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Date Published:
Jan 1, 2005Abstract:
The economic and social organization of capitalist societies is one of the most classical of sociological subjects, as the editors of this volume point out. Pioneers of economic sociology such as Weber were fundamentally comparative, but the comparative analysis of the institutions governing capitalism in different cultural contexts has unfortunately received relatively short shrift within the new economic sociology of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (Swedberg, this volume). Instead, much of this terrain has been implicitly ceded to political economists working in the newly-developed "varieties of capitalism" framework (see discussions in Brinton 2005, and Swedberg this volume). The varieties of capitalism agenda is ambitious. But it leaves many areas of interest to economic sociologists wide open.