Our volume is comprised of six sections: (1) the crisis; (2) its similarities to, and differences from being a “normal accident;” (3) sociological and historical explanations for the meltdown; (4) analyses of comparable speculative bubbles and business cycles; (5) international parallels and...

In this postscript, I argue that a sociological approach to regulating securities markets requires a clear stance on the relationship between price and value, one that combines (a) the contrarian thesis that there are objective criteria by which one can assess value more accurately than the...

This essay argues for a sociopolitical approach to the study of the current financial crisis in the United States and other advanced industrialized countries. Such an approach offers a bridge between economic sociology and historical institutionalism that can help analysts identify the ways in...

We discuss the ways in which the tensions between deregulation and bailouts create fundamentally inefficient markets. Although there is an appetite for the rhetoric of a laissez-fair economic system in the United States, we do not have the political will to operate such a system, as there are...

Both neoclassical and Keynesian economists have widely favored the use of equilibrium models to understand economic activity, but dramatic periods of change such as the current global economic downturn are poorly understood by assuming equilibrium. The economist Joseph Schumpeter tried to inject...

In this article, we consider the evolution of the US stock market from the 1770s through the early 20th century. Adopting an institutional lens, we conceive of the stock market as an institutional field constituted by socially constructed cultural logics and myths. We focus on the role of the US...

This article identifies the institutional factors behind both the emergence of a highly vulnerable financial system and the housing bubble that devastated it. The underlying premise is that the financial crisis was a market failure embedded in and caused by an institutional one. The failing...