Conclusion

Although it has had a tortuous history, the idea that economic events are social events is taking its place within the academic world. This does not prevent contemporary eco­nomic sociologists from referring to different currents of thought, and thus offering a variety of research programmes provided by recent handbooks (Smelser and Swedberg 2005, Beckert and Zafirowski 2006, Steiner and Vatin 2009).

One final point should be stressed, of particular interest to historians of economic thought. From the outset, and exemplified by Durkheim and Weber, economic sociolo­gists have had a particular interest in the sociology of economic knowledge; this holds true for contemporary research on economists as professionals in various countries and the evolution of their connections to the market and policy (Fourcade 2008), the different forms of rationalization of their science (Steiner 1998) or the political conse­quences of the symbolic dimension of their “science”, even when their prognosis went plainly wrong, as was the case with the subprime financial crisis in 2008-09. This is still true with the development of a pragmatic approach to economics, according to which economists do not describe economic activity, but perform it (Callon 1998); creating the devices and arrangements thanks to which actors in the markets implement what eco­nomic theory considers to be rational economic behaviour (Muniesa et al. 2007). This approach is gaining momentum, since it has provided fruitful explanations in the case of the creation of derivatives markets (McKenzie and Milo 2003), the carbon market or some matching markets as developed by Alvin Roth, a laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. More generally, the sociology of economics acknowledges the changes brought about by the development of the engineering approach to economics, and the turn to what is known as “market design”.

Philippe Steiner