Economic Sociology in Retrospect and Prospect: In Search of its Identity within Economics and Sociology

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Oct, 1999  by Milan Zafirovski

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

The treatment of economic science as a discipline of a more general social science can be found even in economics itself. Such a treatment is nowhere more explicit in neoclassical economics than in the Austrian school, though its members often tend to differentiate themselves from neoclassical theory (for a recent attempt, see Kirzner 1997). For example, the Austrians (Wieser 1967, 152-153) posit that a theory of economic phenomena presupposes a sociology that is "a complete theory of society" providing explanation of the "fundamental types of social activity." The explanation of these sociological phenomena is seen as the necessary preliminary to a description of the economic process itself. In this context, economic sociology is by implication an "inquiry into the social relations of the economy." Economic value would be the most promising field, not only for economics, but also for economic sociology thus understood. This is because economic values or market prices are assumed to result from social relati ons, as expressed in market interactions, and therefore are "obviously social phenomena" (Schumpeter 1951, 5-10). Hence, the "pricing process is a social process" which is "consummated by an interaction of all members of the society," and the market as a price-determining mechanism represents a paramount social order (Mises 1966, 315/337-338). In retrospect, such views probably have been influenced by Weber's (1968, 108) status of economic values as sociological phenomena, especially his insight that values or prices "result from power constellations."

However, these values are to be distinguished from the values held by social actors, including scientists and policy-makers. Within rational choice sociology, conflations (e.g., Hechter 1992) are often made between the values of economic goods (consumer products or production factors) and social values as "conceptions of the desirable" or human ideals (Parsons 1951). Thus, the valuations of tangibles or simply money prices are confused with those of intangibles or value judgments, these latter being dissolved into the former-perhaps not surprisingly for a theory which seems to be predicated on the premise that people "know the price of everything, but the value of nothing" (as objected by Zelizer 1992). However, this conflation appears to neglect the importance of "invaluable goods," those phenomena not subject to market pricing or economic valuation, as admitted by Arrow (1997).

In the Austrian frame of reference, economics is considered (by Wieser and Mises) an "advance guard of sociology" by virtue of its focus on value and economic action generally, including its "sociological categories" (Weber 1968, 63). Hence, economics would amount to what Wieser, like Weber, called "social economics." Although more developed than and giving more than receiving from sociology as the "main body of the theory of society," economics is seen as "only one phase" of the latter (Wieser 1967, 152-153). By implication, economic sociology would provide the link between sociology and economics by coping with the "sociological problems of economic theory" (Wieser 1967, 152-153). In sum, most Austrian economists consider economics the "most elaborated branch of sociology" (Mises 1960, 68-69), and as a "branch of a more comprehensive science of sociology" that extends beyond its own terrain economics evinces the same "logical character" as this science. In retrospect, these views of the Austrian economists and Weber, advanced before or around the WW I, suggest that no sharp distinctions were made between economics and sociology [7] (Miller 1997), but rather the two were viewed as complementary. (This was indicated, for example, by Menger's excursions into Problems of Economics and Sociology, Wieser's treatise on Social Economics, Mises' economic and sociological analysis of socialism, not to mention Schumpeter's sociology of enterprise, sociology of imperialism and other works in what he called economic sociology).