ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Moral Views of MarketSocietyMarion Fourcade1 and Kieran Healy2

1Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-1980;email: fourcade@berkeley.edu2Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721;email: kjhealy@arizona.edu

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2007. 33:285–311

First published online as a Review in Advance onApril 5, 2007

The Annual Review of Sociology is online athttp://soc.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131642

Copyright c© 2007 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0360-0572/07/0811-0285$20.00

Key Words

markets, capitalism, moral order, culture, performativity,governmentality

AbstractUpon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely,does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, andsocial bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social scienceitself. In this review, we evaluate how today’s scholarship approachesthe relationship between markets and the moral order. We beginwith Hirschman’s characterization of the three rival views of themarket as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. Wereview recent work at the intersection of sociology, economics, andpolitical economy and show that these views persist both as theoriesof market society and moral arguments about it. We then arguethat a fourth view, which we call moralized markets, has becomeincreasingly prominent in economic sociology. This line of researchsees markets as cultural phenomena and moral projects in their ownright, and seeks to study the mechanisms and techniques by whichsuch projects are realized in practice.

285

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

INTRODUCTION

In 1982, a soft-spoken economist with a self-diagnosed propensity for subversion (and self-subversion) published a short article on a bigtopic (Hirschman 1982): How have intellec-tual elites understood and judged market so-ciety throughout history? Somewhat contraryto his expectations, Hirschman (1977) foundthat the market was initially seen as a civilizingforce. For most of the eighteenth century, thedoux commerce thesis held that market relationsmade people more cordial and less inclined tofight one another. By the late nineteenth cen-tury, however, this harmonious vision faced achallenge. Marx, among others, argued thatcapitalist society tends to undermine its ownmoral foundations, to the point at whichit will ultimately self-destruct. In responseto this gloomy prediction, the defenders ofthe market revised the doux commerce thesis.The market was still an essentially goodforce but a too feeble one. According to this“feudal shackles” thesis, the persistence ofcultural and institutional legacies from thepast hampered the market’s beneficial effects.Conversely, the absence of such a heritagein the U.S. case was seen as a blessing anda critical element in explaining the country’smoral character and economic success.

Markets, Hirschman suggested, have thusbeen cast as civilizing, destructive, or feeble intheir effects on society. In the 25 years sincethe publication of his article, there has beenan explosion of research on markets in sociol-ogy. In this article, we begin with Hirschman’sconceptual scheme and show how a good dealof this recent work fits within its categories.First, economists still endorse the doux com-merce thesis and generally emphasize the pos-itive effect of market institutions on civil soci-ety, politics, and culture. We call the modernversion of this view the liberal dream. Second,public intellectuals and critics from variousdisciplines continue to critique the market.The “autodestruction” thesis that Hirschmanidentified, however, has evolved into morespecific claims that markets undermine social

relations, corrupt political life, and corrodecharacter. We call this view the commodi-fied nightmare. Finally, economic sociologistshave leaned toward Hirschman’s third cate-gory: markets as relatively feeble compared toculture and society. The dominant paradigmof embeddedness implies that culture and in-stitutions mediate, and often trump, the moralimplications (good or bad) of capitalist mar-kets. In this view, markets do not have a moralnature outside the particular social and cog-nitive arrangements from which they emergeand that sustain them.

Despite the value of Hirschman’s frame-work, we also seek to go beyond it. In hisscheme, the causal relationship between themarket and the moral order is straightforward.Markets can exert a huge direct effect for goodor do tremendous damage. Alternatively, thearrow points the other way, and fragile mar-kets are overwhelmed by the moral order (or,more rarely, nurtured by it). We argue that abody of important work, most of it quite re-cent, rejects this clean division between themoral order and the market. Instead, researchon the classification of exchange relations, theperformativity of economics, and the regula-tion of countries and corporations in the inter-national economy is united by a view of mar-kets as intensely moralized, and moralizing,entities. We suggest that this new emphasisreflects not simply a shift in scholarly fashion,but also trends in the public justification ofthe contemporary economic order itself.

CIVILIZING MARKETS:THE LIBERAL DREAM

Economists need no convincing that compet-itive markets constitute the best possible ar-rangement for the satisfaction of individualneeds and the efficient allocation of resources.Both these arguments were made long ago byAdam Smith and Leon Walras, respectively,and have generally withstood the test of timewithin the discipline. At both micro and macrolevels, so it seems, economic theory elevates

286 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

egoism to paradigmatic status. “It is not fromthe benevolence of the butcher, the brewer,or the baker, that we expect our dinner, butfrom their regard to their own self-interest.We address ourselves, not to their human-ity but to their self-love,” wrote Smith (1994,p. 15) in one of the most cited passages of theWealth of Nations. Today, the neoclassical ap-proach that formalized modern economic the-ory generally posits that individuals maximizetheir utility in all social relations. Principal-agent theory, for instance, is predicated onthe notion that actors will retain informa-tion and cheat organizational demands. Pub-lic choice theory hypothesizes that corrup-tion, rather than benevolence in some degree,is the natural condition of the government.And an infamous leaked World Bank memoabout the comparative advantage of develop-ing economies in attracting dirty industrieshas become a canonical example of the po-tential gap between moral questions of justiceand cold-blooded considerations of allocativeefficiency (Economist 1992).

If economists exclusively made narrowclaims about the allocation of resources, an ar-ticle about markets and morals would featurethem only as a negative case. Yet the relation-ship of economic theory to morality is morecomplex than this. First, economic theory isbuilt on assumptions whose implicit moralcontent can be drawn out in detail (Hausman& McPherson 2006). Second, and more im-portantly for our purposes, there is a long tra-dition within economic discourse of explicitpraise for the moral benefits of market society.The precise benefits vary. The doux commercetradition is carried forward by arguments thatthe market nourishes personal virtues of hon-est behavior, civility, and cooperation. Oth-ers have seen markets as a necessary condi-tion for freedom in other aspects of life, mostprominently in politics and in the culturalrealm. A final tradition, represented today bythe bulk of prescriptive macroeconomics, em-phasizes economic growth as a condition forhuman progress, and it is best encapsulatedby Keynes’s comment that economists are the

“trustees, not of civilization, but of the possi-bility of civilization.”

A Virtue Ethics of the Market

The reason morality seems a priori irrele-vant to economics is that, as Smith discov-ered, a system may be virtuous and harmo-nious as a whole no matter how selfish its con-stituent parts are. But here is the twist: Eachindividual’s hunger for profit will be kept incheck by a similar drive among other individ-uals. Rather than producing ruthless greed,self-interest will tend to make people polite,serviceable, and honest. Thus, Smith (1978,p. 538; cited in Stigler 1981, pp. 172–73) alsowrote that “whenever commerce is introducedinto any country, probity and punctuality al-ways accompany it . . . . Of all the nations ofEurope, the Dutch, the most commercial, arethe most faithful to their word.”

Markets, then, not only produce eco-nomic harmony (the satisfaction of individ-uals’ desires and needs), they also createsocial harmony. McCloskey (2006) is todayperhaps the most prominent defender ofthe view that markets encourage not onlypublic but also personal virtue. Like othervirtue ethicists, she seeks to identify both thevirtues that comprise good moral characterand the individual habits and social institu-tions that cultivate such virtues in people.In broad outline, we may contrast this ap-proach with the Kantian and consequential-ist traditions, which offer competing theoriesfor judging the morality of actions (whetherthrough the application of deontological prin-ciples of moral duty or a utilitarian calcu-lation of the good and bad consequencesof one’s choices). For McCloskey, marketsnurture a long list of “bourgeois virtues,”including integrity, honesty, trustworthiness,enterprise, respect, modesty, and respon-sibility. Commerce teaches ethics mainlythrough its communicative dimension, thatis, by promoting conversation among equalsand exchange between strangers. We canbring out the distinctive nature of this

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 287

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

view by comparing it with Habermas’s(1985) critique of systematically distortedcommunication. For Habermas, the marketis one of the rationalizing forces that inhibitproper, unforced communication between cit-izens, whereas for McCloskey the market-place is the fount of habits of civil discourse.

Modern economic theory has room for thiskind of argument, but the idea that the marketencourages the cultivation of certain virtues(and thus the implication of a fairly thick the-ory of the individual) has been replaced bythe more utilitarian notion that any repeatedeconomic interaction or game makes it ratio-nal to strategically develop one’s credibility orreputation. In a situation in which economicagents have little, if any, information aboutone another, honesty is simply good businesspolicy.

