Discussion Forum Economic Sociology As Public Sociology

Socio-Economic Review (2007) 5, 319–367 doi:10.
1093/ser/mwl031
DISCUSSION FORUM
Economic sociology as public sociology

Keywords: economic sociology, markets
JEL classification: A14 sociology of economics
Public sociology and economic sociology:

introductory remarks
Richard Swedberg
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Correspondence: rs328@cornell.edu
This issue of SER contains three articles on public sociology and economic soci-
ology, which all have their origin in a session on this theme that was held at the
annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 2006 in Mon-
treal.1 The reason for organizing this session was a sense that ‘new economic
sociology’ has ignored many of the issues that are associated with the term
‘public sociology’.
If one looks at the writings in ‘new economic sociology’ from the mid-1980s
and onwards one will, on the whole, find very few attempts to relate economic
sociology to such issues as the political role of the analyst, how economic soci-
ology can be used to change or improve the world and the like. The reasons
for this apolitical character of new economic sociology is not clear. Maybe the
desire to establish economic sociology as a legitimate academic field was too
strong or maybe many of its early practitioners had had enough of activist politics
during the 1960s. Alternatively, maybe they were responding to the ideology of
neo-liberalism that was just being launched at around this time. In any case,
issues that should have been addressed were not being addressed.
1
For comments, assistance or inspiration I thank Mabel Berezin, Michael Burawoy, Mark Granovetter
and Chris Winship. The session took place on 13 August 2006 and was organized by myself. Other
participants included Mike Useem and Nicole Woolsey Biggart.
# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
320 Discussion forum
Some exceptions exist, and the works of Fred Block and Neil Fligstein deserve a
special mention in this context. In Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Econ-
omic Discourse (1990), for example, Block makes a sharp political critique of
mainstream economic categories and suggests a number of alternatives, which
are more humane as well as more comprehensive, and in Markets, Politics, and
Globalization (1997) Neil Fligstein raises the issue of ‘normative implications of
a sociology of markets’ (Fligstein, 1997, pp. 38 – 41; cf. Fligstein, 1996). Fligstein
has also presented himself here as well as elsewhere as an advocate of stakeholder
theory.
A special mention must finally be made of Pierre Bourdieu, who from early on
addressed normative and political issues in his work. Bourdieu’s position on
public sociology can be illustrated by Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of
the Market, a short book which mainly consists of lectures and speeches given
at various public occasions, including strike meetings (Bourdieu, 1998). Its
major theme is that the welfare state is under heavy attack from neo-liberalism,
and that this is something that has to be fought since the welfare state protects
people from the ravages of the market (for the full set of Bourdieu’s activist writ-
ings during 1961 and 2001, see Bourdieu, 2002).
Bourdieu’s attack on neo-liberalism is not very different from what one can
find elsewhere among social scientists who define themselves as progressive
and anti-liberal, but there is one part to Bourdieu’s criticism that is very sugges-
tive to my mind and of special interest to the discussion of public sociology and
economic sociology. This is the part which has to do with Bourdieu’s attempt to
introduce a new set of concepts to criticize neo-liberalism and capitalism more
generally, and which somehow succeed in serving both as political concepts
and as sociological ones. These are centred around the idea of theodicy and
include concepts such as ‘sociodicy’ and ‘social suffering’ (e.g. Bourdieu, 1979,
1998; Bourdieu et al. 1999).
Theodicy tries to answer questions such as the following: Why is there suffering
in the world, and why do some people suffer more than others? Bourdieu’s position
is that the organization of society has much to do with the creation of suffering,
and he therefore speaks of ‘sociodicy’ and ‘social suffering’ (e.g. Bourdieu, 1998,
pp. 35, 43; see also Morgan and Wilkinson, 2001). Neo-liberalism, for example, is
characterized by Bourdieu as a ‘conservative sociodicy’ since it justifies suffering
on the ground that it is necessary for economic progress (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 35).
Also education is presented as a form of sociodicy by Bourdieu, since it justifies
the mistreatment of certain people on the ground that they are less competent
and knowledgeable than others (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 177).
However, the real wake-up call for economic sociology, and much of sociology
more generally, came with the work of Michael Burawoy and his attempt to draw
attention to public sociology. This was done in a marathon of talks and articles,
Economic sociology as public sociology 321
which began in 2002 and still continues. The most important item in this pro-
duction is Burawoy’s presidential address from 2004 at the American Sociological
Association, entitled ‘Public Sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005). This article has gener-
ated a large number of comments (see e.g. British Journal of Sociology, 2005;
American Sociologist, 2005).
Burawoy’s 2004 address makes two important contributions that should be
kept apart. First, it put the term ‘public sociology’ on the map of sociology
once and for all (the term itself was coined by Herbert Gans, after the pattern
of ‘public intellectual’). Second, it also presents a new and interesting version
of what public sociology should be and, more generally, its place in sociology
as a whole.2 Burawoy distinguishes between what he terms traditional public soci-
ology and organic public sociology, with the former meaning the production by
sociologists of newspaper articles, books aimed at the general public and the like,
and the latter meaning activist work of a critical type.
Burawoy’s main project, however, is not so much to distinguish one type of
public sociology from another, as to present an analysis of public sociology in
relation to other types of sociology. With this purpose in mind, he states that
sociology can either be instrumental or reflexive in its approach, and that it
can be either aimed at an academic audience or at an extra-academic audience.
This gives us a two-by-two with four types of sociology: professional sociology,
critical sociology, policy sociology—and public sociology (see Table 1).
Burawoy’s suggestion that we equate public sociology with reflexive sociology
directed at an extra-academic audience gives, among other things, legitimacy to a
type of sociology that by tradition is part of the tradition of sociology, but which
over the years has also been much criticized in the name of objective social
2
All histories of words are complex. Here is Michael Burawoy’s reaction to my question if it was he
who invented the term public sociology:
Well it’s more complicated. First, it’s difficult to say I invented the term public sociology, the
inspiration is very clear in Mills’s Sociological Imagination, especially chapter 6. There is a clear
demarcation made by myself and Gans between public sociologist and public intellectual—the
former is so-to-speak a specialist public intellectual, someone who knows what (s)he’s talking
about and still subject to accountability from peers. If I contributed anything it was to organize
our discipline into four interdependent sociologies—professional, public, policy and critical—
and insist that a vibrant discipline depends upon the flourishing of all four.
Some more digging showed that the first use was probably that of Herbert Gans, in his 1988
presidential address at ASA entitled ‘Sociology in America: The Discipline and the Public’ (Gans,
1989, p. 7). Gans states that he constructed the term public sociology with Russell Jacoby’s notion
of public intellectuals in mind; and he cites The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart as examples
of public sociology. In 2000 Ben Agger published a volume entitled Public Sociology: From Social
Facts to Literary Acts.
Table 1 Public sociology and other types of sociology, according to Michael Burawoy
Academic audience Extra-academic audience
Instrumental knowledge Professional sociology Policy sociology

Reflexive knowledge Critical sociology Public sociology
Source: Adapted after Table 3 in Michael Burawoy, “Public Sociology”, American Sociological Review 70
(2005), p. 16.
science, namely activist research. In response to Burawoy’s article, Edna Bonacich

writes for example:
By acknowledging a long tradition within our discipline, and recogniz-

ing its important contribution to the field, he is providing legitimacy to
many of us who have been toiling in this area for years. We know that
many of our students were attracted to sociology because it promised
the opportunity not only to understand our complex world better,
but to try to do something to change it. Yet we also knew that many
in our discipline and departments felt compelled to crush this
impulse, and to drive students into a narrow professionalism. ‘If you
want to be an activist’, they would say, ‘you don’t belong in graduate
school’. (Bonacich, 2005, p. 105)
My own sense is that Burawoy has made a very valuable contribution to sociology
through his work on public sociology that will be with us for a long time to come.
Having said this, I would also argue that his definition of public sociology is
perhaps too narrow in scope. His work on public sociology, I suggest, might
best be seen in economic sociology as an inspiration to address a number of ques-
tions about what I would like to call the role of economic sociology in the world
of today.
When economic sociology was revived in the mid-1980s it termed itself
‘new economic sociology’, and by ‘new’ it meant first and foremost that it rep-
resented a different approach from the old economy and society-approach.
According to this approach, typically associated with the work of Talcott
Parsons and Wilbert E. Moore, economists should deal with the economy and
not with society, and sociologists should deal with society and not with the
economy.
However, this is a point that is well understood by now, and I suggest that a
better way to justify the ‘new’ in ‘new economic sociology’ would be to interpret
it in the sense that we need a new economic sociology in a new economic world.
While economic sociology is rightly seen as building on the work of Marx,

Weber, Schumpeter and Polanyi, the economy of today is quite different from
what it was 150 years ago or even 50 years ago. Classes are not the same as
they were in Marx’s days; rational capitalism is not the same as in Weber’s
days; entrepreneurs are not the same as in Schumpeter’s days; and markets are
not the same as in Polanyi’s days. Capitalism means change, change, change—as
all the classics argued!
To capture these new features of economic life—networks, electronic markets,
the changing role of gender in economic life and much, much more—constitutes
the real and important agenda of new economic sociology, and this agenda also
extends to the public sociology of these new issues.
Exactly which these new issues are is something that economic sociologists
need to discuss. In the meantime, let me quickly mention a few of them, just
to give a sense of my way of looking at these things.
1. The profitable use of networks

While economic sociologists did not invent network analysis, they have con-
tributed importantly to its development. They have not, however, looked at
the growing use of networks to make money. Social networking is growing
by leaps and MySpace, for example, had 56 million visitors in September
2006 (Rivlin, 2006). LinkedIn, which aims at business people and not just
anyone interested in electronic socializing, claims to be a network of 8
million professionals in 130 countries.
2. New ways for economic sociologists to be useful
According to a full-scale article in Business Week from May 2006, sociologist
William Bielby has testified in more than 50 cases against corporations in
suits relating to discriminatory employment practices (Orey, 2006; see e.g.
Bielby, 2003). Wal-Mart, Fedex and Johnson & Johnson are some of the corpor-
ations involved. In 2004 Bielby testified in a case against Morgan Stanley in
which the firm settled sex discrimination claims for $56 million. Also, other
sociologists have participated as expert witnesses in cases involving corporations
and their employment policies. Is this a new role for economic sociologists?
3. The role of the media
An important part of people’s knowledge and attitudes towards economic
topics comes from opinions voiced in the media. What role, for example,
did various experts voicing their opinions about the market on television
play in the corporate scandals of 2001 –2002? How does television influence
the attitudes of children to money, wealth and material well-being? There
exists practically no research on these particular issues or on the role of
media in transmitting economic information and forming economic attitudes
more generally.
4. The role of business schools

Since the main purpose of business schools is to educate managers and
(increasingly) people working in finance, how does this mandate influence
the economic sociology that is produced there? There exists a huge literature
on business schools by sociologists, but little of this is reflexive in nature (see
however Rakesh Khurana’s forthcoming From Higher Aims to Hired Hands,
2007).
Many more issues could be cited, but the ones I have mentioned should be
enough, I hope, to make the point that there is a new and peculiar economic
world out there, which it is the task of economic sociology to study—and
more. What should this ‘more’ consist of? I do think that the situation today is
different enough from what it was in the days of Marx – Weber – Polanyi, and
that a number of old positions need to be re-evaluated.
This also includes the issue of activism and objectivity. Marx, at one end
of the spectrum, wanted us to change the world, not just explain it; and
Weber, at the other end, wanted us to make objective analyses in our capacity
as social scientists and do politics in our capacity as citizens. However, is this
choice between Total Activism and Total Objectivity the only possible one? Is it
perhaps time to rethink objectivity and try to relate it in some new ways to the
world that has come into being after World War I and the end of classical
sociology?
All articles in this issue on the theme of public sociology and economic soci-
ology address, in one way or another, the attempt to find a place for economic
sociology also outside of academia or, as I have phrased it, find a new place for
economic sociology in the new economic world that has come into being. In
‘Confronting Market Fundamentalism: Doing “Public Economic Sociology”,
Fred Block argues that the old strategy of trying to affect change through the pub-
lication of books, articles and op-eds (‘traditional public sociology’ in Burawoy’s
terminology) is insufficient in a time when Market Fundamentalism is
hegemonic.
Something else, he argues, is needed; and he suggests that people interested
in doing ‘public economic sociology’ should try to engage in strategic behaviour
by building coalitions with groups that would benefit from a weakening of
Market Fundamentalism. One example of such a strategy is discussed, involving
a standard setting organization called INMEX in the hotel and convention
industry.
In ‘Public Sociology vs. the Market’, Michael Burawoy suggests that the world
is currently undergoing a third period or wave of marketization, which threatens
to create havoc in society, destroy the environment and kill off sociology for good.
During each of the two earlier waves of marketization, a specific type of sociology
developed in response; and so it will this time as well. Public sociology will in this
way take over from the utopian sociology of the ninteenth century and the policy
sociology that came into being after World War I.
The new type of sociology that is needed to effectively meet the challenge of
third-wave marketization, Burawoy continues, will have to be global in nature, be
directed at many different audiences and express the values of many communities.
This represents a difficult enterprise, but sociology itself is under attack today; and
there is no choice but to try to develop an effective form of public sociology.
In ‘The Invisible Science of the Invisible Hand: The Public Presence of
Economic Sociology in the USA’, Akos Rona-Tas and Nadav Gabay focus primar-
ily on how the ideas of economic sociology are diffused. Using two case studies,
they show that, when ideas that sociologists have developed and published are
presented to the general public by economists, these latter are given credit for
their discovery. Economic sociology, as a consequence, is little known.
The reason for this is institutional; and the authors suggest a number of ways
in which institutions structure the diffusion of ideas about the economy. Econ-
omics, for example, has much more disciplinary cohesion than sociology.
What is at issue is not so much if you have one or several perspectives at the
core of the discipline, the authors argue, but if there is fragmentation or not in
the discipline. Sociology, as opposed to economics, is badly fragmented into a
number of subfields which have little to do with one another. Economic sociol-
ogists should continue to fight successfully against this trend; and the way to do
so is by being concerned with sociology as a whole and by taking ideas from other
subfields. The authors also suggest that it would be helpful if there was a presti-
gious prize in economic sociology.
References
Agger, B. (2000) Public Sociology: From Social Facts to Literary Acts, Lanham, Rowman &
Littlefield.
American Sociologist. (2005) ‘Public Sociology’, 36(3/4), 1 –165.
Bielby, W. (2003) Betty Dukes et al. v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Block, F. (1990) Postindustrial Possibilities: a Critique of Economic Discourse, Berkeley, CA,
University of California Press.
Bonacich, E. (2005) ‘Working with the labor movement: a personal journey in organic
public sociology’, The American Sociologist, 36(3/4), 195–220.
Bourdieu, P. (1979) ‘The Disenchantment of the World’. In Algeria 1960, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, pp. 1 –91.
Bourdieu, P. (1993) Sociology in Question, London, SAGE.
Bourdieu, P. (1998) Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New York. The
New Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2002) Interventions, 1961– 2001. Science Sociale & Action Politique, Marseille,
Agone.
Bourdieu, P. et al. (1999) The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society,
Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.
British Journal of Sociology. (2005) ‘Public Sociology’, 56(2).
Burawoy, M. (2005) ‘Public Sociology’, American Sociological Review, 70, 4 –28.
Fligstein, N. (1996) ‘Markets as Politics: A Political-Cultural Approach to Market Insti-
tutions’, American Sociological Review, 61, 656– 673.
Fligstein, N. (1997) Markets, Politics, and Globalization, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis no.
42, Stockholm, Almquist & Wiksell International.
Gans, H. (1989) ‘Sociology in America: The Discipline and the Public’, American Sociologi-
cal Review, 54, 1 –16.
Khurana, R. (2007) From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press (in press).
Morgan, LD. and Wilkinson, I. (2001) ‘The problem of suffering and the sociological task
of theodicy’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4(2), 199–214.
Orey, M. (2006) ‘White men can’t help it’, Business Week, 15 May, pp. 54 –57.
Rivlin, G. (2006) ‘Wallflower at the web party: how Friendster missed a billion-dollar
break’, The New York Times, 15 October, pp. 1, 9.
Confronting Market Fundamentalism:

doing ‘Public Economic Sociology’
Fred Block
Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA
Correspondence: flblock@ucdavis.edu
This essay argues that Market Fundamentalism—a vastly exaggerated belief in

the ability of self regulating markets to solve problems—has become hegemonic
in the USA. While it is urgent that sociologists challenge these ideas, they are unli-
kely to be effective if they confine their efforts to writing articles and books. It is
necessary to think strategically and work in concert with political allies to wage
campaigns that will challenge Market Fundamentalism directly. The example of
a campaign to strengthen the position of employees in the hotel and convention
industry is used to suggest the kinds of alliances that are necessary.
Over the last generation, Market Fundamentalism—a vastly exaggerated belief in

the ability of self-regulating markets to solve problems—has become firmly
entrenched as the reigning public philosophy in the USA. Market Fundamental-
ism supports the aggressive export of US ‘free market’ principles, the continuous
tax cuts of the current administration, the deepening economic inequalities in the
USA, and the reduction of civilian governmental capacity that was illustrated in
the failed response to Hurricane Katrina. Opponents of the current Adminis-
tration criticize its specific policies, but they generally do so without challenging
Market Fundamentalist ideas directly. Politicians, journalists, and even activists,
fear that attacking Market Fundamentalism might place one ‘beyond the pale’ of
legitimate discourse.
As sociologists, however, we have little choice but to critique Market Funda-
mentalism. Almost half a century ago, C. Wright Mills (1959) defined the three
great questions that social scientists must answer for their societies: ‘What is
the structure of this particular society as a whole?’; ‘Where does this society
stand in human history?’; and ‘What varieties of men and women prevail in
this society and in this period?’ To these questions, Market Fundamentalism
answers that there is no society, just an enormous marketplace, peopled by
rational actors pursuing their self-interest with the potential to create the
highest gross domestic product in human history. There is no possibility for
peaceful coexistence between these answers and those derived from the sociologi-
cal tradition.
However, it is not enough for us to elaborate our alternative answers in the
classroom or in publications circulated only to other scholars. Sociology is at
risk if we fail to make our case in the public sphere as well. It seems highly
likely that, if we do nothing, Market Fundamentalists will suggest that our uni-
versities should be purged of a misguided field that has made an illusion—the
concept of society—the object of its inquiries.
1. Doing public economic sociology

While we need to take our case to the public, however, the best way to do this is
far from clear. It is often assumed in debates over the merits of public sociology
that the biggest problem is the reluctance of most sociologists to devote energy to
reaching a broader audience. This is the ‘build it and they will come’ approach
to public sociology; it assumes that the problem is entirely on the supply side.
If we can just increase the number of people producing public economic
sociology, we will have an impact.
Yet in economic sociology, the main problem has been on the demand side,
that is the receptiveness of publics for the analyses that we have to offer. Over
the last 25 years, a significant number of sociologists in the USA have entered
public debate on economic issues and have frontally challenged Market Funda-
mentalist ideas. On issues such as welfare policy, health care policy, income
and wealth distribution, deregulation and corporate power, sociologists have rou-
tinely weighed in with op-eds, articles and books written for broader audiences.
Yet what is striking is how few of these efforts have garnered any significant atten-
tion or had any visible impact on public policy.
Perhaps, the most dramatic example is welfare policy, where sociologists and
allied social scientists have produced a very substantial body of work on the
causes of poverty and the impact of welfare spending (O’Connor, 2001). In the
1970s, books rooted in these sociological understandings such as Piven and Clo-
ward’s Regulating the Poor (1971) and William Ryan’s Blaming the Victim (1971)
were widely read and debated, and policy makers were attentive to these argu-
ments. However, after the publication of Charles Murray’s Losing Ground in
1984, the public debate has been dominated by the arguments of Murray and
other Market Fundamentalists. In 1996, when the Personal Responsibility and
Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act was enacted, the voices of sociological
experts were ignored (Somers and Block, 2005; Weaver, 2000). Moreover,
despite worsening poverty since 2000, the public understanding is still that
‘welfare reform’ has been a great success.
Market Fundamentalist ideas, in short, are hegemonic; they have become part
of the society’s common sense. The consequence is that the gatekeepers who
control access to the public sphere through their roles as editors, reviewers and
pundits routinely deny space to voices that reject Market Fundamentalism. To
be sure, the publishing marketplace is wide open enough that dissenting books
can find publishers, but they are far less likely to get the reviews and publicity
that are necessary for substantial sales.
Hegemony also means, though, that even when heterodox works sneak
through and become more broadly available, they are still unlikely to persuade
readers to reject Market Fundamentalism. For example, Barbara Ehrenreich’s
Nickel and Dimed (2002) is one of the rare dissenting books that has broken
through in recent years and achieved best seller status. Ehrenreich did this by
disguising her critique of low wage labour in the highly popular genre of the
memoir. Readers of Ehrenreich’s book are likely to be persuaded to support
increases in the Federal minimum wage and other policies that help low wage
workers, but it is unreasonable to expect them to come away from the book
with an understanding that Market Fundamentalist policies have been directly
responsible for the steady deterioration of working conditions and compensation
for those at the bottom of the labour market.
The dynamic is similar to Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) classic account of scientific
paradigms. Both scientific theories and hegemonic ideas generate a certain
number of anomalies—facts or findings that are inconsistent with the framework.
However, anomalies are not alone sufficient to weaken the hold of the dominant
ideas. That requires additional work to prove that the anomalies are symptomatic
of deeper flaws in the framework.
2. The deepening of hegemony

It is particularly troubling that the hegemony of Market Fundamentalism appears
to have become even stronger in recent years, despite growing public disaffection
with the current Republican administration. There seems to be very little public
debate over alternative public policies despite the worsening of economic and
social problems. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, dissenting economists and economic
journalists such as Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich, Lester Thurow and William
Greider periodically wrote books that reached a broad audience, but that has
become increasingly rare. In recent years, dissenting books written by such
eminent figures as Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist at the World Bank
and a Nobel Prize winner, and John Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard mutual
fund, have failed to reach the best seller list (Bogle, 2005; Stiglitz, 2002, 2003).
One way to understand the strengthening position of Market Fundamentalism
is by looking at the structure of the right wing’s ideology. George Lakoff (1996)
has argued that the right in the USA has organized its entire worldview around
‘strict father’ morality, but it is actually more accurate to say that the right has
successfully sutured together two somewhat distinct sets of ideas. The first set
of ideas can be termed ‘Neo-traditionalism’; it is the argument that US society
has been in decline because people have turned their backs on both traditional
moral teachings and those authority figures who historically drew their legitima-
tion from those teachings. (For the real impact of Neo-traditionalism on public
opinion in the USA, see Baker, 2005.) The political program is to re-establish the
dominance of a socially conservative Christianity, reverse policies that have legiti-
mated abortion and homosexuality, and to restore respect for traditional auth-
ority in the family, church, and public sphere.
The Right has effectively tied this Neo-traditionalism with Market Funda-
mentalism to create its overarching worldview. Needless to say, this fusion
creates a number of obvious anomalies, including the deep tension between lib-
ertarians and theocrats, who are both part of the right wing’s coalition. However,
the critical point is that it is the Neo-traditionalist side of the Right’s ideology
that has drawn virtually all of the public opposition and contestation. The
battles over marriage rights for homosexuals, abortion, contraception, sex
education and the separation of church and state have all generated powerful
critiques of Neo-traditionalism.
Yet with all of this public contestation over Neo-traditionalism, the Market
Fundamentalist ideas have been able to slide through and gain hegemony with
very little direct challenge. One can see the difference in the strategies of different
activist groups. Those in the gay rights and reproductive rights community have
had little choice but to attack Neo-traditionalist ideas directly, but the same has
not been true of activists impacted by Market Fundamentalist policies. Whether
the issue is welfare rights, labour rights or environmental protection, the pre-
ferred approach has been to fight for specific goals without elaborating a broad
theoretical alternative.
One can hardly fault activists for these choices. If, for example, one is trying to
protect poor people from the predatory lending practices of financial institutions,
the chances of winning victories is likely to be diminished if one also attempts to
take on the whole ideology of Market Fundamentalism, but the consequence of
thousands of these pragmatic decisions is that, even when reform campaigns
are successful, they fail to shake the hold of Market Fundamentalism on the
public.
3. Implications for public economic sociology

