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Organizational theory was one of the roots of the “new” economic sociology. In recent years, a set of complementary research programs have come to the fore that augment our understanding of the social structuring of markets. These include an interest in the role of conventions and commensuration, market devices, the performativity of economics, and the role of morality in the construction of markets. These other interests have come to enrich our conception of the ways in which “the social” structures market activities. While this has decentered some of the emphasis on organizations, there are still active research programs pushing forward new ideas that are focused on organizations, institutions, and networks in economic sociology. We discuss some of the recent work on organizational logics, inter- and intra-organizational networks, and social movements and organization. We note there has also been some hybridity as scholars borrow from each other's toolkits in order to deepen our knowledge of the way the economy works. Organizational theory remains a main theoretical mainstay of economic sociology, but it has now been joined by additional perspectives.

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]

One of the puzzles about the financial crisis of 2008 is why the regulators were so slow to recognize the impending collapse of the financial system. In this paper, we propose a novel account of what happened. We analyze the meeting transcripts of the Federal Reserve’s main decision-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), to show that they had surprisingly little recognition that a serious economic meltdown was underway even after the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. This lack of awareness was a function of the inability of the FOMC to connect the unfolding events into a narrative reflecting the links between the housing market, the subprime mortgage market, and the financial instruments being used to package the mortgages into securities. We use the idea of sense-making to explain how this happened. The Federal Reserve’s main analytic framework for making sense of the economy, macroeconomic theory, made it difficult for them to connect the disparate events that comprised the financial crisis into a coherent whole. We use topic modeling to analyze transcripts of FOMC meetings held between 2000 and 2008, demonstrating that the framework provided by macroeconomics dominated FOMC conversations throughout this period. The topic models also suggest that each of the issues involved in the crisis remained a separate discussion and were never connected together. A close reading of the texts supports this argument. We conclude with implications for future such crises and for thinking about sense-making and the role of economics in policymaking more generally.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis was centered on the mortgage industry. This paper develops a distinctly sociological explanation of that crisis based on Fligstein’s (1996) markets as politics approach and the sociology of finance. We use archival and secondary sources to show that the industry became dominated by an “industrial” conception of control whereby financial firms vertically integrated in order to capture profits in all phases of the mortgage industry including the production of financial products. The results of multivariate regression analyses show that the “industrial” model drove the deterioration in the quality of securities that firms issued and significantly contributed to the eventual failure of the firms that pursued the strategy. We show that large global banks which were more involved in the industrial production of U.S. mortgage securities also experienced greater investment losses. The findings challenge existing conventional accounts of the crisis and provide important theoretical linkages to the sociology of finance

The worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2010 was set off by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. This crisis caused widespread banking failure in the U.S. and forced the federal government to provide a massive bailout to the financial sector. The crisis simultaneously reverberated to banks around the world, and eventually brought about a worldwide recession. This paper documents why Western European countries were so susceptible to the housing price downturn. We explore various mechanisms by which the financial crisis might have spread including the existence of similar regulatory schemes, government deficits and current account imbalances, export connectedness, and the presence of a housing bubble. We present a surprising result: European banks went down because they had joined the market in the U.S. for mortgage backed securities and funded them by borrowing in the asset backed commercial paper market. They were pursuing the same strategies to make profit as the American banks, and when the housing market turned down, they suffered the same fate as their U.S. counterparts. Our study makes a broader theoretical point suggesting that subsequent studies of global finance and financial markets need to know something about the identities and strategies of the banks that structure the main markets for different products. This insight has implications for the literatures on financialization, globalization, and the sociology of finance.

As the financial economy has expanded beginning in the mid 1980s, it has done so in part by selling more products to individuals and households, such as mortgages, second mortgages, mutual funds, student loans, car loans, insurance, and various forms of retirement products. This has allowed households access to new forms of assets and debts and new ways to fund their lifestyles. This giant expansion of the financial services sector occurred at the same time that income inequality and job insecurity increased dramatically in the U.S. This paper seeks to tease out empirically the relationship between these trends by examining data on the activities of households in the past 20 years. There are two views, one that focuses on how households reacted defensively to preserve their lifestyles and the other which focuses on households developing a more financial mindset to the management of their assets, debt, and consumption and thereby using the new opportunities to invest and borrow money to increase their consumption. We show some support for both views. The use of financial products and debt has increased at all levels of the income distribution. Attitudes toward risk and indebtedness have generally become more lax. But, there is also evidence that people at the top of the income distribution are using their growing income to consume more while people lower down are struggling to keep up. The meaning of new financial culture is quite different depending on where you stand in the income hierarchy.