Commerce Fosters Cooperation

The central claim of the original doux com-merce thesis is that the market encourages civ-ilized conduct. “It is almost a general rulethat wherever manners are gentle,” de Mon-tesquieu wrote, “there is commerce. Andwherever there is commerce, manners aregentle” (cited in Hirschman 1982, p. 107).The same is supposed to be true of relation-ships between nations. Commercial societymakes people more cooperative by bindingthem to one another, thereby reducing so-cial tensions, although de Montesquieu (1989[1749], pp. 338–39) noted that this is achievedby creating “traffic in all human activities andall moral virtues; the smallest things, thoserequired by humanity, are done or given formoney.”

At root, the market creates a bond throughthe mediation of goods. As Boltanski &Thevenot (2006, p. 48) point out in their dis-cussion of the justificatory logic of market-based arguments, “not only does the estab-lishment of the market bond presuppose thatindividuals are subject in a concerted wayfor a common penchant for exchange; it isalso sustained by the common identification

of external goods. Objects of desire that arefully detachable from the human body andthus suited for use in exchanges, these goodsprovide the underpinnings for interpersonalrelations.” The market, then, presupposeswhat we may call a shared intersubjective ori-entation (first toward exchange, and secondtoward goods).

How consequential is this orientation?Most market relations remain anonymous,particularly in modern society. Echoing vonHayek (1945), Seabright (2004, p. 15) arguesthat the market can be described as human“cooperation with nobody in charge.” Still,there is some evidence that this “company ofstrangers” miraculously produces greater co-operation and even altruism. A series of exper-iments done in 15 small-scale societies aroundthe world found that in societies with more ex-posure to the market, people were more gen-erous with exchange partners when dividingmoney in ultimatum games (Henrich et al.2004). As for the relationship between mar-ket and cooperation between societies, follow-ing de Montesquieu, the reigning paradigm ininternational relations holds that “a civilizednation has to be a trading nation” (Watson2006, p. 45). Membership in the World TradeOrganization, for instance, is widely seen asa sign of civilization [although some schol-ars dispute that the relation between interna-tional commerce and peace holds empirically(Martin et al. 2006)]. Finally, between individ-uals the civilizing effects of market relationsis more mixed: Experimental results (mostlycarried out in the developed world) suggestunequivocally that “market-like situations in-duce self-regarding behavior” (Bowles 1998,p. 89) but also that the market itself may not bethe preferred mode of exchange. Social psy-chologists, for instance, have found that ex-perimental subjects were much happier withreciprocal (i.e., gift-like) rather than anony-mous negotiated (i.e., market-like) forms ofexchange, even when disparities in power andresources were taken into account (Molmet al. 2006). The structural transparency ofnegotiated exchanges indeed seems to create

288 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

a framework in which injustices and inequitiesare more keenly felt.

In practice, many exchanges defined as for-mally market-like fall somewhere on a contin-uum between the paradigmatic poles of directbargaining and serial reciprocity. The pure,abstract, and anonymous common sense ofthe market situation is routinely transformedinto an actual social relation as people seekto reduce the problems posed by informa-tion asymmetries and opportunism. Anthro-pologists studying local markets have longestablished that people overcome informa-tion problems in practice by personalizingexchange. Most bazaar interactions, for in-stance, end up transiting through small net-works of trusted relations and involve intensebargaining (e.g., Geertz 1978). Sociologi-cal analyses of risky transactions, business-to-business relations, and ethnic economiesmake a similar point (DiMaggio & Louch1998, Portes & Haller 2005, Whitford 2005).Studies of online markets also offer a strikingvindication of this argument. Analyzing theway online traders overcome the problem oftrust, Kollock (1999) found that sites such aseBay are replete with conversational featuressuch as bulletin boards and discussion groups,and thereby exhibit a much greater person-alization of exchange than one might haveanticipated. In the economics literature, bycontrast, the tendency is to argue that infor-mation asymmetries will either cause marketsto fail (Akerlof 1970) or require remediationby some more formal institutional supportsuch as hierarchical organization (Williamson1985) or state regulation (Glaeser & Shleifer2003).

Capitalism Makes You Free

In the postwar period, the most potent argu-ment for market capitalism has come fromits association with freedom, whether per-sonal freedom (choice) or political freedomwithin society. Von Hayek (1944) drew the lat-ter connection with great force. The centralorganization of production and distribution,

von Hayek argued, incrementally leads to theuse of coercive measures. Little by little, theimplementation of economic planning bringsabout increased oppression and ends in full-blown tyranny.

Written during the war, at the height ofNazi and Soviet totalitarianism, The Road toSerfdom was an instant success and is todayone of the best-known social science booksof the twentieth century. Yet it was not vonHayek himself, but one of his colleagues at theUniversity of Chicago who popularized theargument that political and economic free-doms are inseparable, thereby reviving thegospel of laissez faire in modern politics. “Onthe one hand,” Friedman (1962, p. 8) wrote,“freedom in economic arrangements is itselfa component of freedom broadly understood,so economic freedom is an end in itself. In thesecond place, economic freedom is also an in-dispensable means toward the achievement ofpolitical freedom.”

Two ideas are critical to the liberal the-sis as formulated here. The first is that freemarkets allow needs and desires to be satis-fied and therefore help make people happy.Economists have found some empirical sup-port for this assertion. Frey & Stutzer (2001),for instance, show that doing well in the mar-ket (in terms of income and employment) doesmake people happier (although not as muchas the ability to participate meaningfully inthe political process). A natural corollary isthe idea that empowering markets empowerspeople. Market protection, whether by statesor by producers eager to preserve their profitmargin, is not only inefficient but antidemo-cratic as well. Fettering the market preventspeople from choosing what they really want.Consumer sovereignty is thus political free-dom in another guise. As Lerner (1972, p.258) argues, “as an economist I must be con-cerned with the mechanisms for getting peo-ple what they want, no matter how these wantswere acquired. This view I find very closeto the idea of democracy or freedom—theidea of normally letting each member of so-ciety decide what is good for himself, rather

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 289

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

than having someone else play a paternalrole.”

The second idea is that competitive eco-nomic arrangements are the best defense notonly against arbitrary interference by thestate, but also against the concentration ofeconomic power in the hands of a few. (Thetwo are related by the possibility of politi-cal coercion by vested interests.) This is therationale behind antitrust laws: Market com-petition can be difficult to maintain in theface of the constant work by market actors toconcentrate power to stabilize their environ-ment (Fligstein 1990). Although economiststend to agree that unfair practices by corpo-rations should be monitored, they often dif-fer in their assessment of the severity of theproblem and the need for sanctions. Many, infact, are quite satisfied with a lenient enforce-ment of antitrust laws and a relatively high de-gree of concentration in practice (Galbraith1956), arguing that economic concentrationis generally an efficient response to marketconditions (Kovacic & Shapiro 2000). Butthis is not true across the board. Rajan &Zingales (2003) argue that truly free capital-ism cannot exist without a strong dose of in-stitutional and political support. (Rajan wasappointed director of economic research atthe International Monetary Fund shortly af-ter publishing this book.) Free enterprise, theyargue, is not the natural state of the economy.Rather, it is “better thought of as a delicateplant, which needs nurturing against con-stant attacks by the weeds of vested interests”(Rajan & Zingales 2003, p. 277). (This antic-ipates the feeble markets or voluntarist viewwe discuss below.) They thus advocate freeingfinancial markets by opening borders, estab-lishing strong standards of transparency andaccountability, and even maintaining a socialsafety net so that powerful actors cannot ex-ploit economic downturns to restrict compe-tition. Writing for the developing world, theyargue that access to finance will empower thepoor, allow them to take advantage of oppor-tunities, and thereby keep vested interests incheck through the existence of countervail-

ing political power. As for the rich, they willonly stay rich if they are able to remain pro-ductive and prove their competence time andagain.

