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The idea of unintended consequences of social action constitutes one of the core meta-assumptions of new economic sociology. Yet neither its US nor its European branch seem to make a direct statement about this. This state of affairs appears to be the result of various cumulative circumstances, such as the role played by the competition from other meta-assumptions which address similar or related issues and the rather general treatment of the unintended consequences within the field. This article takes a closer look and tries to establish whether the approach to the unintended in the US and European new economic sociologies is indeed so general. It concludes that the source of the low visibility of the unintended consequences as a fundamental problem for new economic sociology is not the fact that this is not granted proper systematization. The problem rather lies in the lack of awareness and cumulative knowledge about the unintended consequences as a main sociological problem that was already taken up in sociology.

Unintended consequences might be linked to three problems in social sciences: purposive social action, human action (but not human design), and purposive social intervention. The treatments of these evolved rather autonomously within sociology, economics, and public policy analysis, respectively. Sociology established an interest in the unintended as deviation from rational-action accounts of social behavior. Economics investigated the spontaneous social order and the processes of aggregation leading to unintended configurations. Public policy analysis pointed to paradoxes and perverse effects of initiated institutional change. The proliferating analyses of unintended consequences as side effects, of perverse effects, and of paradoxes of modernization projects recently presented the empirical opportunity for the three perspectives to be compared and to further develop their conceptual backgrounds.

MikoA‚aj Pawlak and Adriana Mica connect the insights from the traditional sociology of unintended consequences with more recent developments in institutional theory. For the authors, the discussions on institutional work are of particular relevance here. Both individuals and organizations frequently generate unintended consequences as a result of their institutional work. In their stimulating conceptual paper, Pawlak and Mica not only distinguish different types of unintended consequences within a neo-institutional framework, they also identify a variety of coping mechanisms related to unintended consequences that result from different outcomes of institutional work. Interestingly, not only success or failure is discussed as an outcome, but also institutional compromise, institutional mid-course shift, and constant reinstitutionalization.