Economische sociologie en institutionele economie

Samenvatting

Economic Sociology and Institutional Economics. A review essay on books edited by (1) Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, The Handbook of Economic Sociology (Russel Sage Foundation: Princeton U Press: Princeton, NJ, 1994); and (2) Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Warren J. Samuels, and Marc R. Tool, The Elgar Companion to Institutional and Evolutionary Economics (Edgar Elgar, 1994). In recent years, there has been talk of a renaissance of studies of economic phenomena from a sociological and institutional perspective. This is in contrast to the mutual alienation of economics and sociology several decades ago, each of which characterized the other as "primitive." Both publications here maintain that, to discover the dividing line between the two disciplines, one must return to political economists Adam Smith and Karl Marx and to classical sociologists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Additionally, both books point to differences between neoclassical economics and economic sociology, especially in terms of the types of questions asked. Special attention is given to the role of network and rational choice theory, shown to be problematic. Also discussed is the high degree of specialization in the two fields. M. Meeks