Both of these books are concerned with how global social movements are refracted through national cultural and legal systems. Both find that new norms spread across countries, in this case originating in the United States and then spreading through feminists to Europe. But both find diffusion...

The Economic Sociology of Capitalism might have been titled The Sociology of Economic Institutions. The chapters, presented at Cornell in September 2001, catalog current thinking about how institutions lead to regularities in economic behavior. They define institutions variously as cognitive...

This book at first appears to be Perrow's own history of the modern corporation, but it turns out to be a critique of the canon and a fresh look at the historical material presented by others. As such, it is a lot closer in format and goals to Perrow's classic Complex Organizations (New York:...

In Adam Smith in Beijing, Giovanni Arrighi has given us a sequel to The Long Twentieth Century (Verso, 1994), which traces the center of the economic world from Italy to Holland to Britain to America. In that book he argued that the key to being a hegemon was to control finance and capital, not...