Capital: NegotiatingPerceptions of Pan-AsianAscendencyandWestern Decline in GlobalSexWork.” Social Problems, 61 (4):1–23

• 2008 Financial Crisis and expansion of East Asian economies creates opportunity to rethink the multiply inflected hierarchies woven throuhg racialized, national, and class-based relations which produce competing hierarchies of global masculinities
• Studies Western Budget Tourists, Western transnational businessmen, Viet Kieu, and wealthy local Vietnamese entrepreneurs to bring together multiple performances of masculinities that simultaneously affirm and contrast Western superiority
  • Western Budget Tourists and Western businessmen able to project status anxieties onto women’s bodies, affirming Western superiority
  • Viet Kieu and local entrepreneurs contrast Western superiority by capitalizing on this particular moment of economic flux and conspicuously consuming