Markets Liberate Creativityand Innovation

Curiously, the strongest emphasis on the pro-tean creativity of market systems has of-ten come from outside the mainstream ofeconomic theory. Alongside thinkers in theHayekian and libertarian traditions, Marx’ssketch of bourgeois capitalism in the Commu-nist Manifesto and Schumpeter’s characteriza-tion of capitalism’s path of creative destructionare classic versions of this idea, rediscoveredby Romer (1986). Market systems are sup-posed to provide incentives and opportuni-ties for innovation in all sectors of the econ-omy. For our purposes, the close associationbetween aesthetic taste and moral judgmentmakes cultural goods an important specialcase of this general argument. Intellectualshave often regarded the market as inimical tohigh culture and good taste. Following the ar-guments about choice and freedom discussedabove, economists have often rejected suchjudgments as mere snobbery. But more re-cently, others have sought to directly refutethe charge. If the market can be shown to pro-duce cultural goods of all sorts, and encourageinnovation and creativity besides, then an im-portant pillar of antimarket rhetoric will betoppled. Cowen (2002) argues that marketsmake a staggering variety of work in art, lit-erature, and music available to a wide varietyof consumers cheaply. As a consequence, themarket exchange of cultural goods (especiallyin large, globalizing markets) feeds back intothe process of cultural production, encourag-ing the hybridization of genres and the emer-gence of new forms. In other words, whereassociologists of culture have emphasized theproliferation of identities and the techniquesby which consumption choices act as statusdifferentiators (Bourdieu 1984, Bryson 1996),economists point out that it is the market

290 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

that provides the very basis for this activityby generating the fecund and varied supplyof consumer goods on which the process ofdistinction feeds.

The doux commerce thesis has become theliberal dream of market society, with marketexchange variously seen as a promoter of in-dividual virtue and interpersonal cooperation,the bulwark of personal liberty and politicalfreedom, and the mechanism by which hu-man creativity can be unleashed and its prod-ucts made available to society at large. Thestory for most economists usually ends there,with minor adjustments—but not for critics,who relentlessly warn that the dream can turnnightmarish on all three counts.

DESTRUCTIVE MARKETS: THECOMMODIFIED NIGHTMARE

The doux commerce thesis argues for the gen-tly civilizing effects of bourgeois commer-cial activity. The harshest critics of the mar-ket present a radically different view. Manyof these critiques build on Marx’s analysisof alienation and exploitation in the capital-ist production process, although others (e.g.,Veblen 1994 [1899]) have found capitalistconsumption to be just as morally corro-sive. These critiques challenge each aspect ofthe doux commerce thesis. Instead of enrich-ing our individual characters, critics argue,markets reduce our justifications for action tothe narrowest kind of self-interest. Instead ofencouraging cooperation and altruism, theymake these impulses unintelligible or crowdout the motivation to engage in them (Frey1997). Promising liberty they deliver only asmuch freedom as one’s money can buy, andin place of authentic diversity they provideersatz, commodified alternatives.

Instead of Virtue, Envy and Wants

People, Veblen argued, do not consume goodsto satisfy hedonistic needs, as economists be-lieve, but instead to impress others by demon-strating their wealth. Capitalism thus plays

on a debased competitive instinct, inherent tohuman nature, and pushes individuals, eventhose with little money, to consume wastefullyas a means to acquire honor and reputability.It is a gigantic waste-producing engine, whichcontinuously encourages and supports socialrivalry. This drive for conspicuous consump-tion, in turn, has a profoundly degrading effecton individual judgment and conduct. It trans-forms the canons of ethics, aesthetic taste, andthe sense of devotion by replacing them witha general respect for wealth and pecuniaryexpense.

Although it would be difficult to find as fe-rocious a stylist as Veblen in today’s scholarlydiscourse, the substance of his critique per-sists. The work of Schor, for instance, particu-larly her documentation of middle-class con-sumption in The Overspent American (1998),echoes The Theory of the Leisure Class. UnlikeVeblen, however, Schor draws direct politi-cal conclusions. Just as class conflict broughtabout the critique of capitalist production,Schor argues, anxiety over the constant ratch-eting of lifestyles, looming indebtedness, andthe social and ecological costs of goods oughtto generate a potent political critique of con-sumption. Just as we saw the morally bene-ficial aspects of markets extolled in terms ofboth personal virtue and macroeconomic de-velopment, the countervailing moral critiquealso proceeds on both fronts. For example,at the level of personal or family consump-tion, we see moral critiques of the absorp-tion of childhood and personal identity bythe marketing process (Schor 2004), at thesame time that activists work to tie corporatebrand identities to unfair or exploitative child-labor practices in developing countries (Klein2002).

Two mechanisms lie behind the socialcritique of affluence. First—at the individuallevel—is the competitive instinct emphasizedby Veblen and reconceptualized by Bourdieu(1984) as the result of individuals un-consciously positioning themselves vis-a-visothers through their lifestyles. Tastes produceanxiety because of their relationship to the

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 291

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

recognition we expect from others. Second—at the macro level—is the acknowledgmentthat our wants and tastes are not simply in-ternally driven. Lane (1991, 2001), a politicaltheorist, makes a strong case that it is the mar-ket that creates wants, rather than the otherway around. More generally, critics of theview that markets are the best way to discoverand satisfy the latent wants of individualsargue that wants are, in fact, endogenousto market processes. In making this claim,the critical view disputes the economists’case that the preferences of individuals shouldbe treated as exogenous and largely unchang-ing, with the dynamics of apparent changes intastes really explained by changes in relativeprices and incomes (Stigler & Becker 1977).But it also contests the identification that theeconomics literature generally draws betweenwant, satisfaction, and happiness. It is not forpurely hedonistic reasons that we consumeor consume in particular ways. Perhaps thebest empirical evidence for this is that therelationship between affluence, choice, andhappiness is not at all clear (Easterbrook2004, Frey & Stutzer 2001, Schwartz 2005).

Instead of Cooperation, Coercionand Exclusion

Sandel (2000) suggests that ethical argumentsagainst commodification tend to take one oftwo forms. An argument from coercion claimsthat market exchanges are often involuntary,and “severe inequality or dire economic ne-cessity” makes a mockery of the formallyfree nature of market exchange (Sandel 2000,p. 94). Alternatively, an argument from cor-ruption claims that some kinds of goods—especially moral or civic goods, but also, po-tentially, things such as human organs orembryos—are corrupted or degraded by mar-ket exchange. Because of their intrinsic char-acter, some goods ought not to be boughtand sold. Another way of phrasing this ob-jection is to say that the market has only onemode of valuing things—price—whereas inreality goods may be valued (and valuable) in

ways that price cannot capture (Ackerman &Heizerling 2005, Anderson 1996). Argumentsfrom corruption have stronger implicationsthan arguments from coercion because theysuggest that some transactions should neverbe commodified, even if the exchange partnersare substantively as well as formally equal.

We can view Marx’s analysis of alienationand commodity fetishism as a distinctive vari-ant of the second kind of argument. In addi-tion to being exploitative, thanks to the privateappropriation of the surplus, capitalism forMarx also distorts social relations. The powerof money to override the essential proper-ties of individuals and things is central tothis process. In a characteristically dialecti-cal contrast, Marx (1992, p. 165) argues thatthe paradox of commodification is that socialrelations between persons and material rela-tions between things come to be perceived as“material relations between persons and so-cial relations between things.” Thus, whereasin the market’s logic the exchanged good isthe medium through which the social relationbetween market actors gets established, in theMarxist framework it is the good itself that isthe (crystallized) social relation between ac-tors in the production process.

In contemporary work, the reformattingof traditional social relations that results fromthe progress of market capitalism has beenparticularly well analyzed by Bourdieu (2000),who documented the new temporal habits,class, and gender relations that followed colo-nial Algeria’s entry into economic modernity.Elyachar (2005) and Mitchell (2002) haveoffered sobering accounts of the efforts bywell-intentioned international experts to turndeveloping societies such as Egypt into labo-ratories of neoliberal capitalism, showing howsuch innovative techniques as microenterpriseand titlization often end up dispossessingthe poor further from the few resources theyhave. The pervasiveness of commodificationis well documented (e.g., Strasser 2003),and its potentially corrupting effects areexplored in Radin (1996), Hochschild (2003),and Scheper-Hughes & Wacquant (2002).

292 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Arguments in Appadurai (1986) and Zelizer(1988), however, have pushed anthropologistsand sociologists away from the idea that themarket is a straightforward, irresistible forcethat reprocesses whole tracts of society intothe commodity form. Interestingly, this shiftin theoretical emphasis has occurred duringa period of undeniable growth in the com-mercialization of certain goods and services,notably in the areas of domestic labor, carework services, and human goods, such ashuman tissue and reproductive technologies.The question is less whether commodifiedexchange is proliferating and more whetherthis form carries with it a reliably negativeset of effects. Recent work tends to be morenuanced in its assessment of the meaning ofthese trends (Ertman & Williams 2005).

