What do sociologists even know about the economy? Surprisingly, maybe as much as economists[*]! In this ten-week graduate course, we will explore recent sociological literature on markets, money, and the economy. Our aim is to understand and make use of key sociological perspectives that shed light on the economy and markets. (Oh, and there’s the odd anthropologist here and there).

Grading

The course will be graded with a combination of weekly 500-word memos (10, 5% each of the final grade) and a 4,000-word final essay (40% of the final grade); participation/attendance will correspond to the remaining 10%.

The weekly memos will have to engage with a specific set of questions about the readings. They should be analytical, rather than summatory memos. Your weekly memos will be evaluated by comparison to a similarly-length memo written by an AI agent that was provided with class notes, course readings, and background materials. The evaluation will occur through a blind comparison test where subjects of a crowdsourcing platform will be asked to determine which memo is both more coherent and less likely to have been written by a computer.

The final essay will require engaging with an empirical example of an economic process/market. The case, approach, and framing will be of your choice, but you must submit a paper proposal by week 7 of the quarter.

Students will have to actively participate of class discussions at least 3 times throughout the quarter. This requires reading all the materials and being ready for active debate as well as for presenting a paper/book at least once throughout the course. This is a binary, yes/no grade.

Readings

All readings are available either in the library (in physical form), online (accessible through UC San Diego’s subscriptions) or a Google search away. If you haven’t taken an economic sociology class before, there are several useful handbooks and edited collections (e.g. by Richard Swedberg) that provide additional background materials.

Part 1 – Things written before most of you were born and that are rediscovered every other year, with some more contemporary stuff (a.k.a. “the classics”)

Week 1. Say ’embedded’ one more time…

Polanyi, Karl. “The Economy as Instituted Process.” In Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Glencoe: Free Press, 1957.

Granovetter, Mark. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510.

Krippner, Greta. “The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the Paradigm of Economic Sociology.” Theory and Society 30, no. 6 (2002): 775–810.

Week 2. Sort of closer to ‘instituted process’, I guess: politics & institutions

Somers, Margaret R., and Fred Block. “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate.” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 260–287.

Fligstein, Neil. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Chapter 1 (“Introduction”), pp. 1–32.

Dobbin, Frank. “Why the Economy Reflects the Polity: Early Rail Policy in Britain, France, and the United States.” In The Sociology of Economic Life, 397–418. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.

Week 3. Get your dirty hands off my clean money! Culture & Relations

Zelizer, Viviana. Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Bandelj, Nina. “Relational Work in the Economy.” Annual Review of Sociology 46, no. 1 (2020): 251–272.

Mears, Ashley. “Working for Free in the VIP: Relational Work and the Production of Consent.” American Sociological Review 80, no. 6 (2015): 1099–1122.

Strathern, Marilyn. Relations: An Anthropological Account. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Guyer, Jane I. “Soft Currencies, Cash Economies, New Monies: Past and Present.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 7 (2012): 2214–2221.

Part 2 – Things that are relevant for making sense of everything around us today

Week 4. Markets: The good, the bad, and the plain fugly

von Hayek, Fredrich. “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. American Economic Review 35(4) (1945): 519-530.

Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy. “Moral Views of Market Society.” Annual Review of Sociology 33, no. 1 (2007): 285–311.

Callon, Michel. Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.

Carruthers, Bruce G., and Arthur L. Stinchcombe. “The Social Structure of Liquidity: Flexibility, Markets, and States.” Theory and Society 28, no. 3 (1999): 353–382.

Roth, Alvin E. “Marketplaces, Markets, and Market Design.” American Economic Review 108, no. 7 (2018): 1609–1658.

Week 5. The Fugly™: financialization

Fligstein, Neil, and Adam Goldstein. “The legacy of shareholder value capitalism.” Annual Review of Sociology 48 (2022): 193-211.

Krippner, Greta. “The Financialization of the American Economy.” Socio-Economic Review 3, no. 2 (2005): 173–208.

