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The Sociology of the Economy, edited by Frank Dobbin. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. 343 pp. $49-95 cloth. ISBN: 0-87154-284-6.
What is economic sociology? Research in the new economic sociology has flourished in the last couple of decades, and if membership in ASA sections is a valid indicator, many sociologists now self identify as economic sociologists. Still, there are also plenty of those who wonder what economic sociology entails, and what kind of research questions and theoretical issues it tackles. For anyone curious, Frank Dobbin's new edited volume, The Sociology of the Economy, provides a great sense of the sociological study of the economy and its most current research.
The volume is the product of two conferences at Princeton University organized to take stock of the new economic sociology. Contributions attest to the tremendous diversity of the research in this subfield. After the editor's Introduction, we find 11 empirical chapters on topics as varied as the legitimacy of hostile takeovers, institutional foundations of national economic organization, and cultural accounts of human organ donation. Among others, the authors find their inspirations in the Renaissance Florence, contemporary urban China, and the past and present of the United States. They are equally diverse in their methods, showing that economic sociology can be done with regression equations, conversation analysis, network methods, historical process tracing, focus groups, or...