If corruption-type arguments are lessin fashion, coercion-type arguments againstmarket exchange have proved more robust.Historically, Polanyi (2001) provided the mostforceful expression of the idea that the mar-ket thrives on formal equality combined withbrutal inequities in practice. Polanyi’s workcaptures the widespread transformation ofthe moral order that accompanied the riseof modern industrial capitalism. Followingnineteenth-century critics, Polanyi empha-sized the dehumanizing effect of moderncapitalism on personality and social rela-tions, whereby individuals come to be seenas commodities, rather than ends in them-selves. The pivotal moment in this “GreatTransformation,” he argued, was the re-form of the English Poor Laws in 1834.This institutionalized the idea of the self-regulating labor market, thereby transform-ing labor into a commodity and dismissing hu-man solidarity as a legitimate basis for socialorder.

Two points are worth noting aboutPolanyi’s thesis. First, morality was om-nipresent in the debates that led to the GreatTransformation: Much of the indictmentof the Old Poor Law relief system, whichled to the 1834 reform, was formulated inmoral, rather than strictly economic, terms.

Reformers maintained, in particular, thatpoor relief discouraged demographic andmoral restraint among the poor. Comparingthe English episode to the welfare reform ofthe mid-1990s in the United States, Somers& Block (2005) find a similar ideational story.In both cases, they show, reformers mobilizeda perversity thesis, which attributed theblame for poverty to the corrosive effectsof welfare policies on poor people’s moralcharacter. Welfare support, the argumentwent, encourages laziness and illegitimacyand prevents any meaningful form of socialrecognition. By contrast, incorporation intothe market encourages dignity, opportunity,responsibility, and social solidarity.

Second, Polanyi’s account of the effectsof the New Poor Law sharply undercutsthe political economists’ optimism regardingthe causal connection between markets andmorality. The 1834 law offered relief belowthe lowest paid and least attractive jobs avail-able on the market; the poor were confined tojail-like workhouses and segregated by gen-der. To ensure labor mobility and the freeadjustment of wages, it was deemed neces-sary to make poor relief materially unattrac-tive and morally degrading. Thus, a limitedand highly repressive social policy emergedas the natural counterpart of free-marketcapitalism. A number of scholars of neolib-eralism see the same logic at work today,for instance, in the concomitant transforma-tion of economic, social, and penal policiesin the modern era. Wacquant (1999, 2007)draws an explicit link between welfare re-trenchment, neoliberal economic policy, andmass imprisonment: “[I]n all the countrieswhere the ideology of submission to the ‘freemarket’ has spread, we observe a spectacu-lar rise in the number of people being putbehind bars as the state relies increasinglyon police and penal institutions to containthe social disorders produced by mass unem-ployment, the imposition of precarious wagework and the shrinking of social protection”(Wacquant 2001, p. 404; see also Western2006).

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 293

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Instead of Freedom, MarketPopulism

Friedman forcefully argued for the close con-nection between markets and liberty. One in-terpretation of this argument is that the mar-ket is akin to democracy and allows peopleto freely express and satisfy their choices. Tosome extent, this view builds on the Amer-ican preference for popular taste over high-brow snobbery (de Tocqueville 2003 [1835]).But this ideal of participatory market democ-racy, critics retort, is a sad parody of truedemocracy. For instance, Frank (2001, p. 30)analyzes how, during the economic expan-sion of the 1990s, Friedmanite ideas of mar-ket liberalism and anti-elitism about culturewere fused with the rhetoric of the new econ-omy to promote the argument that free mar-kets are fundamentally democratic, or rather,that they are democracy: “[S]ince markets ex-press the will of the people, virtually any crit-icism of business could be described as anact of despicable contempt for the commonman.”

Frank takes pains to show that this ideol-ogy of market populism is not new in America.Much the same thing happened at the end ofthe nineteenth century. What is remarkable,he argues, is the intellectual unanimity thatthe equation between the market and democ-racy has received since the 1980s. (Franktraces this back to the anti-elitist backlash fol-lowing the post-1960s culture wars.) Maga-zines celebrate the successes of businessmenas democratic achievements. Business tropespenetrate deeply into everyday life, carried bymanagement gurus, public opinion experts,and marketers of all stripes who extend theparadigm of consumer choice to everythingfrom clothing tastes to policy choices and po-litical affiliations. The language of individual-ism (i.e., the idea that people make decisionsfor themselves and that at least in economicmatters these are the best decisions) serves asa powerful legitimation for free-market liber-alism. The irony is that this profoundly anti-expert, anti-elitist, democratic ideology has its

own expert class, its professionals of market le-gitimation, and has been the vehicle of a classpolarization far greater than at any other timesince World War II.

Much less polemical but no less tren-chant, Thrift, a British geographer, capturesthe power of the popular imagery of mod-ern capitalism in somewhat different terms.Capitalism, Thrift argues, is an ongoing per-formance, constantly propped up by theo-ries it tells itself about itself. Again, nowhereis this character more obvious than in therelationship between discursive and materialchange in the so-called new economy. Echo-ing Frank’s critique, Thrift argues that therhetoric of the new economy was produced byand for the benefit of a small number of keystakeholders—including, most prominently,what he calls the “cultural circuit of capi-tal”: business schools, management consul-tants, and management gurus. Together withthe media, governments, business economists,managers, and the information-technologysector, they feed not only on the fascinationthat the new economy discourse creates in thepublic’s mind, but also on the frenzy of theprofoundly new experiment in capitalism thiseconomy represents and carries out througha widespread expansion of its financial audi-ence. As Thrift (2005, p. 112), citing Komisar,puts it: “[I]t’s the romance that produces thefinance that makes the business worth pur-suing.” The intellectual move in these worksis similar—except Frank treats the logic atwork in the neoliberal market as a travesty oftrue freedom and real democracy, which onlyserves to further political alienation and eco-nomic dispossession, whereas from Thrift’smore postmodern stance the question of truthis somewhat beside the point.

Instead of Creativity, Copyright

The counterpart to the thesis that marketsenhance cultural creativity and innovation isthe claim that markets instead cater to thepublic’s most basic shared tastes, driving out

294 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

personal style and eliminating diversity.Adorno & Horkheimer’s (2002) critique ofthe culture industry as “mass deception” isthe classic articulation of this view. Undercapitalism, they argue, the production of cul-ture is organized in an industrial manner andfollows the logic of profit rather than aes-thetics. Cultural objects are designed to pro-vide instant and easy gratification to thosewho consume them. In addition to being ofpoor quality, they rely on a form and sub-stance that are not conducive to critical think-ing and thereby ultimately help reproducethe status quo. Cowen’s (2002) description ofthe modal Hollywood blockbuster as formu-laic, focused on action (rather than dialogue),and unchallenging fits this description quitewell.

The Frankfurt school’s thesis had fallenout of favor by the 1970s, but received re-newed attention with the explosion of the lit-erature on globalization. In a manner simi-lar to Horkheimer and Adorno, critics likeJameson (1991) emphasize the idea that thefree trade of goods and ideas leads to stan-dardization in cultural practices on a worldscale, dominated by American images, prod-ucts, and models. Against the argumentsput forward by economists, many also showthat the supposed diversity of modern con-sumption is deceptive and nourishes a de-bilitating obsession with choice, which onlybreeds anxiety and dissatisfaction (Schwartz2005).

Rather than freeing up creativity, then, themarket would artificially constrain it. It mayeven block it altogether. A good example isthe recent expansion and strengthening ofintellectual property rights since the 1980s.The tremendous cultural vitality of capital-ism, scholars have argued, is based on its abil-ity to draw from a vast cultural commons offreely available material and the capacity tobalance the need for this commons with in-centives for individuals to innovate (Lessig2004, Vaidyanathan 2003). The rise of restric-tive copyright laws threatens to dam up thestreams that replenish this reservoir of com-

monly shared material. A world with highlyrestrictive property rights on cultural goodsmight well come to have the kind of atrophiedculture envisaged by the Frankfurt school. Butthis would be caused not by the mechanical(or digital) mass production of cultural goods,nor their distribution via the market, but byrestrictions governing the use of these prod-ucts in the creation of new cultural forms. Aswith the concentration of ownership and thewave of corporate mergers, critics of the mar-ket argue that although markets promote cul-tural innovation and creativity in principle, inpractice they may well lead to the oppositeresult.