Since Market Fundamentalism is so deeply entrenched in the USA, doing Public
Economic Sociology requires something more than writing articles and books
that are widely accessible. The truth is that, no matter how eloquently and
powerfully we express our ideas in print, they are unlikely to have much of
an impact. However, if the same ideas are on the bumper stickers and posters
of social movements, then the possibilities for change increase substantially.
In short, we have to begin to think strategically and this means building
alliances with groups who stand to gain if Market Fundamentalism is challenged
and weakened.
This requires entering uncharted territory and there are few models that can
serve to guide us, but one recent initiative is useful for suggesting the potentials
and possibilities of such alliances. To be sure, this particular alliance did not
involve a frontal assault on Market Fundamentalism, but it did show that a
powerful corporation could be forced to embrace rhetoric that is at odds with
Market Fundamentalism.
Over the last few years, the American Sociological Association and other
academic associations have been on a kind of collision course with UNITE
HERE, the union that represents hotel workers in major US cities. In 2004, the
ASA meetings were held at the San Francisco Hilton just as the old union contract
was expiring. Fortunately for the Association, there were union rallies but no
walkouts. During 2005, the Association made the decision to move the 2006
meetings out of New York City out of concern that the expiration of that city’s
contract might lead to a strike that could fatally disrupt the meetings. Around
the same time, other academic associations were forced to shift the locus of
meetings at the last minute to avoid labour management conflicts in

San Francisco.
These conflicts led some of us to imagine a positive sum solution to this
problem. If the ASA and other academic organizations helped to create a standard
setting organization for the hotel and convention industry, then it might be poss-
ible to both strengthen the union’s bargaining position and decrease the danger
that our meetings would be disrupted by labour conflicts. In the initial con-
ception, this standard setting organization was to be called ‘NORM’—the
National Organization for Responsible Meetings. The name was intended to
convey the insight of economic sociology that economic relations, including
employment relations, are embedded in moral understandings.
The strategy was also based on the insight that employers in the hospitality
industry can choose between a ‘high road’ strategy that involves cooperation
with unions and decent wages and working conditions and a ‘low road’ strategy
that pursues the reduction of labour costs through all available means (for an
overview of labour’s situation in the hotel industry, see Bernhardt et al., 2003).
While pressures from the financial markets might push managements towards
the low road approach, it seemed possible that organized pressure from consu-
mers might shift managers in the opposite direction.
From the start, the strategy could only be successful if the idea was embraced
by the union. A few associations would join NORM simply because they believe
in labour rights, but for others, their decision would hinge on the argument that
joining would help protect them from the disaster of meetings that were dis-
rupted by labour-management conflicts. Only the union was in a position to
make this argument credible.
Not only did the union embrace the idea, but its leadership decided to devote
significant resources to building the standard setting organization. Along the way,
the name was changed from NORM to INMEX—the Informed Meeting
Exchange (www.inmex.org). In four months of intense organizing between
March and June of 2006, almost 200 organizations were persuaded to become
subscribers to INMEX. The roll includes other unions, religious organizations,
minority organizations, environmental groups, political groups and a handful
of professional associations including the ASA, the American Anthropological
Association and the American Studies Association.
As it happened, the organizing occurred at a time when the union had
made the Hilton Hotel chain its main target in a round of bargaining over the
expiration of local contracts in New York City, Chicago, Honolulu and other
cities. The national union had put on the table the demand that the Hilton
chain agreed to remain neutral when the union engaged in organizing campaigns
at the chain’s non-union hotels. Such neutrality agreements have been a key
element in successful organizing campaigns by the Service Employees
International Union and other unions, but most of the examples have occurred at
the local or state level where the union is able to use some political leverage
against the employer. There had been relatively few examples to date of major
national corporations agreeing to neutrality.
Nevertheless, at the end of July 2006, the Hilton organization announced it
had agreed to a contract with the New York City local and it had also signed a
five year pact with UNITE HERE. The pact included an agreement by the
company to remain neutral at an unspecified number of non-union Hilton
hotels, cooperation between the union and management on measures to
improve productivity, and language that UNITE HERE would grant Hilton the
status of ‘hotel management company of choice for the union’. The President
and Chief Operating Officer of Hilton is quoted in the press release as saying:
‘Well over 20 percent of our team members in the USA are represented
by a union, easily the highest percentage in the industry, so we are
accustomed to working constructively with those who represent our
employees. It is in this spirit of cooperation that we are pleased to
have reached this agreement with UNITE HERE.’
It is too early to evaluate the significance and durability of this pact. The union
did reach agreement with the Hilton chain in October 2006 on terms for its
San Francisco and Waikiki hotels, but it remains uncertain what impact the
agreement will have on local hotel managers who have long histories of highly
conflictual management practices. Even so, it is still significant that a major
US corporation has deployed the language of cooperation and has backed
that up with an agreement to neutrality on union campaigns at some of its
properties.
It is hard to know how much of a role the union’s effort in organizing INMEX
played in Hilton’s decision to sign a cooperation agreement, but Hilton has been
particularly vulnerable to pressure from customers because it is more dependent
on convention business than some of the other major hotel chains. Moreover, the
clause in the agreement about the ‘hotel management company of choice for the
union’ sounds like it is a reference to the union’s new role in advising consumers
about their hotel choices.
However, it is important to emphasize that, if INMEX played a role, it did so
only in conjunction with rank and file hotel workers who were ready to place con-
crete economic pressure against the Hilton chain in New York and in other cities.
Strategic alliances of this sort work precisely when they are able to link strong
moral arguments with the kind of economic and political clout that organized
workers can deploy.
4. Conclusion
This particular case is offered only as an example of what can happen when we
think strategically as economic sociologists and focus our energies on building
alliances. This means working in cooperation with activists and advocates to
organize campaigns that simultaneously fight for concrete changes while also
challenging the hegemony of Market Fundamentalist ideas. The range of possible
campaigns is almost limitless from battles at the state level for progressive taxa-
tion, mobilizations against predatory lending in real estate, credit cards and pay
day loans, efforts to shift public policy on climate change, and struggles to expand
the access of poor and working class people to quality services such as child care,
health care and higher education.
Our role in such campaigns would be an extension of our role as educators. We
can help grassroots activists to recognize and refute the arguments of Market
Fundamentalism and find powerful ways for them to communicate to the
public that alternative public policies can and will work. We also need to
educate people in the funding community of the importance of directly challen-
ging the ideas that have given conservative forces a systematic advantage in our
politics. It is only through such practices that we can hope to defeat the ideas
that are currently hegemonic.
References
Baker, W. (2005) America’s Crisis of Values, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Bernhardt, A., Dresser, L. and Hatton, E. (2003) ‘The Coffee Pot Wars: Unions and Firm
Restructuring in the Hotel Industry’. In Applebaum, E., Bernhardt, A. and Murmane,
R. J. (ed) Low Wage America, New York, Russell Sage, pp. 33– 76.
Bogle, J. C. (2005) The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, New Haven, CT, Yale University
Press.
Ehrenreich, B. (2002) Nickel and Dimed, New York, Henry Holt.
Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago
Press.
Lakoff, G. (1996) Moral Politics, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press.
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, New York, Oxford University Press.
Murray, C. (1984) Losing Ground, New York, Basic Books.
O’Connor, A. (2001) Poverty Knowledge, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Piven, F. F. and Cloward, R. A. (1971) Regulating the Poor, New York, Pantheon.
Ryan, W. (1971) Blaming the Victim, New York, Pantheon.
Somers, M. R. and Block, F. (2005) ‘From poverty to perversity: ideas, markets, and insti-
tutions over 200 years of welfare debate’, American Sociological Review, 70, 260–287.
Stiglitz, J. (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents, New York, Norton.

Stiglitz, J. (2003) The Roaring Nineties, New York, Norton.
Weaver, R. K. (2000) Ending Welfare as We Know It, Washington, DC, Brookings.
The invisible science of the invisible hand:

the public presence of economic sociology
in the USA
Akos Rona-Tas and Nadav Gabay
University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
Correspondence: aronatas@ucsd.edu
In the USA, the public visibility of economic sociology (ES) has been abysmal,
especially in contrast to economics. We start with two case studies where econ-
omists borrowed ideas from sociologists, executed them at not particularly high
levels and still received great publicity. Once we established that economics
gets better press even with less original and overall weaker scholarship, we
bracket issues of content and proceed to observe other, institutional mechanisms
that privilege economists. As economic sociologists receive less notice because
they are sociologists and not economists, we analyse the wider discipline of soci-
ology. We find that sociology is more fragmented both as a discipline and as a
profession, it has lost many of its outside constituencies by the 1980s, has not
developed a mediating layer of journalists, works on a longer time-scale, and
has had mixed success in education. We conclude with recommendations how
ES can increase its profile in the USA.
1. Introduction
The public visibility of sociology and economic sociology (ES) in particular has
been abysmal in the USA. Sociology as a whole is slipping from the public eye
since its heydays in the 1970s. In The New York Times, economics is five times
more likely to appear than sociology. If this were to reflect a shift in interest
toward economic concerns, one would expect ES to grab more attention than
other sociologies, but as far as the public is concerned, ES is almost a clandestine
operation. LexisNexis shows about a dozen mentions of the phrase ‘economic
sociology’ in the last five years. In the New York Times, in the past quarter of a
century it is mentioned just once and only three times in The Wall Street Journal
since 1985. By contrast, US economics has been spectacularly successful at enter-
ing the public sphere and disseminating its academic ideas to a wider public
through the media. At first glance, this may seem surprising. Economics is not
a discipline easily accessible to lay people. Economic departments usually
produce a highly abstract discourse, disconnected from the real world and com-
pletely oblivious to the uninitiated. Some self-critical economists even refer to
their discipline as ‘autistic’.1 In fact, precisely some of the same qualities that
lend economics academic prestige—its deductive formalism, mathematization,
fabricated models and abstracted rhetoric—make it an unlikely candidate for
popular consumption. By contrast, sociological research, with its inductive, nar-
rative, sometimes even colloquial presentation, should be a much easier sell in the
media.
Some explain this difference in visibility with the quality of the ideas. Econ-
omics, so the argument goes, has better analytical tools, produces more interesting
ideas and tests them more rigorously than sociology. Without disputing that econ-
omics often does produce interesting ideas of high quality that are indeed tested
with great rigour, we will start with two case studies where economists borrowed
ideas from sociologists, executed them at not particularly high levels but still
received publicity that economic sociologists who developed those ideas were
never granted. Moreover, these ‘discoveries’ were presented in the press as revolu-
tionary, novel and exciting without much reference to the body of literature already
accumulated in sociology. By looking at ideas that economists borrow from soci-
ologists, we can bracket (hold constant) many of the issues concerning content.
The line between new renditions of old ideas and new discoveries is often dif-
ficult to draw and as ideas travel from one discipline to another they necessarily
change. This could raise the question: is a sociological idea the same idea once it is
transplanted into economics? Luckily, in the context of our investigation, this is a
less vexing problem than it seems. Since we are looking at these arguments
through the low intellectual resolution of popular discourse, we do not have to
pay heed to subtle differences that get lost in the popular translation.
Once we have established that economics gets better press even with less orig-
inal and overall weaker science, we can shed arguments about creativity, rigour
and style, leave them for a time in the coatroom at the lobby and enter the
door of sociological analysis to observe other, institutional mechanisms that pri-
vilege economists. Because ES suffers from ailments rooted in its disciplinary
1
Now there is a movement among economists to counter the autistic tendencies of their discipline.
Their journal is the Post-Autistic Economic Review; http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/index.htm.
habitat, we will tour the wider discipline of sociology. We will finish with a few
recommendations of what ES can do to increase its public profile in the USA.
We are very well aware of the important differences between the USA and the
rest of the world with respect to economics (Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001; Frey
and Eichenberger, 1993) and sociology (Nedelmann and Sztompka, 1993), but
because of the enormous influence the USA has on the social sciences elsewhere
on the globe, we believe that the lessons we draw may be of interest to others.
2. Arrow’s discovery
On 22 August 2004, Daniel Gross, a business writer for The New York Times,
announced in the pages of the Sunday Business Section a major discovery by
Nobel-laureate, Kenneth Arrow and his co-author, that should soon revolutionize
the way we think about labour markets (Arrow and Borzekowski, 2004). Arrow,
Gross wrote, made the stunning observation that labour markets are not always
efficient because employers often do not know enough about future hires. So how
can they still find the right person for the job? Gross, paraphrasing Arrow,
explained that the key to this mystery lies in social networks that supply
additional information about job applicants to employers. Networks are
especially valuable, we learn from Gross, in finding out about such personal
characteristics as reliability and sense of humour. Because better chosen
workers fit their jobs better, they will be more productive and thus make more
money. Thus it is not just what you know that matters in how much you will
earn, but also who you know. Arrow’s breakthrough insight then was followed
by testimony from others. The line-up included Arrow’s co-author, now at the
Federal Reserve, Ron Borzekowski, along with an economist from Georgetown
and a management professor from NYU. Never, throughout Gross’s article is
there any mention of ES or sociologists who had published widely on this
topic (for a review of the sociological literature on the topic see Lin, 1999 and
Mouw, 2003).2
In the original article published as a working paper of the Federal Reserve,
Arrow and Borzekowski start from the assumption that wages depend purely
on productivity of workers, which, in turn, is a function of the worker’s observa-
ble and unobservable abilities. Workers with more social ties will be able to
2
This was, indeed, not the first time that Arrow shocked his own profession by espousing sociological
ideas. He has always kept a famously open mind. In the 1960s, studying healthcare he discovered the
importance of trust (Arrow, 1968), and in the early 1970s, he got interested in employment
discrimination (Arrow, 1973, 1998). By then, both topics already had an extensive sociological
literature. Trust was largely shunned by economists, so was discrimination except for Gary Becker’s
pioneering dissertation (Becker, 1957).
inform employers better through those connections about their unobservable

