Economic sociology is a rapidly expanding field, applying sociology's core insight--that individuals behave according to scripts that are tied to social roles--to economic behavior. It places homo economicus (that tried-and-true fictive actor who is completely rational, acts only out of...

The study of reputation has often focused on such relatively narrow areas as creation of good reputations rather than developed systematic theoretical approaches to understanding the means by which reputations are modified, or shifted, and the factors affecting such shifts. This paper introduces...

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic...

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...