FEEBLE MARKETS: SHACKLESAND BLESSINGS

The liberal dream and the commodifyingnightmare views share the conviction that,for good or bad, markets have astonishinglypowerful effects on the social order. Againstthis, the axial position in economic sociologyis that markets are not such powerful institu-tions after all. Perhaps as a result of efforts todistinguish itself from both promarket enthu-siasts and Marxist or Veblenian critics, eco-nomic sociology has consciously avoided tak-ing an explicitly normative position on themarket as such. Following the terms of thedebate as set by economists (Fourcade 2007,Zelizer 2005b), the field has emphasized ques-tions of market structure and economic devel-opment over questions of moral order. Thelatter only come up to the extent that eco-nomic sociologists have sought to evaluate thecontribution of a country’s (or a region’s) cul-ture and institutions to the performance ofits markets, sometimes with an explicitly pre-scriptive angle. The theme throughout is thatmarkets are embedded in, entangled with, orotherwise dependent on other parts of society(Beckert 2002). Hence, the problem of moralorder remains relevant, but as an independentrather than a dependent variable. This is muchin line with what Hirschman calls the feu-dal shackles/feudal blessings thesis, the idea

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 295

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

that the development of markets depends onthe institutional legacies of the past. We referto contemporary scholarship in this vein aspromoting the feeble markets thesis, and weargue that it comes in three main variants:(a) From a realist view, capitalism thrives incertain cultures, whereas other cultures re-main stuck; (b) in a voluntarist understanding,the conditions that will help capitalism thrivecan be implemented as a package by way ofpolitical intervention; and (c) from a differen-tiated perspective, capitalism follows differentpaths in different places.

The Realist View: Cultural Legacies

Weber’s studies of the relationship betweenreligious doctrines and economic life are aclassical source of the claim that culture hasan independent effect on economic organiza-tion. Each world religion, Weber argued, has aparticular economic ethic associated with it—that is, it encourages or discourages a particu-lar set of economic practices in everyday life.But the relationship between religion and theeconomy is not straightforward. For instance,Weber (1958) was careful to show that the ra-tional search for profit he observed among theprotocapitalist Calvinists did not follow log-ically from their religious worldview. Rather,their actions made psychological sense as away to relieve the salvational anxiety theirharsh religious doctrines tended to produce.By contrast, Weber argued, the religions ofAsia could not independently help evolve cap-italistic attitudes (still, he believed these re-gions were perfectly capable of assimilatingcapitalism once it had developed elsewhere).Although Asian soteriologies shared asceticProtestantism’s commitment to self-control,they were directed at a contemplative with-drawal from the everyday world. These beliefsinhibited the development of the vocationalconception of economic activity that was crit-ical to the rise of rationalized capitalism in theWest (Weber 1951).

In light of modern scholarship on com-parative religion, Hamilton (1994, 2006; also

see Hamilton & Biggart 1988) reformulatesthe Weberian argument by focusing on theway civilizational (and particularly religious)elements came to shape the structure of au-thority in different cultures. In the West,the Protestant heritage means that individ-ual compliance to authority relies mainly onself-control. In the Confucian world, by con-trast, compliance to authority relies on obe-dience to a higher order. Hence, whereasthe West came to place a high value onindividual jurisdictions (e.g., individuals aregranted the active mastery of their world), inChina the emphasis was on individuals ad-justing to the world by finding their placein a harmonious status ordering of roles.For Hamilton, however, this political-culturaltrait suggests a different path for China intocapitalism, through filial piety and familial en-terprise, rather than an intractable culturalobstacle.

Even close followers of Weber—Hamiltonor Collins (1997) for example—do not arguefor the strong thesis that major religiousethics such as Confucianism or Buddhism areantithetical to the development of capitalism.Most sociologists today subscribe to thedifferentiated view we discuss below. By con-trast, economists’ understanding of the effectof culture on development has been morerigid and realist. Landes (1998), for instance,makes the bold argument that industrialrevolutions are unsustainable without certaincultural traits, which he thinks of as normsthat express themselves in personal virtues.The argument has some qualifications, butnevertheless, “if we learn anything from thehistory of economic development,” he argues,“it is that culture makes all the difference”(Landes 1998, p. 516).

The work of another economist, Greif(1994, 2006), stands out as a sophisticatedattempt to delineate the microlevel mecha-nisms whereby cultural worldviews give rise(or not) to market institutions. In his com-parative study of commercial life in thelate medieval period, Greif contrasts the so-cially heterogeneous makeup and individualist

296 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

culture of Genoese merchants with the me-chanical solidarity and collectivist culture ofMaghribi traders. Using a game-theoreticapproach, he shows how different expecta-tions with respect to others’ actions in eachcultural context shaped principal/agent rela-tionships, attitudes toward the circulation ofinformation, and sanctions for deviant be-havior and—ultimately—gave rise to diver-gent paths of economic development. Greifargues that the two groups evolved differ-ent economic systems as efficient responsesto the problem of moral hazard under strongcultural constraints. The alternative institu-tional solutions, however, were not equalin terms of their economic performance inthe long run. Whereas the Genoese tradersand their Western descendants could capi-talize on the blessings of formal contract-ing and go on to dominate the world, theMaghribi traders and their successors in thedeveloping world, although fairly efficient athome, got stuck by the shackles of infor-mality and highly personalized social rela-tions and were unable to extend their tradingactivities.

What these views have in common isthe argument that the moral order of soci-eties constitutes a precondition for the de-velopment of market capitalism, althoughthe mechanisms can be quite different—psychological in Weber’s case, rational andgame theoretic in Greif ’s. But the point is thatcapitalism thrives in certain cultural contextsand stumbles in others.

Finally, others have extended this argu-ment to sticky institutional legacies whoseeffects hamper the development of effi-cient institutions. Since Evans (1989) pop-ularized the distinction between predatoryand developmental states, for instance, schol-ars across the social sciences have attendedto the effect of political structures on eco-nomic development or failure. Among thebest in this vein in economics is an in-fluential article by Acemoglu et al. (2001),which demonstrates the long-lasting impactof the worst, extractive type of colonialism

(in which colonizers economically exploit thecolony but do not themselves settle there)on the quality of contemporary economicand political institutions and thus economicperformance.

The Voluntarist View: Good and BadInstitutions

The position that there are right and wronginstitutions when it comes to the developmentof markets has been a powerful instrument inthe hands of would-be advisers to economicpolicy makers. Among the best practice,market-friendly institutions economists havevariously identified are strong propertyrights (De Soto 2003, North 1990, North& Thomas 1973), a common law system(La Porta et al. 1998), well-developed andtransparent financial markets (Rajan & Zin-gales 2003), and specific models of corporategovernance (Hansmann & Kraakman 2001).Realists and voluntarists differ mainly in theirdegree of optimism about the malleabilityof pre-existing economic, social, cultural,and political conditions. For voluntarists,the set of right institutions for growth anddevelopment is available as a package to beimplemented more or less anywhere, perhapswith a few small tweaks to adjust for local id-iosyncrasies. Realists, by contrast, believe thatsuccess depends on some key institutionalor cultural ingredients but are more likelyto emphasize the burden of history or theinescapability of basic aspects of a society’sculture. Roland (2004) recently brought thisdebate home in economics by establishinga distinction between slow-moving (e.g.,culture, social norms) and fast-moving (e.g.,legal systems or electoral rules) institutions.A sharp critic of the “shock therapies” appliedin Eastern Europe and Russia, he arguesthat the interaction between the two types ofinstitutions explains why “the transplantationof ‘best practice’ institutions (or ‘institutionalmonocropping’) does not work . . . . Coun-tries with different cultural and historicalpaths must find within their slow-moving

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 297

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

institutions the roots for changes in theirfast-moving institutions” (Roland 2004,p. 120).