talents, and will find jobs that fit them better. Thus they can be more productive
and will earn more. The authors build a theoretical model and run a simulation
showing how change in the size of one’s social networks should influence one’s
earnings. To calibrate their model, they look at aggregate census data. They
take African Americans and white men with similar education, age and labour
force commitment and see what differences in the number of social ties will
result in the wage gap that exist between the two groups. In fact, they assume
that the two groups ‘differ only in the distribution of ties’ and that ties are
exogenous. They also set aside the nature and structure of these ties. They find
that the number of ties their model predicts is not very far from what Marsden
found for blacks and whites analysing the General Social Survey more than a
decade earlier, although they acknowledge that the ties in Marsden’s study are
very different from those in their model (Marsden, 1987).
Unfortunately, the basic premise of the article, i.e. getting hired through con-
tacts has a positive effect on wages, has no empirical support in the literature
(Bridges and Villemez, 1986; Elliot, 1999; Volker and Flap, 1999; De Graf and
Flap, 1988; Lin, 1999; Mouw, 2003), a fact the authors seem to be unaware of.
Informal ties matter in finding a job but not for subsequent earnings (or pro-
motions). The quality and structure of informal ties are correlated with earnings
but the causal relationship is in dispute. The simplifying assumptions of the
model building in the paper are staggering even by the excessive standards of
economics. The mathematical model is relatively simple and will not be
counted among Arrow’s big analytical achievements. The lack of real data,
acknowledged in Gross’s article, is another sign that the piece is just a light
finger exercise. That the academic qualities of the paper are at best mediocre is
obvious from the fact that it never passed peer review and, after being released
as a working paper, it never got published.
In spite of Gross’s presentation, the authors do not claim they invented the
idea of the importance of social networks in the labour market.3 In fact, they duti-
fully acknowledge previous work. Their first footnote starts with a reference to
Arrow’s sociologist colleague at Stanford: ‘The classic study is that of Granovetter
(1974)’. Of the 23 items listed among the references, four are by sociologists and
another three are authored by James Montgomery, who holds a joint appoint-
ment in Sociology and Economics at UW-Madison. What is curious is that the
word ‘sociology’ is completely absent from Arrow’s paper and any lay reader
3
The broader implication that economics is unaware of inefficiencies in the labour market is also
misleading. The literature on unemployment (see Bewley, 1999, Chapter 20), signalling (Spence,
1973) and discrimination (Arrow, 1998), just to name a few, all try to grapple with information
problems and the resulting labour market inefficiencies.
would be forgiven concluding that Mark Granovetter or Peter Marsden are

economists. Sociology, and here ES, is completely erased as a discipline and
sociologists appear as pioneering economists.
So if it is neither the originality, nor the execution of the idea that makes
Arrow’s piece a public event, it might be that it is the style of argumentation
that makes the difference. Clearly, it is not. After considering an article, written
by economists in the style of economics, let us take a piece of scholarship on
this very same topic written by a sociologist but in the style of (labour) econ-
omics. For further contrast, let us consider another one written by an economist
but in the style of sociology.
More than half a year before Arrow’s discovery, The American Sociological
Review (ASR) published a rigorous empirical study, based on various surveys
including the National Longitudinal Study of Youth by Ted Mouw questioning
the causal effect of social ties (Mouw, 2003). He finds no effect of getting a job
informally on wages, and argues that even the correlation between the quality
of one’s contacts and earnings may be largely an artefact: people with better
income associate with others who are like them. In fact, better social ties are
more the consequence than cause of better incomes. The style of Mouw’s analysis
would be certainly familiar to any econometrician as he is using sequential job
search models developed by labour economists (Devine and Kiefer, 1991).
Mouw’s piece was roundly ignored by the media and there is no sign that
Arrow or his co-author read the article either.
Consider, by contrast, Truman Bewley’s 500-plus page book, Why Wages
Don’t Fall During a Recession (Bewley, 1999). Bewley, Cowles Professor of
Economics at Yale, described by The Boston Globe as ‘a mathematical economist
out of your worst dreams’ (16 July 2000)4 and as ‘one of the leading mathematical
economists of his generation’ in The New Republic (7 August 2000), conducted
over 300 unstructured interviews to find the answer to the question posed in
his book’s title. Most of the book consists of long, verbatim quotes from his
respondents. Bewley’s conclusion is that all existing theories of wage rigidity
are incorrect. It is the employers’ desire to encourage loyalty—a curious motiv-
ation in the time of layoffs—that keeps wages high during bad times. Bewley’s
book, which is argued in a clear and straightforward prose, shows none of his
mathematical talents; in fact, it could be mistaken for a work of qualitative soci-
ology. Yet neither its sociological style and nor its pages of unedited interview
material in great need of judicious trimming were hindrance in generating
publicity, as the quotes above suggest. The Economist also had a full-page
4
This back-handed compliment is an acknowledgement of the chasm between economics and the
common folk.
article on the book (24 February 2000) praising the ‘intrepid economist’ for ven-
turing ‘into the real world’. Bewley’s volume, which supports the importance of
social ties in finding a job, is also cited by Arrow and Borzekowski as a good lit-
erature review.
3. Barro’s discovery
Every week, The Economist reports on recent achievements in economics in its
popular Economics Focus section. In the 13 November 2003 issue it reported
that Robert Barro of Harvard, ‘one of America’s best known economists’, and
his co-author, Rachel McCleary, found that religion has an effect on economic
growth (Barro and McCleary, 2003a). The article was published as a working
paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER),5 in May that
year6 and, unlike Arrow’s discovery, it appeared in a peer-reviewed periodical
but not in an economics journal (Barro and McCleary, 2003b). The article was
published in ASR a month before The Economist reported on it, and a few
months before The New York Times took notice.7
The Economist says nothing about ASR or sociology, except that it briefly men-
tions ‘Max Weber, a founder of sociology’, and his observations about the Protes-
tant ethic and capitalism. The article in The New York Times on 31 January 2004,
also refers to Weber. It describes the article as an ASR publication and interviews
Mark Chaves, a sociologist, along with Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist who
had gathered some of the data Barro and McCleary used. Inglehart remarked: ‘I
find that belief factors play a major role in economic growth, but here is one of
the world’s leading economists saying so’, and then added with reference to
Weber, ‘This is a revised view of the Protestant ethic’.8
The NBER paper and the ASR article are almost identical, except for a longer
footnote in the latter that gestures towards the content of various religious teach-
ings. The authors present a sophisticated set of regression analyses of countrywide
5
NBER was founded in 1920 with the leadership of Edwin Gay and Wesley Mitchell. NBER, an
institute that is privately funded but very well connected to the federal government, soon became
the most influential economic think-tank in the USA.
6
The article was also picked up by The Christian Science Monitor from an earlier draft a year before
ASR published it (21 October 2002).
7
Barro’s bio in ASR ends with a friendly gesture to sociology: ‘[Barro] is pleased to be publishing an
article in a sociology journal’.
8
What Barro and McCleary actually find is that, contrary to Weberian expectations, it is countries with
more Catholics that are doing best, and having a lot of Protestants helps development as much as
having a large share of the population with Eastern religions once church attendance and belief in
heaven and/or hell are controlled for.
averages for 59 countries observed over decades in multiple time points. The stat-
istical models tackle the issue of the direction of causation using instrumental
variables and produce the finding that the countrywide averages of beliefs in
heaven and hell have a positive effect, while church attendance has a negative
effect on economic growth.9 Why this is the case is far from clear. The authors
advance the argument that somehow ‘religious beliefs stimulate growth because
they help to sustain aspects of individual behavior that enhance productivity’.
They speculate that those beliefs augment ‘individual characteristics, such as
thrift, work ethic, honesty, and openness to strangers’ to be studied in the
future. Why is church attendance detrimental to economic development? They
conjecture that going to church takes up time and resources.
As intriguing as these findings are, the argument is a classic case of ‘ecological
fallacy’. Here it is practised in two steps. First, the economic success of the country
which is observed is conflated with the economic success of individuals which is
unobserved, ignoring thorny issues of economic organization and inequality
(Baumol, 1990). An increase in individual success can easily occur in the
context of a zero or negative sum game. Then it is assumed that, because we
observe that countries with more religious beliefs grow faster, it is the believers
that are instrumental in this economic growth. Even if it is the believers who con-
tribute disproportionately, say through obedience and hard work to economic
growth, it is not necessarily the case that they do so by benefitting themselves.
The religious masses could serve as obedient drones to enrich secular elites.
Issues of power, institutions and legal structure are all cast aside to leap from
country-level data to individual behaviour. Government policies and institutions
related to religion make a brief appearance as instrumental variables (i.e. factors
unrelated to growth).
There has been a sprawling body of sociological research that looked into the
relationship between economic success and religiosity (e.g. Lenski, 1961; Glen
and Hyland, 1967; Mueller and Johnson, 1975; Woodrum, 1985; Keister, 2003)
and an even larger literature on the historical and institutional connection
between economic development and religion (e.g. Tawney, 1954/1962; Collins,
1980; Lehmann and Roth, 1993; Kalberg, 1996; Delacroix and Nielsen, 2001).
All those are ignored in favour of a vague psychological explanation.
Neither Arrow’s nor Barro’s discovery became a public event because of novel
content or unusually high quality scholarship. Neither article is an easy read for
9
The extent to which one believes these findings depends on how much one is convinced by the
instrumentation that is aimed at separating secularization (the effect of economic development on
religion) and the religious factor (the effect of religion on economic development). The original,
bivariate relationships between all three indicators of religiosity and growth point in the same,
negative direction.
the educated lay public. What then explains their success in garnering public
attention?
4. The role of institutions

Public attention is structured by institutions. The reason why works by economists
are more visible in the public eye is because the economics profession is better able
to channel public notice than sociology can. Taking the two cases above as our
points of departure, we can see that both papers were written by economists of
high repute. Arrow received his Nobel Prize in 1972 for providing the mathematical
underpinnings of general equilibrium theory. Barro is one of the most highly cited
economists. The reputation system of the economics profession is much more hier-
archical and consensus over who the leaders are in the field is much more uniform
than in sociology. In a 1977 survey of US academics, Lipset and Ladd found that
economists had a strong agreement over the top people in their field (Lipset,
1994, p. 215). Back then, Friedman, Samuelson and Arrow topped the list.
Arrow, who came third, got three-fifths of the professions support. In sociology,
the comparable number was 31%, less than in psychology, political science or
even English literature. The economics reputation system is much more cohesive.
Economics reputation system has been built and maintained by a set of institutions,
which structure the production of knowledge in each discipline and the ways in
which this knowledge is disseminated and consumed.
4.1 Internal coherence of economics and sociology

