Economics: the view from below

There is a long tradition among sociologists of using economics as an intellectual straw man. For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, every economic sociology article, on every topic, ran something like this: it began by ritualistically presenting the view from economics, and then proceeded to pull it to pieces by showing that “it is, in fact, much more complicated” than the play of interests and incentives. Against what they regarded as naïve economism, sociologists and anthropologists “demonstrated” the relevance of social networks, or culture, or politics to explaining various economic outcomes, and questioned the standard of “economic rationality.” They celebrated their “dirty hands” against the economists’ “clean models” and worried about the encroachments of rational choice theory into their discipline (Hirsch et al. 1987; Wacquant and Calhoun 1989). To the “anthropological monster” that they saw in Homo Economicus, and in Stigler and Becker’s injunction that “De Gustibus non est disputandum”, they opposed their own sociological theories of action, rooted in a fine-grained understanding of how necessity shapes choice and how relative social position shapes taste (Bourdieu 2000). Paradoxically perhaps -but in what amounts to a classic defense of the disciplinary boundarythe sociologists’ main targets in those days were often those economists closest to them intellectually: the economic historian Alfred Chandler, the institutionalists Oliver Williamson and Douglas North; and the microeconomist Gary Becker (who had a joint appointment in the Chicago sociology department). Economists, of course, did not care very much about all of this agitation on the other side of the disciplinary border. Most were probably unaware of the sociologists’ anxious fixation with their science. And those who knew about it, like Gary Becker, possibly felt: never mind, all publicity is good publicity. The fixation, eventually, gave way to something a bit deeper and hopefully more productive: first, sociologists (and others, such as historians and science studies scholars) started to free themselves from their inferiority