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The article discusses the integration of ecological issues, particularly climate change, into economic sociology. Economic sociologists are increasingly focusing on environmental concerns, utilizing tools from political economy and market perspectives. The interview with Jens Beckert and Neil Fligstein highlights the need to address the ecological crisis within a broader societal context, examining the relationship between capitalism, resource use, and climate change. The scholars emphasize the importance of understanding how societies respond to environmental threats and the role of corporations, policies, and societal norms in addressing climate change. [Extracted from the article]

Neil Fligstein of Department of Sociology, University of California reviews "The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights" by Mark Paul. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: "Explores the role of the state in structuring and limiting the reach of markets, promoting the view that the United States can eradicate poverty and build an economy that works for everyone by adopting social and economic rights." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the same time, workers' collective organizations were greatly weakened in many countries, conglomerate firms were dismantled and the state was expected to reduce its redistributive functions and focus instead on providing a regulatory framework in which markets would do the work of coordinating the economy. While sociologists dealing with the economy during the post-war period did so primarily from an organizational and a (Marxist) political economy perspective, the shift from the state and conglomerate firms to globalized markets opened up new research topics around market operations. Keywords: economic sociology; embeddedness; socio-economics; political economy; theory (up to five); A13 General Economics - Relation of Economics to Social Values; B55 Current Heterodox Approaches - Social Economics; Z1 Cultural Economics; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology (up to three) EN economic sociology embeddedness socio-economics political economy theory (up to five) A13 General Economics - Relation of Economics to Social Values B55 Current Heterodox Approaches - Social Economics Z1 Cultural Economics Economic Sociology Economic Anthropology (up to three) 703 720 18 06/09/23 20230401 NES 230401 We are all political economists now Correspondence: marion.fourcade@gmail.com The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) was born in 1989 out of the normative aspiration to anchor economic institutions and processes in communitarian values as opposed to egoistic ones. The coordinated western post-war economies went through a profound crisis from the 1970s onwards and a new policy regime began to take shape that relied on liberalized markets instead of state coordination. [Extracted from the article]

The problem of sense making is particularly acute when established organizations face a sudden set of changes in their fields. This article offers some conceptual clarification of this issue in several ways in the context of profit-making firms. In these circumstances, managers need to worry about not just competitors but also governments, suppliers, and workers. Because of these complex interdependencies, the process of sense making is accompanied by a search process that may lead managers in directions that are a priori unpredictable. New sets of understandings about how to survive in a market often reflect political compromises between actors that create new cultural conceptions of action. Managers have to sometimes take what systems give in order instead of what they might prefer. The author illustrates these principles in the case of the reorganization of the European defense industry. Keywords: sense making; market governance; Europe; defense industry

American society has now been living in the wake of shareholder value capitalism for four decades. The shareholder value movement began as an invasion of the market for corporate control by financially oriented investors who critiqued sitting managers as not paying sufficient attention to the interests of shareholders during the economic crisis of the 1970s. It altered the relationship between financial markets and the managers of publicly held corporations. Subsequently, publicly held corporations have worked to raise share prices any way they can. While managers initially resisted shareholder value initiatives, they came to embrace them when their pay became tied to the share price. This created an incentive to discover new forms of financial extraction whenever a given set of strategies stopped producing new gains. We consider the impact that these reorganizations had on inequality and the relationship between shareholder value capitalism and financialization. We end by discussing the continuing relevance of shareholder value for understanding contemporary American capitalism. We also identify several avenues for future research on the evolution and consequences of shareholder value in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neil M. Kay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 319 pp. $65.00. Neil Kay attempts to produce a general theory of the firm, one inspired by Oliver Williamson's transaction cost [...]

The problem of the role of actors in institutional theory can be addressed in considering a model of institutional entrepreneurship. A sociological posing of this question defines institutional entrepreneurs as actors who have social skills, that is, the ability to motivate cooperation of other actors by providing them with common meanings and identities. The author argues that skill is applied differently across organizational fields that are forming, become stable, and are being transformed. To illustrate some of these principles, the author considers the example of the role of Jacques Delors in the framing of the Single Market Program of the European Union., Institutional theory in organizational analysis has a limited theory of action because it generally focuses on how meanings become taken for granted in organizational arenas. To the degree that institutional [...]