Disciplinary cohesion. One of the keys to economics public success is its excep-
tional achievement in creating internal disciplinary cohesion. Since the 1930s,
economics settled on a commonly agreed formalized core that has not just pro-
vided a mathematical language for describing data, but formalized economic
theory itself (Yonay, 1998; Weintraub, 2002). While US sociology has not been
averse to mathematical formalism (Sorensen, 1978; Fararo, 1997), attempts to
mathematize sociology always focused on empirical description, be it network
analysis (White et al., 1976; Boorman and White, 1976), the study of social mobi-
lity (Duncan, 1966; Featherman and Hauser, 1978), diffusion (Coleman, 1964),
demographic processes (Siegel and Swanson 2004) or the causal modeling of
survey data (Lazarsfeld, 1946/1955; Blalock 1972). The most ambitious
attempt of theoretical formalization in sociology has been in organizational
theory (Hannan and Freeman, 1989; Peli, 1997; Hannan et al., 2003).10 None
10
Sociologists also borrowed mathematical tools from econometrics in data analysis and tried to
import rational choice theory into sociology (Hechter, 1997) with limited success.
of these efforts attempted to unify sociology as a whole or aspired to become a

dominant voice throughout the discipline.
Mathematization is not the only way of creating unity in a discipline. Several
of the natural sciences from geology and paleontology to biology and chemistry
have prospered for a long time without a mathematical or formalized core on the
strength of their empiricism, agreed upon problem sets and ways of settling dis-
putes.11 Sociology is unlikely to be able to follow in economics footsteps and it
probably should not. Its comparative advantage is in its diversity. One can
have a coherent enough discipline that fosters diversity without a common, for-
malized theory, as long as there is some agreement on what the significant ques-
tions are and on how disputes are to be solved.
However, diversity is different from fragmentation. The problem with soci-
ology is not, as Collins and Yearly claim, that its academic training requires soci-
ologists to develop the ability of switching between alternate frames of reference,
which teaches sociologists that all taken-for-granted-reality, including their own
most deeply held beliefs, are just one set of beliefs among many (Collins and
Yearly, 1992). To be sure, good sociological training does also teach sociologists
that no one, not even sociologists, can hold any belief without thinking it to be
somehow privileged. (Why would anyone bother to believe anything, if it were
just one of an infinite number of equally valid beliefs?) Relativism is indeed detri-
mental to any discipline that aspires to wider public attention, but very little of
sociology succumbed to this academic malady. Indeed, the problem often
seems to be the opposite. Absolutist advocacy of particular epistemological pos-
itions is much more rampant in the profession than the reckless belief that ‘any-
thing goes’. Just try to convince a culturalist that sometimes people act according
to rational calculations or almost any sociologists that biological differences may
have social relevance.
The trouble is also not, as others assert, that sociology is too open a discipline,
too much influenced by history, psychology, political science, anthropology and,
yes, economics (Rigney and Barnes, 1980, pp. 116 – 7; Calhoun, 1992, p. 182) or
that departments hire scholars occasionally from outside the discipline (Halliday,
1992, p. 12). Openness is strength not weakness for sociology as it is the main-
spring of its intellectual creativity.
The challenge is neither relativism nor openness but the increasing Balkaniza-
tion of the discipline, which results from an unfortunate combination of the
opposites of relativism and openness: sociologists are overly committed to the
11
Collins adds to this another unifying factor, a set of technical instruments that are necessary to
generate new discoveries. Indeed, sharing the same expensive gadgetry can also unify disciplines
(Collins, 1994).
particular vision of their subdisciplines and are uncurious about sociology as a

whole. Many sociologists, however, do cross the boundaries of their subdiscipline,
and indeed, these incursions often bring intellectually the most interesting results.
The success of ES within sociology has been to a large extent the result of such
cross-subdisciplinary labour as well as the constant engagement with economics.
Yet, in general, too many sociologists, while interested in other disciplines directly
connected to their area of inquiry, perceive much of sociology as irrelevant and
uninteresting from their own perspective. In the absence of some common
understanding about the main issues and procedures of settling competing
claims, it is not surprising that sociologists tune out much of sociology. Why
should the public care about particular sociological ideas when most sociologists
themselves are not interested?
Balancing coherence with innovation. Economics achieved a high level of intel-

lectual unity by finding a formalized theoretical core which made it easier for
economists to settle on a set of key research problems and on specific ways to
adjudicate competing claims. This resulted in a unified, hierarchical structure
and a disciplinary closure, which imposes some limitations on the discipline.
For instance, ideas new to economics must enter mostly from above. Highly pres-
tigious economists, who have earned their stripes by excelling in the traditional
core, earn the license to voice unorthodox ideas.12 Arrow and Barro, as well as
Bewley, receive attention for ideas that do not fit the mainstream of economics
because of their earlier ideas that did. Once an idea is ‘discovered’ by a top econ-
omist, it becomes a legitimate line of research for others. Arrow transferred legiti-
macy onto those who until now have worked on these topics at the margin of
economics (e.g. Montgomery, 1992) and both luminaries blazed the trail for
new research (e.g. Calvo’-Armegol, 2004; Calvo’-Armengol and Jackson, 2004;
Guiso et al., 2003, 2006).
Another way for economics to deal with disciplinary inflexibilities has been the
creation of satellite disciplines such as management science, organizational, oper-
ational and marketing research, human resources, and business history etc.,
mostly housed in business schools. Practitioners of these less prestigious satellite
disciplines are almost always trained as economists (as satellites rarely grant their
own PhD), but they have their own associations, journals and conventions. They
fulfill three functions for economics. They provide jobs for economics graduates,
allow for experimentation with unorthodox ideas and spread the gospel of
economics.
12
Barro most likely came to the idea of religion as a factor in economic growth through his coauthor
and wife, who holds a degree in religion and philosophy.
Sociology also has a few satellite disciplines (namely, ethnic and gender
studies), but these are much smaller, with far fewer resources, and are accommo-
dated within the structure of sociology as accepted specialty areas. In spite of each
having its corresponding social movement and despite their efforts to reach out
to it, these satellites are even more trapped in academia than sociology and,
focused on political activism, they are reluctant evangelists for the discipline.
Professional organizations. The professional organizations play a key role in

presenting their disciplines to the public and managing the scarce resource of aca-
demic prestige within their respective professions (Cole, 1994; Bernstein, 2001;
Turner and Turner, 1990). The American Sociological Society was founded in
1905, twenty years after the American Economic Association (AEA). The found-
ing meeting was held at the AEA’s annual conference and originally there was a
debate whether to keep sociology within the AEA. Currently, the American Socio-
logical Association (ASA), renamed in 1959, has a membership of about 14 000,
but they are dispersed into a gaudy assemblage of 44 sections including sections
such as Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco (fortunately a single section not three),
Marxist Sociology, and Race, Gender and Class, which exists along with such sec-
tions as Racial and Ethnic Minorities, Sex and Gender, and Latino/a Sociology.
Most of the proliferation of sections happened in the last two decades. In 1961
there were only five sections and in 1982 it still stood only at 20. The AEA, by
contrast, is a single organization with over 18 000 members.
ASA’s fragmented structure is the result of American sociologists’ historical
inability to adjudicate internal disputes, which is both the result and reflection
of its weak disciplinary core. Straddling the sciences and humanities, negotiating
differences between applied and theoretical camps, academic and activist inter-
ests, US sociology has been unable and unwilling to enforce unity in the pro-
fession. Each time conflicts arose, the ASA decided to accommodate all sides
by creating organizational subunits (Rhoades, 1981; Turner and Turner, 1990,
Simpson and Simpson, 1994). The trend towards fragmentation in sociology con-
tinued throughout periods of expansion and contraction. In the 1960s and the
1970s, when sociology experienced a dramatic growth, American sociologists
did not mobilize their increasing resources toward a more coherent conception
of themselves as a discipline. This lack of professional consolidation continued
in the 1980s and 1990s, when sociology experienced a period of decline, as
further differentiation was encouraged by trying to sustain membership in
ASA. Finding itself in an increasing competitive environment with specialty
associations, the ASA sought to co-opt as many factions of professional sociology
as it could. The result was ‘an almost complete inability to consolidate symbolic
resources around . . . a sense of a common professional community’ (Turner and
Turner, 1990, p. 139).
By offering something for everyone, the ASA was organized first and foremost
as an umbrella organization that would house, tolerate, if not actively encourage,
enormous intellectual diversity. While this injected creative intellectual tensions
by not policing too heavy handedly academic inquiry, it also reinforced the intel-
lectual Balkanization we mentioned earlier.
Prizes. One of the biggest successes of the economics profession was the cre-
ation of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. This annual prize, established
by the Bank of Sweden in 1968, was redefined in 1995 as a prize for social
science but so far only one recipient came from outside economics. The
Nobel Prize bestows instant international fame on its winners and elevates
the prestige not just of the recipients but the reputation of the entire field.
The award also brings the subfield of the winner into focus, both putting it
into the headlines and generating momentum for new research. The second
most prestigious prize in the USA in economics is the John Bates Clark
Medal awarded biannually to the best economist under 40 by the AEA. Forty
per cent of the Medal winners have gone on to become Nobelists. The AEA
gives no other awards except the Distinguished Fellow and the Richard T. Ely
Lecture Award.
Although sociologists have a few international prizes, such as the Amalfi Prize,
and a handful of general prizes such as the Holberg or the Balzan Prize that are
also open to them, none of these awards confer either the public or academic
prestige enshrined in the Nobel Prize. Domestically, US sociologists are eligible
for a plethora of awards but the profession does not have the ability to make
them into public events. Part of the problem is the fractured nature of ASA.
The organization itself gives eight prizes (plus one dissertation prize). Even
these are mostly earmarked to special subgroups; there is one for sociology of
women, another for African Americans and there is even an award for promoting
the public understanding of sociology. There are only two truly general awards,
one for best publication and the other for a distinguished career. In 2005, the
various sections gave out 48 awards not counting dissertation and student
prizes. The Economic Sociology section gave two prizes, the Ronald Burt Out-
standing Student Paper Award and the Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship
Award. Such honours may help in academic promotions but will not register with
the public as not even fellow sociologists outside the subfield take notice. (Which
ASA section awards the Max Weber prize and who got it this year?)
It is not just the abundance and narrow focus of the awards that make them
publicly irrelevant but also the type of work they honour. Because its profession-
alism depends almost entirely on the academic system, sociology’s prevailing
reward system favours those whose principal audience is their narrowly trained
colleagues and students (Buxton and Turner, 1992). Many of these awards
honour works of exceptional quality but they are incapable of commanding

public attention.
Public role vs ivory tower. Internal coherence of a discipline and the unity of the
profession are important, but in themselves are no guarantees of public relevance.
In fact, economics’ attempt to fashion itself as a unitary science initially ham-
pered its ability to address important policy issues. Ironically, taking one step
back to make two steps forward, economics achieved its ultimate public strength
through a partial retreat from public life in the 1930s. During the Great
Depression, the neoclassical model that emerged as the core of the discipline,
had very little to offer to building the New Deal. Most of the policy expertise
in this gigantic effort was supplied by the institutionalist school, which was com-
pletely marginalized from the 1940s on (Bernstein, 2001; Yonay, 1998). After
World War II, developmental economics, attacking the most urgent policy
issues of the era, suffered the same fate for not being able to fit itself into the
mathematical models of the core (Krugman, 1995). The retreat to the ivory
tower, however, was only partial. The mathematical mainstream did chalk up
some important practical successes during World War II (for instance, in plan-
ning the war economy and transport logistics). It was also a major coup that,
in 1946, the Council of Economic Advisors to the Office of the President
(CEA) was formed, a symbol of the indispensability of economics in policy
making.13 Yet, the era of post-war reconstruction when the state was taking on
a major role in the economy, was not a hospitable ideological environment for
work emerging from the developing neoclassical core. However, once economics
achieved its internal unity (Kearl et al., 1979; Frey et al., 1984), it was in a power-
ful position to take advantage later of the liberal political wave shaped by the Cold
War and its denouement.
World War II was a defining moment in the rise of economics, as it was for
physics, linguistics and many other disciplines. Sociology, too, made itself
useful during the war mostly by deploying survey research,14 although its
efforts were not honoured with anything comparable to the CEA. Sociology
vastly benefitted from the creation of the America’s Great Society that provided
13
During the early years of the CEA, the economics profession made an enormous effort to keep a
unified voice on the Council (Bernstein, 2001).
14
See, for example, Samuel Stouffer’s four-volume opus, The American Soldier, which was produced in
the Research Branch of the War Department’s Information and Educational Division (Stouffer et al.,
1949/1965a, 1949/1965b). Rhoades writes: ‘sociologists entered all branches of the armed forces and
served in such war agencies as the Office of Strategic Services, the Selective Service System, the Office
of War Information, the National War Labor Board, the War Department, and the Office of Price
Administration’ (Rhoades, 1981, Chapter 6.)
it with plenty to do15 and was buoyed by the social movements of the 1950s and
1960s. By the 1980s, however, the tide of social movements subsided and the con-
servative revolution began to dismantle the welfare state. US sociology found
itself adrift without intellectual anchors, strong professional organization and
discernable clientele outside higher education. While economics built a strong
non-academic constituency in the business community by taking over the curri-
culum of the business schools and building positions for itself in the economy
from tariff boards to the Federal Reserve, sociology has not been nearly as success-
ful in institutionalizing itself in private industry, public administration or civil
organizations.16 In spite of the strength of political activism within the discipline,
sociologists were not particularly successful at enlisting social movements as their
public audience either. By the end of the millennium, the discipline largely had to
retreat into its last institutional base, the university (Halliday 1992; Buxton and
Turner 1992). When universities began to re-examine their support for the disci-
pline in the 1980s, the sociology profession could not ignore its predicament any
longer (see Huber, 1995).
Economics, on the other hand, captured important public positions, which
made its public relevance secure. Economists became not just commentators
but active players in creating the economy; economics became performative
(Callon, 1998). To know what economists think about interest rates, tariffs,
taxes or corporations became important because they are indicative of where
those economic artefacts may be headed in the near future.
Economics and sociology in the USA have been shaped differently as disci-
plines and professions. Economics achieved a high level of internal cohesion com-
pared with sociology. Not surprisingly, sociology was also less successful in
disseminating its ideas in the public sphere.
4.2 Dissemination
Training. Presenting the disciplines to young people is an important part of
their public presence. Learning about economics and sociology at an early age
creates an audience for the research and the ideas. Introducing sociology into
15
It was in 1965, within a year of the launching of the Great Society program by President
Johnson, that ‘sociologist’ as an occupation entered the Federal Civil Service Register (Rhoades,
1981, Chapter 8)
16
What were the business schools to economics were the schools of social work to sociology. Yet social
worker training has always been much smaller and its resources much more meager even before the
welfare state started to wither away. Nevertheless, sociology did make inroads into the criminal justice
system by providing professional training in criminology, into the polling industry, and its
demographers captured the Census Bureau.
the high school curriculum was a failure (DeCesare, 2002) despite the fact that
high school teachers should have been receptive allies. Economics, by contrast
entered successfully the curriculum and in a dozen states it is a required
subject (Walstad, 2001).
On the other hand, both disciplines were successful at planting themselves
firmly in undergraduate education. The number of undergraduate majors in soci-
ology is actually larger than in economics (but smaller than in political science).
The popularity of sociology is no doubt related to its more open structure,
making it more appealing to students. However, the same openness also gave
rise to a weaker curriculum. While economics could create a set of introductory
textbooks (Samuelson and Nordhaus, 2004; Mankiw, 2003) that present the
main ideas and the heroes of economics to young people, sociology
textbooks, while including references to the holy trinity of Marx, Durkheim,
and Weber, present a smorgasbord of different topics and a variety of perspectives
that are only loosely connected. Unlike economics textbooks, which are often
written by star economists, sociology textbooks are typically written by lesser
known scholars employed at less prestigious institutions, and the books are
mostly held in low esteem by the elite of the profession. Many introductory
courses are taught from course readers and a collection of exemplary books.
Later courses in sociology can rarely build on earlier ones; each course must
start from sea level. Therefore, sociology students graduate with very varied
notions of what sociology is and what and whose work is worth knowing in
the discipline.
Time scale. Economics and sociology operate on different time scales in produ-
cing academic knowledge. Economists are faster because they usually do not
produce their own data. (Bewley is the exception that proves the rule.) By
being successful in creating a quantified monitoring system for the economy,
economists have off-the-shelf standardized data that are instantly available. It is
not that economists are blind to problems of data validity and reliability, but
the division of labour between data production and analysis removes the often
paralysing awareness of the socially constructed nature of economic facts.
Barro’s article assumes, for instance, that people report church attendance truth-
fully, even though, at least in the USA, the evidence points to a substantial over-
reporting (Hadaway et al., 1998). Moreover, overreporting has been increasing
over time, suggesting that the effect of secularization on this particular
measure may be underestimated, which may have consequences for their find-
ings. Our point is that the separation of data collection and analysis results in
a speed and certitude that suit the media much better than the plodding indeci-
siveness of data-confused sociologists. The short time scale of newspaper or
television reporting, when information is needed often within hours, meshes

better with what economists can offer.
Journalism as a mediating institution. Economics is not a particularly entertain-

ing subject. Much of economic writing is inaccessible to the public. Economics
therefore needs a mediating layer of journalists, whose job is to put economics
to prose. Many of these journalists have a degree in economics but then receive
special training in journalism or have a degree in business reporting. While
sociologists, on average, may write more readable prose than economists,17
they cannot compete with staff writers for The Economist or The Wall Street
Journal.
The problem is not just with the quality of the writing. The ASA does have one
quarterly publication, Contexts, that aims at popularizing sociological research.
Each issue has five or six feature articles of five to six pages and another 15 – 20
shorter items such as book reviews, interviews and notes on topical issues. In
the last four issues, five of the 22 featured articles were on ES and others were cov-
ering areas close to the field. Many of the articles are well written, but circulation
is only a little over 3000.
Journalists often hook up with academic economists through the public
relations departments of research institutes. There are many more research insti-
tutes in economics than in sociology. The National Bureau of Economic Research
is one of the biggest and most prestigious, with a wide network of non-resident
affiliates. The same goes for the research arm of the Federal Reserve. Pushing
sociological work onto the media, on the other hand, is left mostly to universities
that are less interested in promoting a particular discipline than improving the
image of the school as a whole.
4.3 Summary
The answer to the question why economic sociologists get less credit in public for
their work than economists, even when their work is not any worse is simple and
might even sound trite: regardless of what they write, economic sociologists will
have a harder time becoming visible because they are sociologists.
While economists benefit from a professional organization that can effectively
manage academic prestige, select top practitioners and line up the discipline
behind them, sociologists cannot rely on such a professional juggernaut. Soci-
ology is too disjointed both as a discipline and a profession, and it cannot
17
Some top economists, just as some top sociologists, write famously well. Paul Krugman, Robert
Solow, Amartya Sen and Milton Friedman come to mind. Barro himself wrote columns for
Business Week and The Wall Street Journal.
present the public with a coherent message about what research is important
and who should be listened to. Economists have a mediating layer of
business journalists whom they can engage more effectively due to their acceler-
ated practices of knowledge production. Those journalists then present them to a
public wider than any academic publication can reach. Through the high school
and college curricula, the public gets a better preparation in economics than in
sociology.
Having, so far, introduced a sociological explanation, which locates the visi-
bility problems of ES at the level of large and hard-to-change structures, may
run the risk of illustrating yet another handicap of sociology: its clumsiness in
offering practical advice about what to do. Thus in the concluding section, we
feel obliged to dispense some practical advice.
5. What can be done?

ES should appreciate the relative advantages of belonging to sociology (intellec-
tual diversity and openness) while taking measures to mitigate disadvantages of
its disciplinary affiliation. ES should keep its interest in sociology as a whole and
keep scouring the rest of the field for ideas because its fortune is linked to that of
its mother discipline. It should also avoid its own intellectual balkanization. This
should be easier in a subfield but there are also other reasons for hope. So far, ES
has been able to keep a common empirical focus: the embeddedness of the
economy in its social context (Beckert, 2006). Another reason for its intellectual
success is that ES has insisted on a dialogue with economics. Because economics is
so highly structured, ES could keep a focus through this conversation, achieving
internal intellectual common ground, to some extent, parasitically, on the back of
the coherence of economics. ES should not become a collection of complaints
about economics, and should not feel constrained by economics in setting its
research agenda. Nevertheless, whatever ideas it develops should be measured
against economics. Maybe this constant dialogue turns out to be training
wheels that can be abandoned later but for now this is indispensable. Economics
itself is getting much more colourful. On the one hand, this makes the dialogue
less limiting; on the other hand, ES is beginning to face mighty competition in
new thinking about the economy. This exchange will also help ES to enter the
public sphere where ideas from economics are unavoidable and must be
addressed anyway.
ES should also keep being self-reflexive, taking count periodically of its
achievements and failures, schools and disagreements (see e.g. Swedberg, 2003;
Smelser and Swedberg, 2005; Beckert and Zafirovski, 2005). As ES will move
into more applied areas, keeping business school ES and more critical or theor-
etical approaches within the same fold is essential. Self-assessment through
review articles, collected volumes, handbooks, encyclopedias etc., will also guard
against fragmentation and will bring the clarity to the field as a whole that is
necessary to present it in public.
ES needs good textbooks. As the field is growing fast, the textbooks will have
quick obsolescence but it is important that college students get a good introduc-
tion to sociological ways of thinking about economic processes. ES should not
stop at the college level. It should reach down into the high school social
science curriculum as well.
Economic sociologists should establish an international prize for the study of
the relationship between economy and society. The prize should be open to econ-
omists too. It should be the only such prize, and be given probably every two
years. The presentation of the prize should be a public event and designed in a
way to maximize its impact on the field.
ES must find its way into the media. It should be made easier for business jour-
nalists to find sociologists with relevant knowledge on economic issues. The ES
section of the ASA, therefore, should have a website to promote ES with a publicly
accessible catalogue of experts including contact information and their areas of
competence. Professional newsletters should report on public appearances by
economic sociologists. Economic sociologists, on the other hand, when they
speak in public, should insist on being labeled as ‘sociologists’.
At the end of this article, as we exit, we must retrieve content—creativity,
rigour and style—from our rhetorical cloakroom and emphasize that none of
the efforts proposed will matter unless ES keeps asking new and interesting ques-
tions and giving well researched and well presented answers. In any case, why
bother to become visible without high quality scholarship?
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Public sociology vs. the market1

Michael Burawoy
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Correspondence: burawoy@berkeley.edu
Building on Karl Polanyi’s theory of a societal reaction to the unregulated

exchange of what he called fictitious commodities—labour, money and land—
this paper links the history of sociology to the history of the market. If the first
wave of marketization in the nineteenth century dwelt on the commodification
of labour, prompting utopian sociologies, and the second wave of marketization
of the twentieth century was provoked by the commodification of money, gen-
erating national policy sociologies, then the third wave of marketization that
began in the last quarter of the twentieth century includes the commodification
of the environment (land, air, water), and calls for public sociologies of a global
dimension.
A third wave of marketization has been sweeping the world, destroying the ram-
parts laboriously erected to defend society against the first and second waves of
the previous two centuries. Swept away are the labour rights first won by
labour movements against the marketization of the nineteenth century, but
also the social rights guaranteed by states against the marketization of the twen-
tieth century. Once again the world is being levelled down. Third-wave market-
ization not only abolishes hard won gains of the past but also extends
commodification to new realms. The commodification of nature—from the
body to the environment—came home to roost during the last quarter of the
twentieth century, gathering momentum as we entered the twenty-first century.
Behind this third wave is an economic class of global dimensions that harnesses
nation states for its own ends, instigating wars of terror as well as superexploiting
mobile populations of desperate and destitute workers. The last hold out against
this economic tsunami is society itself, composed of associations with a measure
of collective self-regulation, movements expressed in the formation of a collective
will and publics of mutual recognition and communication. Will society measure
up to the challenge?
In facing this worldwide threat to society and thus to human existence, soci-
ologists have four choices. They can side with the state against the market, hoping
1
This paper was the basis of an address to Tsinghua University, Beijing, 21 June 2006.
to exploit what remains of state resistance. In some nations this might make
sense, such as those with a continuing legacy of social democratic politics or a
strong legacy of welfare provision. Such policy science depends on finding
spaces within the state from which to contain the market juggernaut—spaces
that are disappearing at rates that vary from one nation to the next. Sociologists’
second choice is to bury their heads in the sand, proclaiming that science must
first be built before they can sally forth. We must not risk our legitimacy, our
very existence by wading out into the storm. The professional sociologists sit
tight waiting for the storm to pass, hoping against hope that it will not sweep
us up with the rest of society. The third choice is to agitate against the first
two choices, writing tracts against their moral bankruptcy, launching jeremiads
against those colluding with the evils of state and market. However, critical soci-
ology is found preaching to an evacuated audience as the storm strikes. There is,
however, a fourth road that refuses to collaborate with market and state, that says
science without politics is blind, that critique without intervention is empty, that
calls on sociologists to engage directly with society before it disappears altogether.
This is what I call public sociology. Third-wave marketization calls forth the age
of public sociology.2
1. Three faces of marketization: South Africa, Russia and the USA

