Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true as well: deep moral-political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the four papers gathered here propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy, and call for broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts, and the sovereign debt crisis, the symposium builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.
Economists and Societies is the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scholarly evidence, Marion Fourcade traces the history of economics in each country from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrating how each political, cultural, and institutional context gave rise to a distinct professional and disciplinary configuration. She argues that because the substance of political life varied from country to country, people's experience and understanding of the economy, and their political and intellectual battles over it, crystallized in different ways--through scientific and mercantile professionalism in the United States, public-minded elitism in Britain, and statist divisions in France. Fourcade moves past old debates about the relationship between culture and institutions in the production of expert knowledge to show that scientific and practical claims over the economy in these three societies arose from different elites with different intellectual orientations, institutional entanglements, and social purposes. Much more than a history of the economics profession, Economists and Societies is a revealing exploration of American, French, and British society and culture as seen through the lens of their respective economic institutions and the distinctive character of their economic experts.
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In this short piece, I return to the articles in this special issue to examine the relationship between the material reality of the concept of BRICs and its symbolic place in the world economy today. Aside from the facts that the BRIC countries have been ready to depart from the Washington consensus on certain key elements (state intervention), while maintaining other aspects (fiscal discipline), there isn't much support for the notion that these countries somehow share specific development strategies. If anything, the papers in this special issue show that these four countries have rather different etiologies of growth. The notion of BRICs, I argue, is thus better apprehended through its symbolic and political dimensions, as an effort by well-placed actors in the financial markets to drum up excitement about investment opportunities, as well as reorient the governance structures of the world economy away from the traditional stronghold of Europe.
In this short piece, I return to the articles in this special issue to examine the relationship between the material reality of the concept of BRICs and its symbolic place in the world economy today. Aside from the facts that the BRIC countries have been ready to depart from the Washington consensus on certain key elements (state intervention), while maintaining other aspects (fiscal discipline), there isn't much support for the notion that these countries somehow share specific development strategies. If anything, the papers in this special issue show that these four countries have rather different etiologies of growth. The notion of BRICs, I argue, is thus better apprehended through its symbolic and political dimensions, as an effort by well-placed actors in the financial markets to drum up excitement about investment opportunities, as well as reorient the governance structures of the world economy away from the traditional stronghold of Europe.
Starting from the objectively dominant position of the sociology of markets in economic sociology, this article suggests that markets have served as a privileged terrain for the development and application of general theoretical arguments about the shape of the social order. I offer a critical overview of the sociology of markets as it relates to our concepts of society, focusing on four main representations of what is sociologically important about markets: the social networks that sustain them, the systems of social positions that organize them, the institutionalization processes that stabilize them, and the performative techniques that bring them into existence. I then speculate about the possible future directions that such theorizing might take, calling in particular for a stronger contribution of the sociology of markets to the analysis of societies as moral orders.
