Culture and Economic Sociology

Summary

Prominent cultural lines of research have developed in the field of economic sociology, departing from early developments that had a strong structural focus. Inspired by the work of Viviana Zelizer and Paul DiMaggio in the 1990s, this subfield of cultural economic sociology can be analyzed through four lenses. The first is a body of work that treats culture as cognitive schemas, ideas, and categories and pays special attention to the performativity of economic models. The second line of work addresses valuation and meaning, including changing social value of children and life, cultural foundation of prices, the social meaning of money, and the relational work of matching multiple monies with fitting social relations. The third line of inquiry has become known as the morals and markets scholarship, including considerations of morally fraught and taboo economic exchange. The fourth strand concerns broader institutions and how culture influences various aspects of economic organization that differ across national contexts, such as industrial policy, financial regulation, legal provisions, or economic development. Promising avenues of future research are well poised to address persistent theoretical and new empirical lines of inquiry, including how cultural economic sociology can advance cultural sociology more broadly; how it intersects with issues of domination, power, and inequality; and what it contributes to understanding of digital and platform economies, algorithmic valuation, artificial intelligence, renewable energy, biotechnology, state–market relations, and people’s economic lives increasingly polarized and mistrusting of economic data and expertise.