Third-wave marketization is global, even if sociology’s reaction is still national.
Let me illustrate this with three countries with which I have some familiarity:
South Africa, Russia and the USA. When I returned to South Africa in 1990,
after a 22 year absence, I found there, in the twilight of apartheid, a sociology
energized by its engagement with the anti-apartheid struggles, particularly with
the labour movement. The sociology of social movement unionism was born
in the 1980s, subsequently to be taken up and further developed in other
global contexts. The post-apartheid transition took place in a period of
renewed market triumphalism, triggered by the collapse of socialism in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. What socialist ambitions the African National
Congress had developed in the course of its struggles quickly evaporated once it
assumed power. Instead, South Africa opened its borders to trade and began pri-
vatizing its considerable public sector. The flood of cheap imports from countries
where labour conditions were even poorer destroyed sectors of the economy,
eroded the strength of trade unions, leading to the casualization of labour and
the growth of the informal sector. The move to privatize water, electricity,
public transportation and telecommunications was a second assault on
2
Public sociology depends on the other sociologies—professional, policy and critical—but it takes the
lead.
day-to-day survival in the townships and villages. As the inhumanity of racism

was arrested, another inhumanity deepened. The elimination of apartheid
coincided with the (re)commodification of labour, whether through reduced
social protection or suspended industrial regulation.
South African sociology, too, unable to escape the pincer movement of state
and market, was pushed toward professionalization and drawn into the competi-
tive game of international benchmarking. As wages in the universities fell behind
those in the private sector and civil service, so sociologists made up their short fall
by increasing reliance on policy research. The legacy of critical and public soci-
ology was weakened not only by the pressure for a more scientized and commo-
dified knowledge, but also by the retreat of society itself—its associations, its
movements and its publics. Third-wave marketization has shattered not only
society but also the disciplinary field that is its expression.
Apartheid disintegrated soon after its ideological foe, the Soviet order,
collapsed—a collapse that had its own unexpected denouement. Following the
chain reactions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union found itself compet-
ing with its erstwhile satellites for the most rapid transition to a market economy.
Under the rubric of ‘shock therapy’ (which proved to be all shock and no therapy)
and ‘big bang’ (schemes of wanton destruction inspired by Western economists),
the party state was dismantled in order to release the spontaneous growth of the
market. The quicker the destruction, so it was argued, the less likely communism
would exercise revenge, and the more rapid would be capitalist reconstruction.
The market did indeed spring to life, but it played havoc with production.
With the liberalization of prices at the beginning of 1992 inflation spiraled out
of control, businesses quickly went out of business, and wages were not paid.
The realm of exchange became far more profitable than production and so
resources flowed into flea markets, kiosks, supermarkets, banking, mafia, cur-
rency speculation, asset stripping and privatization. Everything was up for sale
in a big grab with rapidly diminishing time horizons. The commodification of
money had made it useless in economic transactions, which retreated into
barter. Instead of revolution or evolution Russia faced economic involution—
an economy that consumes itself, leading to a decline the likes of which had
not been seen in the twentieth century. If Stalinism brought primitive accumu-
lation, the dispossession of the peasantry and the creation of a working class
with nothing but its labour power to sell, the market transition brought repeasan-
tization, what one might call primitive disaccumulation. For so many economic
survival meant falling back into subsistence production and with that an
advanced society retreated into kin networks and even more narrowly into the
nuclear family.
As society goes, so goes sociology. Except for a momentary effervescence in the
twilight of communism, under perestroika, when civil society burst forth,
sociology had been an ideological conveyor belt for the party state. In the after-
math of communism its inherited professional base was, therefore, very weak.
Marketization turned sociology into opinion polling and market research,
while academic programs were as likely as not to be found in the new business
schools. Without a solid foundation in professional sociology, a crude policy
science prevailed. Critical and public sociology could scarcely be found.
Paradoxically we find almost the opposite in the USA. Third-wave marketiza-
tion has struck here too, aiming to destroy and uproot society, stimulating a lively
response from professional sociology, but this remains bottled up in the academy,
unable to make effective engagement with the wider world. With a society sinking
into oblivion alongside complex and sturdy research and teaching establishments,
the potential contribution of a public sociology only grows. Yet its reception and
adoption in society face ever greater obstacles.
Take the example of Hurricane Katrina, which brought down levees and
flooded the city of New Orleans in August 2005, killing over 1400 civilians.
Much attention has been rightly awarded to the abysmal failure of the
federal administration to cope with this unnatural disaster. It was not as if
the catastrophe was unanticipated—knowing how precarious were the levees
holding back the flood waters, scientists had predicted their collapse in the
face of such a hurricane with the very same consequences that befell this belea-
guered city. The levees had not been rebuilt, despite appeals to Congress from
local administration, because the state had other budgetary priorities, not least
in recent years the war in Iraq. Indeed, militarism also explains the failure of
emergency relief. For one, Louisiana’s home guard, which was mobilized to
handle the crisis, was depleted by postings to Iraq. More important, the
Department of Homeland Security, newly created after 9/11, swallowed up
FEMA (the national Federal Emergency Management Agency), as military
security trumped economic and social security. Third-wave marketization
has gone hand in hand with the gutting of what there was of a welfare state
and with deepening inequalities, so that the poor and largely black population
of New Orleans was defenceless against the flooding, losing their homes and
their possessions, now scattered across the nation in their trailers. There is
no excuse for the richest country in the world losing so many people to a pre-
dictable event, especially when across the Gulf a small country like Cuba con-
siders it a national tragedy if a single person dies at the hands of a hurricane,
even one as strong as Katrina.
Third-wave marketization provides the context for the social paralysis of the
state in its response to the hurricane, but marketization was also a more direct
cause of the devastation. The rapid and unregulated growth of New Orleans’s
leisure industry recovered land at the expense of those wetlands that are crucial
for absorbing flood waters. Capitalism also drove the oil drilling in the Gulf
just off the New Orleans shoreline, causing subsidence of the land, making the
city that much more vulnerable to flooding. Finally, scientists have shown that
global warming, another product of third-wave marketization, intensifies the
ferocity of hurricanes by warming the sea. Thus, with a profligate and uncon-
strained capitalism we can expect disaster damage to only increase. The US
state was deaf to all the warnings of scientists, whether it be those predicting
the stronger hurricanes, the weakness of the levees or the unequal social
impact of such a disaster.
Perhaps economists with their interests in expanding the market or political
scientists with their complementary interest in guaranteeing the political con-
ditions for market expansion may have the ear of capitalists and the state, but
sociologists with their commitment to society can have no such illusions!
Indeed, the US state, for example, rather than deploying society to secure its
own ends, has declared war on civil society, attacking one trench after another.
Sociologists, therefore, have to turn away from the policy worlds of state and
economy that know only too well what they do not want. Sociologists have to
seek out and cultivate other audiences, namely publics, which might restore
the power of society organized for its own self-defence, and as a countervailing
force to third-wave marketization.
2. Three waves of commodification: labour, money, and land

My three cases—South Africa, Russia and the USA—show how third-wave mar-
ketization intensifies and is intensified by the dissolution of organized capitalism,
state socialism and the last hold-outs against decolonization. Today state regu-
lation deepens rather than contains the commodification of labour, money and
land, or what Karl Polanyi called fictitious commodities. Polanyi argued that
commodifying these entities, that is subjecting them to unimpeded market
exchange, destroyed their use value and undermined their utility as factors of pro-
duction. The mode of exchange rebels against the mode of production.
Much of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is devoted to the commodifica-
tion of labour in nineteenth-century England. With the revoking of labour pro-
tection under Speenhamland and the proscription of outdoor relief, labour was
buffeted by the seismic shifts in market forces. Capital could hire and fire
labour at will with no concern for its survival, destroying the traditional commu-
nity within which it had been embedded, yet at the same time desperation forged
a new society out of social movements, such as the factory movement to restrict
the length of the working day, and out of associations, such as burial societies,
trade unions, cooperatives and utopian experiments (e.g. Robert Owen’s New
Lanark). In brief, the commodification of labour led to the spontaneous defensive
self-reconstitution of society.
Polanyi carries his analysis into the twentieth century, shifting from the focus
on labour to the focus on money. When money becomes the subject of unregu-
lated market exchange, as in Russia immediately after the collapse of commun-
ism, uncertainty of value becomes so great that businesses cannot function.
Already in the nineteenth century states created their own nation banks to regu-
late currencies and exchange rates, but the adoption of the gold standard led to
business-threatening fluctuations in the value of currencies. States responded
with protectionism, insulating their national economies from global markets in
more or less draconian ways. Fascism, Stalinism (collectivization and planning),
Social Democracy and the New Deal were divergent ways of coping with second-
wave marketization, but they all involved restoring certain labour rights and
extending them to social rights, including minimum wages, pensions, education
and welfare. To be sure these social rights could come with narrower political
rights and the regulation of society. Even colonialism might be included within
such a protectionist reaction to the market, in particular, strategies of indirect
rule that sustained rather than destroyed traditional communities, thereby repro-
ducing colonial working-class connections to subsistence economies. Second-
wave marketization and the counter-movement by states coincided with Eric
Hobsbawm’s short twentieth century that begins with World War I and ends
with the fall of communism.
Polanyi never anticipated a third wave of marketization. Perhaps this was
because he did not distinguish between a first wave and a second wave within
his single ‘great transformation.’ More likely it was because the Fascist and Stali-
nist reactions to the second wave were so calamitous with respect to human
freedom, laying the basis of World War II. Polanyi thought human kind would
never again take the road of market fundamentalism. Instead, he projected a
far more optimistic future in which markets and states would be subject to the
direction and regulation of self-organizing society. He was wrong on both
counts: first, there would be a third wave of marketization and we are in the
middle of it now and second, no self-regulating society would emerge strong
enough to keep market and state at bay. How should we characterize third-wave
marketization that begins in the middle 1970s and what societal reactions can we
observe? I propose three dimensions.
Following Polanyi we see that first-wave marketization generates a counter-
movement against the commodification of labour, while second-wave marketiza-
tion generates a counter-movement against the commodification of money.
Third-wave marketization, I claim, generates a counter-movement against the
commodification of land and the environment, or, more generally, against the
commodification of nature. Although land and the environment were commodi-
fied in the first and second waves of marketization, they had yet to lead to the
wholesale devastation that now besets this planet. The effects of the
commodification of nature have crept up on us, but they have been cumulative.
Thus, so many of the struggles to-day are around the protection of access to land,
whether it be squatters or shack dwellers defending themselves against local gov-
ernments trying to clean them out of the urban landscape, whether it be middle
class residents of the city opposing high-rise developers, whether it be indigenous
peoples refusing to give up their land, or farmers battling against dams that would
destroy their existence, whether it be the struggles for clean air, against the
dumping of toxic waste, against privatization of water and electricity. And so
the list goes on. The commodification of labour and money, of course, are still
important, indeed are as important as ever, as I indicated above in my accounts
of South Africa, Russia and the USA, but the reaction to the commodification of
nature is the distinctive feature of third-wave marketization.
The second way to characterize the third-wave marketization is its scale. It
is truly global in its causes and its ramifications. Once the barricades of state
socialism, colonialism and to a lesser extent social democracy crumbled, there
was no place to hide from the storm of marketization. There is progression in
the scale of reaction. If the response to the commodification of labour under
first-wave marketization was often local but aspiring to be national, and if the
response to the commodification of money under second-wave marketization
was national but aspiring to be global (IMF, World Bank), then the response to
the commodification of nature under third-wave marketization may set out
from the local but it aspires to be global. Since the effects of global
warming, nuclear accidents and contagious diseases are global, so the response,
in the final analysis, also has to be global, even if this global response involves
knitting together local movements.
The third way to characterize successive waves of marketization is not the
advance from one fictitious commodity to the next, but in terms of the successive
roll back of defences erected against marketization. If second-wave marketization
first destroys the ramparts of labour organization before building new ramparts
of state social protection, then third-wave marketization rolls back both labour
and social rights. We see this everywhere as trade unions decline, as real wages
of working classes fall, as social security, pensions and welfare all contract and
not just in one country but across the world—although to be sure very unevenly.
On what foundation then will the next round of defences be built—defences that
will fend off the degradation of nature but also recover labour rights and social
rights? The deeper the challenge to humanity and community, the deeper the
reaction. In response to third-wave marketization we will need to develop the
defence of human rights—the defence of a community of mutual recognition
as human beings—that will necessarily incorporate labour and social rights.
Human rights, like all rights discourses, are easily appropriated and
narrowed to suit particular interests. The USA defends its imperial adventures
and colonial-like occupations as the furtherance of human rights, all the while
denying basic human rights to its own citizens. Electoral democracy becomes a
human right that justifies invasion, killing and subjugation abroad while
hiding it at home. Markets themselves are advanced in the name of the human
right to freedom of choice and the protection of private property. Human
rights that are universal rather than particular, and that, therefore, include
labour rights and social rights must begin with the protection of human commu-
nity, that involves first recognizing and treating each other as ends rather than
means. Human rights then is a complex terrain of struggle in which groups
stake their claim on the basis of their own interests, but ultimately human
rights is about the protection of humanity, galvanizing radical struggles of
global proportions against third-wave marketization.
3. Three waves of sociology: utopian, policy and public