Such arguments point toward anotherform of voluntarism. If economic volun-tarism often amounts to a naturalization ofAmerican models as best practice institutions,sociological work provides a good illustrationof a softer, or hybrid, form of voluntarism,which relies more explicitly on the detailedknowledge of local institutions and culture.In his influential statement on industrialstrategies in Third World developmentalstates, for instance, Evans (1995) argues thata successful industrialization must rely on acombination of state capacity (e.g., a cohesiveand legitimate bureaucracy, autonomousfrom political pressure) and a workingconnection between public administrationand private capital. Criticizing not only thestate-bashing proclivities of much of con-temporary economic advice, but also whatwe may call the statist fervor of the earlierdevelopmentalist literature, he shows that“state capacity without connection will not dothe job” (Evans 1995, p. 244). Chibber (2003)complements this argument by suggestingthat state autonomy is insufficient in anotherway: If the culture of bureaucratic rationalityis squandered in the competitive processamong state agencies with no proper dis-ciplinary oversight, development strategiesare unlikely to be successful. Finally, Evans(2004, p. 31), making an argument somewhatsimilar to Putnam’s (1993), has recentlysuggested a further mechanism for improvingeconomic performance, “deliberative institu-tions founded on a thick democracy of publicdiscussion and exchange,” for which he findsempirical illustrations in the state of Kerala,India, and in the city of Porto Allegre, Brazil.The key, then, is the combination of a volun-tarist principle having to do with the generalform of political and administrative insti-tutions (embedded autonomy, bureaucraticcohesiveness, deliberative democracy) and ofthe sociological attention to its specific artic-ulation within the local context. Once these

general principles are established, indeed, therange of possible blueprints remains quiteopen.

The Differentiated View: Varietiesof Capitalism

In contrast to both realists and voluntarists, athird group of scholars argues that the rangeof viable pathways to growth is in fact quitewide. Some version of this more differentiatedview is the dominant position within sociol-ogy. For our purposes, its proponents can bedistinguished by how close a causal connec-tion they see between institutions or culture,on the one hand, and economic growth, onthe other. Some argue that different culturesor institutional configurations directly sup-port different types of capitalisms or indus-trial strategies. How many types is a matter ofdebate. Hall & Soskice (2001) posit two basicvarieties of modern capitalism (liberal and co-ordinated, modeled after stylized versions ofthe United States and Germany, respectively),each of which is organized around comple-mentarities among the different institutionaldomains and is capable, in its ideal typicalform, of yielding high growth rates. Others(e.g., Amable 2003) see a broader range ofpossible institutional combinations and eco-nomic outcomes.

At the opposite end of the scale are thosewho see a much weaker link between cul-tural and institutional arrangements and eco-nomic performance. Dobbin’s (1994) com-parative analysis of the development of therailway sector in the nineteenth century is aparadigmatic case. In their efforts to achieveeconomic growth, he argues, public officials inthree countries chose different paths becauseof their different moral perceptions about howto maintain social order. In the United States,they strove primarily to protect communityself-determination and prevent public corrup-tion; in France centralized coordination bythe state was deemed necessary to avoid lo-gistical chaos; and in Britain they were con-cerned with protecting individual sovereignty.

298 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Three different economic orders emerged inthese countries, each efficient at performingsome tasks and less so at performing others.All three of these orders could plausibly beunderstood as rational responses to the waythese officials perceived the problems to besolved and the ultimate goals of their action.That each country built a functioning nationalrailway network was taken, by those involvedin each case, as a confirmation of this point.For Dobbin, the performance of the railwaynetworks he studies is of interest mainly in anegative sense: Despite their differences, alldid well enough to justify their planners’ faithin them, which helps reject the hypothesis thatsome basic competitive laws described the de-velopment of each system.

It is not just sociologists of culture who areskeptical of strong claims about the economicefficacy of institutional arrangements, how-ever. Advocates of multiple paths such as Halland Soskice argue that there is more thanone way to organize an effective, productiveeconomy, but they retain the convictionthat there is a relatively tight connectionbetween institutional coherence and eco-nomic performance. Like Hall and Soskice,Kenworthy (2004) argues that different sortsof capitalisms can thrive without having toconverge on a single model in the long run.But, like Dobbin, he is not convinced that thelink between institutional complementaritiesand economic performance is tight. Policyoptions typically presented as economicallyinevitable trade-offs are in fact more similarto political choices that might or mightnot be pursued without strong effects oneconomic performance. Dobbin sees thisdecoupling as evidence that differencesbetween models of political order drownout the effects of economic laws, whereasfor Kenworthy it provides opportunities toimplement alternative social policies withoutthe fear of crashing the economy.

On its face, the feeble markets view cannotmatch the liberal dream view for zealous ad-vocacy nor the commodifed nightmare viewfor damning critique. Yet a reading of this lit-

erature makes it clear that each of the realist,voluntarist, and differentiated views is oftenproposed as a moral or ideological project.Most realist readings are the latest version ofthe long-standing idea that “West is best.”Optimistic voluntarists urge that the king-dom of God lies within us, requiring only theright ingredients and the political resolve toput a plan into action. And the differentiatedview amounts to a robust defense of alterna-tive models of economic success: A thousandflowers—or some number between two andseven—ought to be allowed to bloom.

MORALIZED MARKETS:MARKETS AS SCIENTIFICAND MORAL PROJECTS

Hirschman identified a progression in intel-lectual history from doux commerce argumentsto autodestruction to feudal shackles (orblessings). We converted this sequence toa typology and used it to organize our dis-cussion thus far. In the spirit of Hirschman’shistorical perspective, we link classic state-ments of each view to counterparts in thecontemporary literature, while emphasizingthat the three positions have differentiated in-ternally or shifted their emphasis over time. Inbroad outline, however, a picture of how theseparate worlds of the market and the moralorder interact is clearly visible within eachview. In the doux commerce and corrosive mar-ket versions, the causal line runs strongly frommarket to morality, for good or bad. The fee-ble markets view is more sanguine. Differentsocial and moral orders may foster the marketor inhibit it, or simply give it a particular localflavor.

Are these the only choices? We think that abody of recent work strikes out in a new direc-tion, one not so well captured by Hirschman’stypology. Its characteristic move is to ar-gue that markets are culture, not just be-cause they are the products of human prac-tice and sense making (Abolafia 1997, KnorrCetina & Bruegger 2002), but because mar-kets are explicitly moral projects, saturated

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 299

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

with normativity. We see three areas in whichthis idea is being developed. First, there isthe role of markets in the creation of moralboundaries between persons or societies. Onthe surface, this work recalls McCloskey’s ar-guments about the bourgeois virtues or Fried-manite arguments about the importance ofmarkets to individual liberty, but on the sur-face only. The sociologists we discuss beloware typically concerned with the social sourcesof moral ideas and not the development ofa positive moral theory. Second, at the levelof particular markets, sociologists of sciencehave begun to treat the social technologies ofmarket making in the same way that they ex-amine life in laboratories. In this work, thepersistent tension in economics between nor-mative and descriptive theory is shown to beresolved in practice through the developmentof social technologies that bring the behaviorof markets in line with the demands of the-ory. Third, at the macro level, economic rulesturn out to be filled with explicit moralizing,whether concerning the creditworthiness ofnations, their degree of corruption and crony-ism, or the extent of corporate social and envi-ronmental responsibility. All these approachesaim to show that market exchange is saturatedwith moral meaning—that is, that it involvesmore or less conscious efforts to categorize,normalize, and naturalize behaviors and rulesthat are not natural in any way, whether in thename of economic principles (e.g., efficiency,productivity) or more social ones (e.g., justice,social responsibility).

Markets and the Making of MoralPersons

Anyone who has read The Protestant Ethic andthe Spirit of Capitalism knows that in modernsocieties money is central to the evaluation ofthe moral worth of individuals. The carefulmanagement of one’s wealth is not just eco-nomically rational but an index of one’s moralresponsibility. The earmarking of money fordifferent social uses relies on, and supports,systems of moral classification (Zelizer 1994).

Similarly, different kinds of payments (piecerates, wages, salaries, stock options, and soon) do not simply reflect specific incentivesor bear only a technical relation to the workbeing paid for. They also incorporate spe-cific status signals, cultural representations(Biernacki 1995), and codes of moral worth.We can clearly see this moralizing aspect ofpayment systems, for instance, in research onthe evolution of welfare provision. Culturalcategories of worth are institutionalized insystems of benefits and entitlement (Mohr2005) and provide the basic set of mean-ings and tropes available to actors seeking toreform or reorganize existing arrangements(Steensland 2006).