Early theorists of European integration speculated that economic integration would lead to political integration and a European identity. A European identity has not displaced national identities in the EU, but, for a significant share of EU citizens, a European identity exists alongside a national identity. At the same time, political parties asserting more traditional nationalist identities and policies have directed their dissatisfaction against immigrants, foreigners, and, sometimes, the EU. Those who participate in “Europe” are more likely to develop a European identity, while those whose economic and social horizons are essentially local are more likely to assert nationalist identities.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis was centered on the nonconventional mortgage industry. Scholars have just begun to carefully consider what really caused the crisis. This paper pushes the debate forward in several ways. First, we elucidate four different theoretical approaches, "financialization", "actor-network/performativity", "perverse incentives", and ""markets as politics"" to understanding how the mortgage securitization industry evolved. We generate hypotheses and relevant data and show that the “markets as politics” approach accounts for the social structuring of the market from 1990-2008. Second, we use archival and secondary sources to show that the industry became dominated by an “industrial” conception of control whereby financial firms vertically integrated in order to capture profits at all points in the value chain. In 2004, the conventional mortgage market turned down. Financial firms entered the nonconventional market in order to keep their “industrial” conception going. The nonconventional market thrived for three years but when it turned down, the firms that went bankrupt were those who were the most committed to the “industrial” conception of control.

The current crisis in the mortgage securitization industry highlights significant failures in our models of how markets work and our political will, organizational capability, and ideological desire to intervene in markets. This paper shows that one of the main sources of failure has been the lack of a coherent understanding of how these markets came into existence, how tactics and strategies of the principal firms in these markets have evolved over time, and how we ended up with the economic collapse of the main firms. It seeks to provide some insight into these processes by compiling both historical and quantitative data on the emergence and spread of these tactics across the largest investment banks and their principal competitors from the mortgage origination industry. It ends by offering some policy proscriptions based on the analysis.

In recent years there has been an outpouring of work at the intersection of social movement studies and organizational theory. While we are generally in sympathy with this work, we think it implies a far more radical rethinking of structure and agency in modern society than has been realized to date. In this article, we offer an over brief sketch of a general theory of strategic action fields (SAF). We begin with a discussion of the main elements of the theory, describe the broader environment of fields in which any given SAF is embedded, consider the dynamics of stability and change in SAFs, and end with an extended example intended to illustrate how adoption of our perspective would fundamentally change the interpretation of one of the more consequential “episodes of contention”—the civil rights revolution—to take place in the U.S. over the past 50 years.

There is now a solid set of results from economic sociologists concerning the spread and implementation of "shareholder value" strategies across publicly held corporations in the United States during the 1980s. Corporations were financially reorganized and used the tactics of selling off unrelated product lines, engaging in mergers with firms in similar industries, various financial ploys such as stock buybacks, and downsizing their labor forces. Using data from 62 industries for 1984-2000, this paper explores empirically the connections between shareholder value strategies such as mergers and layoffs, and related industry-level changes such as de-unionization, computer technology, and subsequent profitability. Mergers occurred in industries where economic conditions were not good in line with shareholder value arguments. Mergers subsequently led to layoffs, consistent with the shareholder value perspective that emphasizes that firms needed to deploy their resources more efficiently as they reorganized. There is also evidence that managers who engaged in mergers invested in computer technology. This technology displaced workers through layoffs and was focused on reducing unionized work forces. There is no evidence that mergers or layoffs returned industries to profitability. This suggests that shareholder value strategies were not, successful in righting the problems of American business.

