As a person who has always been interested in both economics and sociology, I’ve had some trouble proving to my economist friends that sociology is a legit discipline. I was excited to hear Bryan Caplan proclaim that in a perfect world, he would call himself a sociologist. This led Fabio Rojas over at Orgtheory ask “if sociology sucks, why do economists keep doing it?” I question whether many of these economists are really doing sociology though.
I’m reading Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright’s excellent monograph on culture and enterprise this week. They have a very apt metaphor on the relationship between economics and cultural studies (which can be extended to sociology as well). “When economists venture into foreign disciplinary terrain, they tend either to merely dabble in the field’s issues at a superficial level, which might be called tourism, or try to aggressively take over the issues of the field on their own terms, which has come to be called economic imperialism.” Steve Levitt might be considered a tourist while Gary Becker definitely represents the English empire of the social sciences. It is no surprise that both happen to be at the University of Chicago.
This leads me to ask: are there any economists out there really doing good sociological work? Marx, Weber, and Pareto have been dead for some time now, so I’ll cross them off the list. Chamlee-Wright’s work on female entrepreneurship in Ghana is a good example. Virgil Storr also has some good work on culture and markets. Douglass North’s work on institutions might also fall under this category.
Can you think of anybody else?
- Josh McCabe
Josh–What a terrific enterprise this blog looks to be. I have it on my toolbar already–relief from the economics blogs up there!
Which leads me to ask: In light of your post, why would you want to mix economics and sociology in the first place? What kind of dependent variables would you be trying to explain, and why would a sociologist explain them better than an economist?
Believe me, I’m no economic imperialist, like Becker or Caplan. I’m not even an economist. And my questions aren’t rhetorical–I’m genuinely curious what you see as the comparative advantage of treating economic topics in a sociology department. I assume one advantage might be that it’s easier to get a job that way if you’re interested in being an Austrian-influenced economist (are you?).
Jeffrey Friedman
Hey Dr. Friedman,
If we look to the recognized founders of sociology – whether you consider them to be Weber, Marx, and Durkheim or Ferguson, Millar, and A. Smith – you will see that they all had economically-informed sociology (and sociologically-informed economics). This is what I believe Josh is attempting to do. It is no easy task. But, if it were easy, there would be no reason to undertake the task!
Best,
Brian P.
Most recently I have been exposed to some “behavioural economics” which to me seemed liked sociology but with a really wacky methodology. It was very entertaining listening to an proponent in a seminar spend a good 30 minutes explaining that, surprise, not all people actually are selfish! Next they’ll work out that not everyone has perfect information either.
Hey Guys, Congrats on the blog!
I knew there were a few people out there interested in bringing sociology and economics back n’sync but being interested in sociology and Austrian economics I considered myself somewhat of a personified oxymoron of todays rather left-leaning social sciences especially and ironically so at my Alma Mater: the University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna (!)
studying “socioeconomics” in Vienna Austria…
It is a good feeling to know that I am not alone out there
Well, what about Schumpeter (ok also dead), but I wonder why you didn’t come up with Richard Swedberg or Jens Beckert especially;
or what’s with the whole old school Austrian guys like Wieser, Böhm-Bawerk all of which can be read in a genuin sociological/socioeconomic way; and of course Mises himself, who initially wanted to call his praxeology sociology but came to late…
Grüße aus Wien,
phil
Josh – Nice post. I added your blog to mine.
The question you raised is indeed a tricky issue. I’m not sure that you can lump economists and “economic sociologists” together just like that. As you said, economists tend to be either tourists or imperialists. A lot of economists see economics as a social science discipline characterized by selected methods – especially analytical proofs. In that regard, you might want to consider rationality as a method because many economists had adopted the assumption so that it is feasible to perform max/min operations. But many sociologists take issue with that, seeing the specific constrained assumptions as a theoretical divider between economics and sociology. So yeah, to them, economic sociology may not be legit.
Anyway, I’m glag that you blog about this issue. Definitely something that we should blog about, albeit with a much more in-depth literature review.
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I’m not sure this meets your criteria but the Economists who write for The Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, Cato, and FEE are addressing issues of individual freedoms every day. Without free choice and individual liberty man cannot act by free will in his best interest.
One economist who was neither tourist nor imperialist in his use of sociology was (yes, alas, deceased) Francesco Nicosia who was an important force in the development of consumer behavior as a research field. He was at Berkeley for 35 years and was adamant that models of buyer behavior needed to have explicit content normally in the purview of sociology. One article I have used is “Toward a Sociology of Consumption” (Journal of Consumer Research 1976: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489112 ) which cites al the icons (Parsons, Selznick) and others of interest to this blog (Blau, Goffman). He made an interesting observation that consumption activities allowed members of “classes” to differentiate themselves, particularly if they were economically overprivileged, like grad students and over-the-road truckers.
Granted, Nicosia doesn’t reside in the Pantheon with some of names noted above. But, read him anyway.
@Jeff Friedman: The goal is really to reunite economics and sociology. As some other people have pointed out, they were really the the same thing for the classical economists. My guess is that the new economic sociolgy would take the methodological individualism, rational choice, and self-interest aspects from economics and mix it with the sociological emphasis on culture, ideology, and methodology pluralism.
@phil: Good to know you’re out there!
But Josh, isn’t one of the most valuable teachings of the greatest sociologist of all, Weber, that rational choice and self-interest are not universals?
Methodological individualism sounds more promising if it could be separated from rat choice and self-interest, but can it?
Jeff
Funny you should bring that up. I just finished reading an AJS article on Alfred Schutz and the Austrian school where Christopher Prendergast argues that one of Schutz’s goals was to bridge Weber and Mises by showing that the former’s ideal types could be univeral rather than historical. I can’t really comment because I haven’t gotten around to reading Schutz, but he seems like the missing link between sociology and economics in some ways. I only stumbled across it during a JSTOR search, but I highly recommend taking a look at it if you haven’t already done so.
I think rational choice makes more sense if you take Austrian concepts of limited knowledge and temporal concerns. And I should emphasize that I’m not a fan of the strict homo economicus used by economists, but rather a wider conception of self-interest that includes altruism. Some might argue that it strips economics or sociology any analytical usage, but I still think it gives you a good framework for descriptive analysis of real world events and processes.
But given the ambition of my project, I’d settle on an agreement among economists and sociologists that methodogical individualism is the only way to study society.
Yes, as a matter of fact we published an article by Richard Ebeling on Shutz as the missing link (at least it may have been–the title was “Cooperation in Anonymity,” but it was a long time ago), but I’m still not sure what I see as the advantage of the link b/c I agree that a conception of self-interest that includes altruism is tautologous.
But there does seem to be something awfully vague and genuinely objectionable about the “social forces” sociologists–I guess?–constantly refer to? (I could be wrong.) Is that what you have in mind by juxtaposing methodological individualism?
If so you wouldn’t need to assert self-interestedness or rationality to criticize the vagueness; you could just ask “What’s the mechanism?”
Jeff