Re-Imagining Economic Sociology

Patrik Aspers, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University,Nigel Dodd, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics

Patrik Aspers is Professor of Sociology at Uppsala University. His research focuses on theory development, and especially of markets. His work is grounded in phenomenology. Empirically Aspers has studied the economy, especially the fashion industry. He has published several books, including Markets in Fashion, A Phenomenological Approach (Routledge), Orderly Fashion, A Sociology of Markets (Princeton UP), Markets (Polity Press) and, co-edited with Jens Beckert, The Worth of Goods (Oxford University Press).


Nigel Dodd is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Sociology. He is author of The Sociology of Money and Social Theory and Modernity (both published by Polity Press). His new book, The Social Life of Money, was published by Princeton University Press in September 2014. He is now working on a new book for Princeton University Press, Utopianism and the Future of Money, which looks at the prospects for monetary reform by exploring a number of alternative currencies, from Bitcoin to the Brixton pound.

Introduction, Patrik Aspers, Nigel Dodd, and Ellinor Anderberg
1. Theorizing Economic Sociology, Richard Swedberg
Part I: Creating Economic Futures
2. Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics, Jens Beckert
3. Utopianism and the Future of Money, Nigel Dodd
4. What is a Financial Market? Global Markets as Media-Institutional Forms, Karin Knorr-Cetina
Part II: Consolidating Economic Structures
5. Economy and Law: Old Paradigms and New Markets, Bruce Carruthers
6. From Networks to Norms and Economic Institutions, Victor Nee and Sonja Opper
7. Power in the Social Construction of the Economy, Frank Dobbin and Jiwook Jung
8. Growing Economies of Conventional Forms: Coordination, agency and Valuation Revisited in a Critical Perspective, Laurent Thevenot
Part III Enacting Economic Relations
9. Rethinking Relationality in Economic Sociology: Relational Work in Circuits of Commerce, Nina Bandelj
10. Phenomenological Identity in Economic Sociology, Patrik Aspers
11. The Organizational Gift and Sociological Approaches to Exchange, Philippe Steiner
12. What kind of Re-Imagining does Economic Sociology Need?, Neil Fligstein