The sociology of markets has been one of the most vibrant fields in sociology in the past 25 years. There is a great deal of agreement that markets are social structures characterized by extensive social relationships between firms, workers, suppliers, customers, and governments. But, like in many sociological literatures, the theory camps that have formed often seem to speak by each other. We show that some of the disagreement between theory camps is due to differences in conceptual language, and other disagreements stem from the fact that theory camps ignore the concepts in other theory camps, thereby making their theories less complete. We end by considering deeper controversies in the literature that seem open both to new conceptualization and further empirical research.

There is now a solid set of results from economic sociologists concerning the spread and implementation of "shareholder value" strategies across publicly held corporations in the United States during the 1980s. Corporations were financially reorganized and used the tactics of selling off unrelated product lines, engaging in mergers with firms in similar industries, various financial ploys such as stock buybacks, and downsizing their labor forces. This paper explores empirically the connections between mergers, layoffs, de-unionization, computer technology, and subsequent industry profitability. Mergers occurred in sectors where economic conditions were not good in line with shareholder value arguments. Mergers subsequently led to layoffs, consistent with the shareholder value perspective that emphasizes that firms needed to deploy their resources more efficiently as they reorganized. There is also evidence that managers who engaged in mergers invested in computer technology. This technology directly displaced workers through layoffs and was focused on reducing unionized work forces. There is no evidence that mergers or layoffs returned industries to profitability. Only industry growth and computer investment led to increased profits. This suggests that shareholder value ideology was not, by itself, successful in righting the problems of American business.

Utilizing new data from the ILE's 2001-02 California Workforce Survey, this chapter compares the situation of the state's managers and professionals, on the one hand, to that of its clerical, service and blue-collar workers, on the other. Even more than in the past, the contrast between the two groups is striking. The managerial-professional group - which is disproportionately white and male - is doing well, both in regard to incomes and fringe benefits as well as in regard to the quality of work experience. Most managerial and professional respondents find their work enjoyable, but many report working long hours and being tied to their jobs after hours by new telecommunications technologies. By contrast, clerical, service, and blue-collar workers - a disproportionately female, nonwhite and foreign-born group - earn less, have fewer fringe benefits, and work shorter hours - in many cases fewer hours than they would like. They are also much more fearful of layoffs. However, unionized workers in the clerical, service and blue-collar group enjoy more job security as well as better pay and fringe benefits than do their nonunion counterparts.

At the core of the European Union, has been the gradual creation of the "single market" across western Europe. The European Union began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and expanded to become the European Economic Community (EEC). The original intent of the ECSC was to stabilize the production of steel across Europe in order to prevent ruinous competition. The EEC formed to expand the activities of the alliance to cooperation in agricultural policies and various industrial policies. The Treaty of Rome which produced the EEC, had the goal of reducing tariffs and other trade barriers, thereby promoting free trade and economic growth. Both Schumann and Monet, the principal intellectual architects of the EEC felt that if the European societies had economies that were more integrated, governments would be less tempted to engage in military activities that would end up in war.

With the Treaty of Rome, European states designed a set of policy domains related to trade and the regulation of markets, a complex of governmental organisations, and a binding set of substantive and procedural rules to help them achieve the construction of a European Economic Community (Fligstein and McNichol, 1998). Although the Treaty traced the broad outlines of this new Community, it was the purposeful activities of representatives of national governments (Moravcsik 1999), of officials operating in the EC's organisations, like the Commission (Pollack 1998) and the Court (Burley and Mattli 1993; Stone Sweet and Caporaso 1998a; Weiler 1991, 1994), and of leaders of transnational interest groups (Mazey and Richardson, eds., 1993) that subsequently produced the extraordinarily dense web of political and social networks that now functions to generate and sustain supranational governance (Wallace and Young 1998; Héritier 1999; Sandholtz and Stone Sweet, eds., 1998).

Economic globalization refers to three related processes: 1) the growth in the world economy, 2) the change in the relations between first and third world countries that has resulted from the use of information technologies to reorganize production nationally and globally, and 3) the integration of world financial markets. These processes are often held responsible for deindustrialization in advanced industrial societies, increases in income inequality, and pressures on welfare states to transform worker protection and benefits. I demonstrate that the changes in the world economy are much smaller, more gradual, and unevenly spread across societies than the globalization thesis suggests. More importantly, the links between globalization and its alleged negative outcomes are tenuous at best. The Paper then explores what is generating the crises, particularly in Europe.