The thesis of this paper is that, to each wave of marketization there corresponds a
distinctive sociology. Sociology grew up in the ninteenth century together with
civil society, itself a response to first-wave marketization. Sociology began as a
moral enterprise defending society against the market, especially the destruction
of community as newly proletarianized, destitute and degraded populations
made the city their home. Sociology indulged in all sorts of schemes to circum-
vent or leap beyond the market, drawn from such schemes as Robert Owen’s in
England, the Narodniki in Russia, the cooperative and the commune movement
in the USA. This was the era of utopian sociology. One might say that Marx and
Engels were the original utopians in their postulation of communism that would
arise out of the ashes of the inevitably self-destroying capitalism. Auguste Comte
imagined a familial order led by sociologists while Durkheim postulated an
organic solidarity built on corporatist organization of the division of labour, a
form of guild socialism.
Of course, Marx and Durkheim would rail against being labelled utopian.
After all, they saw themselves as scientists, committed to what is and what
would necessarily be by virtue of the laws of society. Still, from today’s standpoint,
for all the revolutionary breakthroughs they brought to the study of society, their
science remained speculative, especially as regards the future, strongly imbued
with moral concerns to reverse the degradation brought about by nineteenth-
century capitalism. Both focused on the division of labour as the foundation of
their science and the central role of labour in their utopian projections.
Second-wave marketization that took off after World War I challenges the
rights that had been won by labour through trade unions and political parties.
However, it was the ravages of international trade and exchange that threatened
the conditions of capital accumulation and prompted protectionist reactions
Table 1 Waves of marketization and sociology
First-wave Second-wave Third-wave

marketization marketization marketization
Fictitious commodity Labour Money Nature

Locus of response Local community Nation state Global civil society
Rights Labour Social Human
Orientation of sociology Utopian Policy Public
Science Speculative Positivist Reflexive
Geographical locus/origin Western Europe USA Semi-periphery
from the state. The reactions ranged from fascism to the New Deal and from Sta-
linism to social democracy, but they all instituted a measure of social (but not
political) rights, including security in unemployment, pensions, welfare and edu-
cation. Sociology developed accordingly. In those countries that reacted to
second-wave marketization with authoritarian means, whether Fascist Germany
or Stalinist Soviet Union, there sociology was eclipsed, but where it reacted
with some form of social democracy, whether in the USA or Sweden, a new
type of sociology developed that collaborated with the state to defend society
against the market. This was the era of policy sociology of state-funded research
into social problems. Indeed, in England an autonomous sociology barely
existed—but instead the field of social administration had grown up, integrally
connected to the welfare state.
In the USA we see the development of a professional sociology that had greater
autonomy from the state. Still, this sociology was concerned with the stabilization
of society—stratification theory based on a given prestige hierarchy of occu-
pations, functionalist theories of the family, the regulation of deviance, industrial
sociology concerned with the pacification and extraction of labour, political soci-
ology focusing on the social bases of electoral democracy and the containment of
extremism. The overarching theoretical framework was defined by structural
functionalism—the delineation of functional prerequisites to keep any social
system in equilibrium and how those prerequisites are met by the institutions
of society. During this period sociology developed its own positive science,
namely detailed attention to empirical research, new methods of data collection
and data analysis and the elaboration of so-called middle range theories that
nestled in the scaffolding of structural functionalism. Positive science was a reac-
tion against the earlier speculative science that was propelled by moral reform.
Positive science wanted to expel moral questions to a completely different
sphere, antithetical to science. If the first wave of sociology was utopian, the
second policy wave tended to think that utopia had already arrived and
mistook it for reality. It was riveted to the present, concerned only with ironing
out its small irrationalities.
So what sort of sociology marks the response to third-wave marketization? As
we have seen, this latest round of marketization rolls back the statist defence of
society, it takes the offensive against labour rights and social rights. Unlike the
second wave of marketization that provoked an anti-market reaction from the
state—protectionism, planning, wage guarantees, welfare and public ownership
of the means of production—third-wave marketization elicits the collusion of
the state. Still a regulatory state, it is nonetheless regulation for rather than
against the market. It undoes all that was achieved against second-wave market-
ization. Society is, thus, under a double assault from economy and state. Unable
to gain much leverage in the state or with the market, the fate of sociology rests
with society. Sociology’s self-interest lies in the constitution of civil society where
it barely exists and in its protection where it is in retreat. Hence the claim we are
living in the age of public sociology.
We are, in a sense, returning to first-wave marketization of the nineteenth
century but with a difference. First, sociology cannot limit its engagement to
local publics, but, as I have argued, it has to be concerned with knitting together
a global civil society. Second, there is a utopian dimension but linked not to ima-
ginary utopias but to actual existing utopias, whose conditions of existence and
expanded reproduction it is our task to explore with all the technical instruments
at our disposal. Third, this calls for a science very different from the speculative
science of the nineteenth century. It calls for a science that is no longer rooted in
value consensus and stability, but one that seeks to develop alternative values,
hence the importance of value discussion, what I have called critical sociology.
We no longer strive for a single paradigmatic science but a discipline made up
of multiple intersecting research programs, founded on the values of different
publics but, at the same time, working out theoretical frameworks through enga-
ging their external anomalies and internal contradictions. I call this a reflexive
science, a science that is not frightened of reflecting on its value foundations
nor of articulating them publicly, but a science nonetheless.
If first-wave sociology emanated from Europe, and second-wave sociology
reached its apotheosis in the USA, where will third-wave sociology find its
energy? In thinking of vibrant public sociologies, I turn to such countries as
South Africa, especially in the climax to its anti-apartheid struggles, Brazil
under post-authoritarian regimes, or France with its intellectualized public
sphere, open to sociological perspectives. We might say that public sociology is
driven on the one side by the need to construct or defend an autonomous civil
society where it is absent or weak or, on the other side, by a vibrant civil
society that calls forth an engaged sociology. However, there are other conditions
for a public sociology. It has longevity when it has a well-developed scientific
foundation in professional sociology, but it also requires a sense of its own values
that comes from a critical sociology. As sociology becomes more global, borrow-
ings across national lines become more feasible and more important. Portugal,
for example, after its 1974 revolution, overthrowing nearly 50 years of dictator-
ship, drew on critical and professional traditions within American and French
sociologies, harnessing them to a vibrant civil society.
Global borrowings present dangers as well as possibilities—the hegemony of
US professional sociology can constrain the responsiveness of national sociolo-
gies to local concerns. Writing in English for foreign professional audiences inevi-
tably threatens the vitality of local public sociology. Whereas inspirational public
sociologies may appear first in semi-peripheral countries, their effects, too, can
ramify across the world, but even such a counter-hegemonic movement will
rely on inputs from other countries. Whereas the hegemonic globalization of
sociology might harness a public sociology become policy sociology to a domi-
nant professional sociology, the counter-hegemonic globalization will subordi-
nate professional and policy sociology to the conditions of expansion of public
sociology, especially an organic public sociology.
4. Conclusion
In this brief essay I have tried to show why sociology has to take a public turn.
Sociology lives and dies with society. When society is threatened so is sociology.
We can no longer rely on the state to contain the market and so sociologists have
to forge their own connections to society, i.e. to develop public sociology. We
have to do more than passively serve society, but have to conserve and constitute
society. In this sociology has many potential allies and partners within society as
they too come under increasing assault from state and market. That is the broader
contemporaneous context within which sociology operates.
We cannot think of the contemporary context outside its past. The three waves
of marketization and their corresponding configurations of sociology cannot be
compartmentalized as three successive but separate periods. Each wave deposits
its legacy into the next wave in a dialectical regression or progression. So the
waves of commodification deepen as they move regressively from labour to
money to nature, each wave incorporating the commodification of the previous
period, just as the counter-movement leads progressively from labour rights to
social rights (which includes labour rights) to human rights, which includes all
three. The dialectical development of sociology is rather different. Policy soci-
ology with its value neutral positive science is a reaction against utopian sociology
with its moral infusions and its speculative science, while public sociology tries to
bind the value commitment of the first period to the scientific advances of the
second. Commodification and its counter-movement for decommodification
deepen with every wave, whereas sociology develops through thesis, antithesis
and synthesis. However, even here we should be careful not to think in terms
of discrete sociologies, but rather reconfigurations of the four elements of soci-
ology, in which the weight of professional, policy, critical and public sociologies
shifts over time. Indeed, a public sociology cannot really take off in a sustained
manner unless it is impelled by critical sociology and grounded in a professional
sociology.
The rhythm and spacing of the waves also varies from country to country. In
the advanced capitalist world of today, the waves are more clearly separated in
time, whereas it might be said in countries such as Russia, India or China that
there is a compression of waves. Certainly in Russia the commodification of
labour, money and nature was simultaneous and intense upon the fall of the
Soviet Union, so much so that counter-reaction was suffocated before it began.
Sociology suffered in parallel. In China, on the other hand, the intensification
of the commodification of labour, money and nature also coincided in the
post-Mao period, yet they were still regulated by the party state, which made
for economic development rather than economic involution, imprinting itself
on the different legacies of sociology. National variation notwithstanding, we
can still identify the present era as one in which the commodification of nature
concentrates within itself the cumulative impact of commodification more gen-
erally. It becomes the planet’s most pressing problem and also becomes generative
of social movements, held together by the language of human rights.
Can sociology meet the challenges of third-wave marketization, can sociology
partake in the knitting together of organizations, movements and publics across
the globe? Or will it too submit to commodification—the commodification of the
production of knowledge in the university and elsewhere, subject to criteria of
profitability, but also the commodification of the dissemination of knowledge
by the mass media? On both counts it will be important for sociology to work
directly with organizations, movements and publics so that its production and
distribution compose a singular process outside the control of market and state.

Discussion Forum Economic Sociology As Public Sociology

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Socio-Economic Review (2007) 5, 319–367 doi:10.

Economic sociology as public sociology

Public sociology and economic sociology:

Academic audience Extra-academic audience

Instrumental knowledge Professional sociology Policy sociology

science, namely activist research. In response to Burawoy’s article, Edna Bonacich

By acknowledging a long tradition within our discipline, and recogniz-

While economic sociology is rightly seen as building on the work of Marx,

1. The profitable use of networks

4. The role of business schools

Confronting Market Fundamentalism:

This essay argues that Market Fundamentalism—a vastly exaggerated belief in

Over the last generation, Market Fundamentalism—a vastly exaggerated belief in

1. Doing public economic sociology

2. The deepening of hegemony

3. Implications for public economic sociology

meetings at the last minute to avoid labour management conflicts in

Stiglitz, J. (2002) Globalization and Its Discontents, New York, Norton.

The invisible science of the invisible hand:

inform employers better through those connections about their unobservable

would be forgiven concluding that Mark Granovetter or Peter Marsden are

4. The role of institutions

4.1 Internal coherence of economics and sociology

of these efforts attempted to unify sociology as a whole or aspired to become a

particular vision of their subdisciplines and are uncurious about sociology as a

Balancing coherence with innovation. Economics achieved a high level of intel-

Professional organizations. The professional organizations play a key role in

honour works of exceptional quality but they are incapable of commanding

television reporting, when information is needed often within hours, meshes

Journalism as a mediating institution. Economics is not a particularly entertain-

5. What can be done?

Barro, R. J. and McCleary, R. M. (2003b) ‘Religion and Economic Growth across

Rigney, D. and Barnes, D. (1980) ‘Patterns of interdisciplinary citation in the social

Public sociology vs. the market1

Building on Karl Polanyi’s theory of a societal reaction to the unregulated

1. Three faces of marketization: South Africa, Russia and the USA

day-to-day survival in the townships and villages. As the inhumanity of racism

2. Three waves of commodification: labour, money, and land

3. Three waves of sociology: utopian, policy and public

Table 1 Waves of marketization and sociology

First-wave Second-wave Third-wave

Fictitious commodity Labour Money Nature

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