Editor's Introduction - reviews unorthodox styles of analysis presented in October 2002 issue

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Oct, 2002

This issue of the AJES reflects our commitment to providing a platform on which several broader issues and unorthodox styles of analysis in the social sciences can be analyzed and discussed. Indeed, Australian sociologist Professor Jocelyn Pixley has recently praised this journal's efforts in that direction. She complains that a dialogue between practicing economists and sociologists is rare but declares the AJES an honorable exception (Pixley 2002). But aligning this journal with some of the broader issues raised by the "new economic sociology" movement is most emphatically not a retreat from our historic mission. If the "new economic sociology" movement is at best 25 years old (Granovetter and Swedberg 2001: 6-7), then it is a youngster when compared with the AJES's 60-year-old vision of promoting "constructive synthesis."

This issue of the AJES explains from where this journal got its unusual mission statement that appears in each issue of the AJES. Those of you reading my words electronically will not be able to flip over the journal and read what is written on its back cover. There it states quite boldly that that we are published quarterly with an annual supplement in the "interest of constructive synthesis in the social sciences.

Our first and founding editor Will Lissner was a newspaperman and a strikingly competent one at that. In his spare time, when not racing towards a deadline at the New York Times where he worked as a staff reporter, Lissner attended classes with the famed emigre social scientist Adolph Lowe at the New School for Social Research in New York City (see Forstater article below, pp. 779-786). It is difficult to date the year that he attended Lowe's lectures, but in 1935 Lowe published his Economics and Sociology. In this book, he regretted the tendency on the part of the economics profession to retreat behind the walls of pure theory when concrete action in social settings required a synthesis of economics with sociology, law, political philosophy, and history. As Forstater explains below, Lowe called for interdisciplinary studies in the social sciences, and that was what Lowe's student Lissner tried to do when he created this journal in 1941 (Lissner 2001; Forstater below: 783).

The Lowe-Lissner vision is still part of our success, and I am delighted that Professor Pixley chose such kind words to recognize the job we are trying to do and the type of interdisciplinary journal that we have become. My enthusiasm about the new joint venturing between economics and sociology in the form of the "new economic sociology" was put to the test just a few weeks ago when I attended the 97th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in Chicago. The relatively new section on economic sociology offered an invited paper session on "Multiple Perspectives on Economic Processes." The organizer and presider was Dr. Viviana A. Zelizer (Princeton University), who is often praised for her work on the early emergence of the life insurance industry in 19th-century America (see, for example, Granovetter and Swedberg 2001: 8). The discussant was none other than Professor Neil J. Smelser, who is one of the most celebrated of the American sociologists, a former president of the ASA, and the c oauthor along with the legendary Talcott Parsons of an important work pointing the way towards a greater synthesis of economics and sociology (Parsons and Smelser 1956).

It was the session's first speaker who disappointed me so much. Her topic was the insurance industry and she introduced her topic in the following way: she promised that she would follow the "usual approach" sociologists take when discussing the work of economists. She would present the views of the economists and then "debunk" them. As I had suspected, she had difficulty even coming close to the target she had set for herself. The presentation was a hodgepodge of generalities and normative assertions for which she subsequently received praise from Smelser. Neither Smelser nor the presiding chair took the higher ground of asking this rank-and-file economic sociologist to get beyond "debunking" and on with the program that Richard Swedberg and Mark Granovetter have set before us of "open[ing] up the academic debate about the economy to include a genuinely social perspective and to set the interactions of real people at its center" (Granovetter and Swedberg 2001: 1). At one session at the ASA meeting it was bu siness as usual, and this was not the business of constructive synthesis that we prefer for this journal!

This October issue opens with a historical piece by Professor Richard Gonce on John R. Commons, who was fired from his first teaching job as a Professor of Sociology in 1899 because he was a radical. This interrupted his plans to prepare a major sociological treatise, and for five years Commons wandered around, enjoying new experiences and developing new interests. His expert knowledge of the American labor movement developed during this five-year period, as Gonce so aptly documents in his paper.