Editor's Introduction

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Oct, 1999

The AJES is proud to present a selection of papers centered on the theme "Economics and Sociology: The New Joint Venture." We have divided the papers into six sections starting with the historical foundations of the economic sociology research program.

Our lead article is by Professor Richard Swedberg of Stockholm University. Swedberg reviews the academic career of the renowned sociologist Max Weber (1864 -- 1920) whose portraits appear as frontispieces to this issue. Swedberg reminds us that Weber was first and foremost an economist and referred to himself as an economist throughout his lifetime. Weber taught economics at the University of Freiburg (1893 -- 1896) and later at Heidelberg. We have his carefully mapped out plans for an economic textbook but he unfortunately did not live long enough to complete that project. Economic sociology was for Weber as it was for William Stanley Jevons and Philip Wicksteed before him, and for his younger contemporary Joseph A. Schumpeter, an important branch of economics. If economics dealt with the implications of that fact that men and women engaged in economizing behavior in market settings, economic sociology dealt in part with the broader circumstances in which men and women come to see certain problems as requir ing economizing activity in the first place. In Weber's case these broader problems motivated his brilliant studies of legal systems, religions, technology, and politics itself. The essential Weberian idea is that the economic system is just one aspect or part of any functioning social system.

As Professor Milan Zafirovski makes clear in the next article in this section, sociology is not the "science of leftovers"--that is, what is left after the economist has finished his work. Indeed, there are social scientists such as A. Comte and Ludwig von Mises, who see economics as the most carefully worked out part of a broader area of study, namely, sociology. Discussion about the interrelationship between economics and sociology got washed away during the 1930s when an ominous detente emerged. According to our next contributor, Professor Olav Veithuis of Erasmus University, it was no less than the American Talcott Parsons who brokered the nefarious deal. It was an implicit agreement and here is what was understood: economics would study the implications of the fact that market institutions promote the efficient allocation of means toward the satisfaction of ends, and sociology would (largely) confine itself to the study of the ultimate ends as institutionalized by the broader conditions of modern soci al life. Sociology would complement economics and not compete against economics for the same university resources. Both disciplines would thrive in separate university departments. As Patrik Aspers of Stockholm University demonstrates in his chapter, even Alfred Marshall's seminal work (published a half-century earlier than the 1930s Parsonian detente) contains numerous places where pure economic discussion reaches up to the border with sociology and then stops.

The Parsonian detente lasted for almost a half of a century. In the 1980s, Mark Granovetter declared practically the whole of mainstream economics a scientific embarrassment and failure. Granovetter must have taken notice of the proliferating number of rational-choice models eroding the sociologist's market share of publications on certain traditional sociological topics. What were these economists doing on the other side of the academic divide? Granovetter explained that economics, steeped in a futile methodological individualism, took false pride in offering an analysis of markets antiseptically free of institutions. According to Granovetter, the basic elements of economic life from money down to the corporate form of business organization are deeply embedded in the norms and institutions of each society in which they are found.

According to our next author, Professor Dan Krier of the College of William and Mary, "the emergence of a re-invigorated economic sociology is arguably one of the most important disciplinary developments of our time, in part because it returns the discipline to a consideration of the kind of big questions regarding economy and society that helped launch it so effectively over one hundred years ago" (see below, p. 670). Krier writes with much interest and sympathy for the "new synthesis school" that is centered around a number of prominent sociologists. That group includes in addition to Granovetter, Professor Amitai Etzioni.

Etzioni has declared something of a holy war against modern economics. Etzioni's school of thought is rooted in three preconceptions as follows: first, economic action is always and everywhere a form of social action and it is not possible to isolate economic behavior from the broader social setting; second, economic action is socially situated and the broader context in which it takes place is critically important to understanding that action; and finally, all economic institutions are social institutions and there is no sense to keeping the disciplines of economics and sociology separate and distinct. Still, Krier finds Etzioni's war cry far too mellow for his liking. Krier wants the "new synthesis" to make common cause with the older historical discussions of Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and C. Wright Mills. Unlike Mises and the modern Austrian school who see economics as the most developed part of sociology, the new synthesis writers turn things around. For them, economics is the least important part of soci ology!