The same processes can be seen withinkinds of market exchange as well as at theborder between market and nonmarket activ-ity. In fact, the intertwining of market activityand moral valuation is so pervasive that re-cent studies have argued that the image ofa clean division between market and non-market spheres is of limited utility. Zelizer’swork consistently emphasizes how marketsand moral boundaries shift and recombinein practice. Her early study of life insur-ance (Zelizer 1979) showed how sacrilegiouslyprofiting from death could be recategorizedas a morally responsible form of investment,with the help of deliberate efforts to ritu-alize the purchase of insurance at the sametime as marketizing it. In this case, she il-lustrates that successful commodification (thespread of the insurance market) requires sub-stantial moral and cultural work. Her sub-sequent (Zelizer 1985) analysis of the elimi-nation of the child labor market in the latenineteenth century shows a similar processof sacralization moving in the opposite direc-tion, as children were removed from the mar-ket and became priceless objects of sentiment.Most recently, Zelizer (2005b) has examinedthe careful ways that different kinds of inti-mate relationships are differentiated from oneanother. She emphasizes the crucial role mon-etary exchanges play (as they are interpreted,variously, as payments, gifts, or entitlements)

300 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

in defining and signaling the substance of par-ticular social ties.

Collins (2000, p. 18) argues that Zelizer’swork shows how superficially homogenousmarkets often disguise quite separate “re-stricted circuits of exchange” (Zelizer 2005a),in which prices and money carry particularinformation about the moral status and socialpositions of participants. From this point ofview, markets cannot be conceived as morallyimproving institutions in the sense put for-ward by McCloskey. But they play a powerfulmoralizing role in practice by defining cate-gories of worth and, through variation in theform and timing of payments, signaling thekind of transaction taking place. For instance,Velthuis (2005) provides a detailed study ofthe highly symbolic nature of prices in the artmarket. The division between art and moneyis reflected in the physical structure of gal-leries (art at the front, commerce at the back).Understanding the price of a piece of art de-pends on knowing many other facts about thesocial organization of the art world. Prices forart vary depending on whom artworks are ex-changed with, as practices of discounting serveto mark particularistic relationships betweendealers. The pricing of art itself is a highlyscripted process, dependent on the position ofdealers, the setting of the sale, and narrativesabout the arc of the particular artist’s career.

The approach is broadly Durkheimian.Morality does not refer here to some univer-sal ethical standard; rather, it means what asociety, or a group, defines as good or bad,legitimate or inappropriate. The moral val-uation or appropriate classification of par-ticular goods, or even of the market itself,is therefore not fixed but empirically vari-able. From this point of view the study of ex-change relations brings about an analysis ofhow moral categories (defined in this socio-logical way) are formed, contested, and trans-formed. Zelizer’s approach allows for consid-erable analytical nuance, for example, in herreadings of the complex fights—often playedout in legal cases—through which people seekto define transactions as falling into one cat-

egory or another, depending on the sort ofpeople and types of relationships involved.This focus on conflict over meaning opens theprospect of linking local battles over particu-lar transactions with large-scale shifts in cate-gories of worth, something that Zelizer doesnot deal with directly.

The appropriate classification of goods (asexchangeable or not, as gifts or commodities,and so on) is often the subject of conflict.Objects or relationships may move back andforth across boundaries in response to techno-logical change, the mobilization of interestedgroups, or the efforts of moral entrepreneurs.For instance, blood donation shifted from agift-based to a partially marketized system andback again in the United States between the1960s and the 1980s, whereas the status oforgan donation is presently highly contested,with both supporters and opponents of mar-ket exchange claiming that theirs is the prop-erly moral position (Healy 2006). The suc-cessful classification of certain exchanges asgifts may act as a channel for power or ex-ploitation as easily as the process of commod-ification. Feminist scholars have argued thisis often the case for many sorts of care work(Folbre & Nelson 2000). How gift and marketexchange relate to moral worth is, ultimately,an empirical question.

Declaring that moral boundaries are soci-ological phenomena does nothing to resolvepractical struggles over their definition. Whatmakes the question of the relationship be-tween markets and morality particularly diffi-cult to study from this dispassionate viewpointis that—as we demonstrate in the first and sec-ond parts of this review—social scientists havethemselves been deeply involved in the moralevaluation of markets and their alternatives.Critics remind us that the market is a pro-foundly political institution and routinely usethe language of commodification and powerto convey moral outrage. Advocates of mar-kets deny this and suggest more or less ex-plicitly that the rationale of the market isdeeply ethical, either because efficiency itselfis a vital moral criterion or because the market

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 301

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

enables some other, higher principle to be ful-filled. It is in this agonistic sense that marketsparticipate in the construction of categoriesof moral worth. People constantly mobilizemoral principles and views of the commongood to talk about the effects of market pro-cesses (Boltanski & Thevenot 2006, Lamont& Thevenot 2001). As such, markets are thesite of moral conflicts between social actorscommitted to different justificatory principlesand the locus of political struggles betweenvarious interests (Fligstein 1996, Schneiberg& Bartley 2001, Yakubovich et al. 2005). Thisheterogeneity should not blind us to the factthat some actors are considerably more pow-erful than others, just as some justificatorylogics (and the economic technologies asso-ciated with them) are more effective instru-ments than others in practice. The logic of ef-ficiency seems to depoliticize social relations,for example, by masking the political conflictsinherent in many kinds of economic policy,and this apparent objectivity helps reinforceits legitimacy (Amable & Palombarini 2005).

Economists and the Constructionof Calculative Agencies

The view of markets and morality discussedabove is necessarily reflexive. It acknowledgesthat all social actors, including social scientiststhemselves, participate in the process of defin-ing markets as moral things. Social scientistsdraw on various forms of evidence to weigh inon the moral evaluation of markets, define thecategories through which we understand mar-ket processes (e.g., public/private, rational/nonrational), and help frame the policies thatapply to them. Their arguments are repro-duced in the broader public sphere and im-plemented in policy.

More than any other academic profession-als, economists actively shape market institu-tions. Partly this is because economists areless embarrassed by beliefs about the rigid-ity of institutions and culture, as we suggestabove. Constantly solicited for their exper-tise, economists have taken the lead in in-

stitutional design—i.e., in providing recipesfor creating a framework for national devel-opment, corporate management, or organi-zational reform. As such, their contributionto the production of particular moral un-derstandings and behaviors deserves specialscrutiny, hence the relevance, for our analyti-cal purpose here, of the recent science-studiesliterature that preoccupies itself with whether,and how, economists (and economic models)make markets, or, rather, make markets workas they should. (See Callon 1998a, Callon& Muniesa 2005, MacKenzie et al. 2007 forgeneral statements. For more specific studies,see Beunza & Stark 2004, MacKenzie 2006,Zaloom 2006 on finance; Mitchell 2005 onland titles; and Guala 2001, Mirowski &Nik-Khah 2007 on auctions.)

Much of this work tries to demonstrate orcritically evaluate what Callon (1998b) callsthe “performativity of economics.” This is theidea that economic technologies do not justdescribe the world, but are profoundly in-volved in shaping it—to the point of makingreal agents behave in the way theory says theyshould. Economics’ emphasis on incentives,for instance, is explicitly directed at aligningthe behavior of actors (whether individuals orcorporations) so they will perform a desiredoutcome, not out of compliance with a coer-cive order, but simply out of self-interest. In aworld saturated by economic thinking, actorsare thus progressively turned into calculativeagencies. Homo economicus, as Callon (1998b)puts it, is “made flesh” by economic technolo-gies; economic models, formulated througha process of abstraction and disentanglementfrom reality, thus get entangled again.

As MacKenzie (2006, pp. 15–25) notes,however, the concept of performativity allowsfor both weaker and stronger interpretations,and the stronger the interpretation, the harderit is to show conclusively. He distinguishesthree kinds of performativity, in increasingorder of interest. With generic performativ-ity, the concepts and language of economicsare used by participants in the economy. Ef-fective performativity happens when the tools

302 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

of economics materially affect the outcomeof the process. The strongest case is Barnes-ian performativity (after Barnes 1988), whenenacting the theory or model alters the eco-nomic actors or process “so that they bettercorrespond to the model” (MacKenzie 2006,p. 19).

Clearly, under empirical scrutiny, weakervarieties of performativity might easily bemistaken for stronger ones, and the weakest,generic sort might just be window dressing forprocesses that might have happened anyway.Here students of performativity echo theirorigins in the sociology of science. Researchin that field has been criticized for equivo-cating between strong claims about scientificknowledge that turn out to be false (or hard toestablish) and weaker claims that are sustain-able but much less interesting. The method-ological reaction of the performativists issimilar to the response within science stud-ies: emphasize the incorporation of theoret-ical principles not just in the minds of ac-tors, but also in the “algorithms, procedures,routines, and material devices” (MacKenzie2006, p. 19) used in the field. In responseto critics (Miller 2002), Callon (2005, pp. 1–4; see also Callon & Muniesa 2005) makesthe same point: “Talking of the performativityof economics means . . . that concrete marketsconstitute collective calculative devices . . . .These agencies, like Hobbes’ Leviathan, aremade up of human bodies but also of prosthe-ses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algo-rithms, etc.”

