Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings, and Social Structure (Sociology for a New Century Series) - Softcover

This long-awaited Second Edition continues to offer an accessible introduction to the way social arrangements affect economic activity, and shows that economic exchanges are deeply embedded in social relationships.

Understanding how society shapes the economy helps us answer many important questions. For example, how does advertising get people to buy things? How do people use their social connections to get jobs? How did large bureaucratic organizations come to be so pervasive in modern economies - and what difference does it make? How can we explain the persistence of economic inequalities between men and women and across racial groups? Why do some countries become rich while others stay poor? This book presents sociological answers to questions like these, and encourages its readers to view the economy through a sociological lens.

Bruce Carruthers Ph.D. University of Chicago 1991. Areas of interest include historical and comparative sociology, economic sociology, sociology of law and sociology of organizations. Carruthers has written three books, City of Capital Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton University, 1996), Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States (Oxford, 1998), and Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings and Social Structure (Pine Forge Press, 2000). His current research projects are on the evolution of credit decision-making as a problem in the sociology of trust, and worldwide changes in bankruptcy law in the era of a globalized world economy. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/quantitative distinction is worth fighting over.

Sarah Babb is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College. She specializes in the areas of Economic Sociology, Latin America, Political Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology, Organizations and Globalization. Her most recent book is Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism.