The Rise of “New Economic Sociology”
In the United States, Parsons’s approach to sociology was challenged by a group of young sociologists, notably those who studied network analysis under the supervision of Harrison White (then in Columbia), a major contributor to the development of that new form of mathematical sociology.
There was a second reason for this renewal of economic sociology, with sociologists reacting to the so-called “economic imperialism” threat. The “invasion” of their domain came from Gary Becker’s work, notably his claim that economic theory could provide relevant explanation for any rational action, be it labelled “economic”, “social” or “political”. It came as well from the favourable sociological reception for Oliver Williamson’s (1981) transaction cost economics, with his powerful distinction between organization (power relations) and the market (contractual arrangements).In this situation, Parsons’s emphasis upon the internalization of values during the socialization process was considered to be an over-socialized view of the economic agent which was as irrelevant as the under-socialized view held by economists. Instead, Mark Granovetter used network analysis to explain how flows of information could be channelled to some agents and not others, studying empirically the structure of an agent’s contact network, and how these flows could explain the fact that some people find a job without looking for it (Granovetter 1974). Then, he further elaborated his approach and suggested that the network could be treated as an empirical measure of the social embeddedness of economic action (Granovetter 1985), turning to the Polanyian concept, but giving a theoretical new departure to this approach. Network analysis was then implemented in a large number of areas, such as financial markets (Baker 1975), producer’s markets (White 2002), credit markets (Uzzi and Lancaster 2004), and is now a very active field of research at the crossroads of economics and sociology (Rauch and Casella 2001). It also has close relations with some heterodox school in contemporary economics, such as the “economy of convention” school in France (Eymard-Duvernay et al.
2002). Coming from the field of cultural sociology, Viviana Zelizer offered a different approach, arguing that the distinction between society and the economy was of little use and, instead of the domination of market over social life, stressing the capacity of social actors to give meaning to market activity, as was the case with the growth of the life insurance market (Zelizer 1979) and the use of money (Zelizer 1994). In Europe, Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of the market for symbolic goods - that is, goods that have a strong cultural component, such as fashion clothes, art, and literature (Bourdieu 1971). According to Bourdieu, these goods are exchanged for the sake of their symbolic dimension and not according to their utility/price ratio. Bourdieu studied the production of such symbolic goods; more recently, Lucien Karpik (2010) has considered the consumption side, explaining how these markets worked, despite customers facing a high degree of uncertainty.In any case, sociologists were actively providing a sociological approach to the functioning of the market, able to counter the so-called “economic imperialism” developed by economists trying to give an economic explanation of the social fact, as claimed by Gary Becker (1976; Becker and Murphy 2000); whereas others were pushing in that direction, but with a more subtle and respectful approach to social sciences (Akerlof 1984).