Fligstein, Neil, and Adam Goldstein. “The Emergence of a Finance Culture in American Households, 1989–2007.” Socio-Economic Review 13, no. 3 (2015): 575–601.

Davis, Gerald F., and Suntae Kim. “Financialization of the Economy.” Annual Review of Sociology 41, no. 1 (2015): 203–221.

Robinson, John N., III. “Making Markets at the Margins: The Racial Politics of Credit Expansion.” American Journal of Sociology 125, no. 4: 974–1029.

Week 6. Markets as interactional realizations

Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Routledge, 2023.

Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff. “Ordering Competition: The Interactional Accomplishment of the Sale of Art and Antiques at Auction.” British Journal of Sociology 58, no. 1 (2007): 63–85.

MacKenzie, Donald. “How Algorithms Interact: Goffman’s ‘Interaction Order’ in Automated Trading.” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 2 (2019): 39–59.

Rivera, Lauren A. “Go with Your Gut: Emotion and Evaluation in Job Interviews.” American Journal of Sociology 120, no. 5 (2015): 1339–1389.

Week 7. Data economies without all that crypto stuff

Davis, Gerald F. “What Might Replace the Modern Corporation? Uberization and the Web Page Enterprise.” Seattle University Law Review 39 (2016): 501.

Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy. The Ordinal Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024.

Caliskan, Koray, Donald MacKenzie, and Michel Callon. “Stacked Economization: A Research Program for the Study of Platforms.” Journal of Cultural Economy 18, no. 2 (2025): 304–331.

Part 3 – Ah, yes. Things that came from Europe much after all the first wave of things that came from Europe.

Week 8. Performativity, but not Butler’s

MacKenzie, Donald, and Yuval Millo. “Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange.” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 1 (2003): 107–145.

Callon, Michel. “Performativity, Misfires and Politics.” In The Limits of Performativity, 25–31. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Unal, Sevde Nur, Simone Polillo, Koray Caliskan, and Donald MacKenzie. “The Modes of Performativity: A Meta-Theoretical Review.” Finance and Society (2025): 1–24.

Week 9. So many valuation studies!

Callon, Michel, and Fabian Muniesa. “Peripheral Vision: Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.” Organization Studies 26, no. 8 (2005): 1229–1250.

Muniesa, Fabian, Yuval Millo, and Michel Callon. “An Introduction to Market Devices.” Sociological Review 55, no. 2_suppl (2007): 1–12.

Velthuis, Olav. “Symbolic Meanings of Prices: Constructing the Value of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam and New York Galleries.” Theory and Society 32, no. 2 (2003): 181–215.

Week 10. How your electricity and Prime deliveries work and fail: on logistics and infrastructure

Rilinger, Georg. “Market Design as Organizational Problem: Explaining System Failures in Platform Markets.” American Journal of Sociology 130, no. 5 (2025): 1065–1112.

Rosenberg, James. “Steps toward an Ecology of Markets: Markets as Evolving Computational Algorithms.” Sociological Theory (2025): 07352751251390470.

Caliskan, Koray, Donald MacKenzie, and Addie McGowan. “Superplatform: A Framework to Analyse and Regulate Google’s Online Ad Ecosystem.” Internet Policy Review 15, no. 1 (2026).

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[1] The Diego Rivera image is an homage to the kind of work that economic sociologists study but rarely do. 🤷🏽. If you happen to be in Detroit, these are worthwhile. Full reference etc here: https://dia.org/collection/detroit-industry-north-wall/58538

[*] though, in all honesty, I would not put my retirement savings in a fund managed by sociologists, so caveat emptor, though economists also don’t do too well either. My suggestion? A contract tied to something like the E-mini or whatever you find tracks “the market” with the lowest possible costs. Stick to it and, unless capitalism collapses, you’ll probably do better than UC’s investment funds. But hey, financial advice? From a sociologist? I don’t know…