This (mostly European) work on perfor-mativity connects with two lines of (mostlyAmerican) sociology focusing on how cat-egorical consistency and comparability areachieved in practice. First, the social tech-nologies of performativity are related to thetechniques of quantification and commensu-ration reviewed in Espeland & Stevens (1998)and analyzed in, for example, Carruthers& Stinchcombe (1999), Sauder & Espeland(2006), or Chan (2004). Second, the way inwhich these technologies disentangle objectsrecalls White’s (1992, pp. 12–13, 180–84) no-

tion of decoupling, in which agents simplifytheir settings and (in the process) achievecomparability between identities or prod-ucts. Economic sociologists in the network-structuralist tradition have drawn on White’sideas to show the costs (in terms of status orlegitimacy) to actors or products that are noteasily compared to others or cannot be lo-cated in an available category (Podolny 2005,Zuckerman 1999). Across these research pro-grams, we repeatedly encounter the idea thatpractical techniques for quantifying, com-mensurating, or screening create and sustainstable categories that then legitimate statuses,which in turn allow for stronger moral regu-lation of the actors being categorized—a re-entanglement.

The Governmentalizationof the Economy?

Economic exchange and policy making aresaturated with moral statements. Today, con-cepts such as transparency and corruption,and the complex techniques that performthem, are routinely used to monitor corpo-rations, international institutions, and evencountries. In both their commonsensical andmore elaborated forms, ideas about fair prices,fair wages, fair competition, and now fair tradeare predicated on moral views about whatthings are really worth or how much poweris too much. The conditions under whichcertain economic behaviors will be definedas moral or immoral are always social—evenwhen they are rationalized and formalizedby expertise. Japan before World War II, forinstance, did not view cartels as illegitimatearrangements. To the contrary, they were per-fectly normal modes of operation in a busi-ness world dominated by networks of mutualobligation (Gao 2001). What has changed be-tween then and now is that such practices havebeen redefined as illegitimate by experts act-ing in the name of a different value: efficiency.

Similarly, few people cared about coffee-growing practices just a few decades ago.Now these practices are classified as either

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 303

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

conventional or ethical. The latter are the tar-get of strict standards of certification and evenclaim a separate market. Consumers, businessactors, and policy makers have at their disposalelaborate technologies and theories to definethe moral criteria against which prices andwages are compared, the degree of compet-itiveness in a particular industry is evaluated,and the extent of corruption in a nation is mea-sured. Clearly, it is time to combine the anal-ysis of the moral discourses reviewed abovewith arguments about their cultural basis andthe performative techniques that enact them.In this way, we see how markets are being ac-tively moralized by the deployment of prac-tical techniques, whether self-consciously (asin the case of social responsibility) or in thename of neutrality and objectivity (as in thecase of efficiency). Indeed, many of the per-spectives discussed above can now be under-stood not only as discursive arguments aboutthe market, but also as practical dispositifs (touse a Foucauldian term) that work to bringmarkets in line with moral ideals so the pro-cesses that go on inside them can be regardedas legitimate (Seabrooke 2006).

As demonstrated above, much of the ratio-nalization and moralization that takes placeis dominated by economists and often relieson the elevation of purely economic crite-ria such as efficiency or profit making to thestatus of a moral rule. The proliferation ofagencies that monitor the behavior of indi-viduals, corporations, or nations with respectto debt, transparency, or honesty is an in-tensely moral project carried out in the nameof rationalizing and expanding economic ex-change and democratizing society. (Politicaland economic liberalism are often two facesof the same cultural process.) The neoliberaleconomy is thus a governmentalized economy(Foucault 1979, Gordon 1991, Rose & Miller1992)1 shaped by a myriad of surveillance or-ganizations entitled to (but also with obvious

1Foucault named this phenomenon but did not analyzespecific instances or mechanisms in detail (Gorski 2003,pp. 24–26).

material interests in) the rational applicationof technical means to govern the conduct ofeconomic actors—be they small or large. Re-cent research thus elaborates the dramatic ex-pansion of individual credit reporting (Guseva& Rona-Tas 2001), the new politics of trans-parency (Best 2005), the rise of corruption rat-ings (Bukovansky 2006, Larmour 2006), ac-counting techniques (Miller 2001), financialanalysis (Zorn et al. 2004), and bond rating(Sinclair 2005). These are not only informa-tional devices that grease the wheels of com-merce, but profoundly disciplining ones aswell. Indeed, consistent with the original Fou-cauldian concept, the diffusion of these pro-cedures embodies a profoundly new sociopo-litical view in which the behavior of actors isregulated internally through self-monitoring,rather than externally through coercion.

As mentioned above, not all economic gov-ernmentalization has its origins in the econ-omy. For instance, new systems of private reg-ulation via certification have also emerged as aconsequence of bottom-up protests by socialmovement activists working within the pre-vailing neoliberal climate to extend the no-tions of accountability and transparency tocorporate policy on environmental and laborquestions (Bartley 2003, Goldman 2005). Ob-viously, one can see these developments asmotivated solely by narrowly economic con-siderations: After all, ethics is good business,too, both for those who comply (e.g., the riseof organic farming) and for those who imposethe standards (e.g., the expansion of certifyingagencies). However, to reduce the moraliza-tion of markets to economics would be to missentirely the meaning and shape of the moralenterprise at work and its profound differencefrom earlier eras, in both institutional struc-ture and direction.

MORALITY AND MODERNITY

Models of economic development and or-ganization always rely on particular under-standings of the basis of the moral orderthat get universalized through hegemonic

304 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

processes (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1999). Nosuch model, then, is ever free of moral judg-ments. Still, these judgments may be articu-lated more or less openly, or simply remainburied below the surface of material relations.A number of authors (e.g., Best 2005) havesuggested that the current period is unusu-ally rich in explicit moral statements (most ofthem about self-control and self-regulation)that support the neoliberal project, in inter-national economic relations and elsewhere.The discourse of the market is increasinglyarticulated in moral and civilizational terms,rather than simply in the traditional terms ofself-interest and efficiency. There is a sensein which technocratic expertise is no longersufficient to generate legitimacy and that itmust be shored up by loftier ideals and prac-tices. In our effort to understand this phe-nomenon, we should perhaps take a cue fromBourdieu’s (1977, p. 169) remark that the “ar-bitrary principles of the prevailing classifica-tion” never need as much explicit articulationas when they come under direct attack, as theneoliberal project has in recent years. In suchcircumstances, these principles are defendedby condemning alternatives (e.g., tamperingwith property rights) as morally evil.

The obvious corollary to this argument iswhat Polanyi (2001) called the “double move-ment,” that is, the societal backlash againstthe advance of self-regulating markets. Manyof the social movements that articulate a cri-tique of the modern economy may be under-stood from this point of view, for instance.The systemic demand for legitimacy may evenhelp fuel these reactions in an effort to en-

compass them (see, for instance, the rise ofgreen neoliberalism at the World Bank inGoldman 2005). But it is important to remem-ber that the ways in which these heterodoxiesget formulated, transposed, and implementedare themselves constrained by the existing in-stitutions and the rules of the game, in whichthey are inevitably embedded and on whichthey sometimes directly depend. The resultis that much of their critique of the existingeconomic order is itself technified and com-mensurating, diffused across a wide range ofgoverning institutions, and often premised onself-disciplining—in other words, it is no lessgovernmentalized a vision of the moral or-der of the market than the prevailing view itopposes.

In summary, for most of its history, in-tellectuals have variously praised, reviled, ordownplayed the moral consequences of mar-ket capitalism. These positions remain wellrepresented in today’s literature. Still, the dis-tinctive quality of contemporary scholarshipis that it goes much further in opening theblack box of morality and dissecting the cul-tural and technical work necessary to produce,to sustain, or—conversely—to constrain themarket. In doing so, it also reveals the rolesocial scientists play in this process. As thelast section of the paper suggests, continuingthis task, then, implies a reflexive approach,in which theorists in economics, political sci-ence, and sociology critically consider theirown participation in the definition of the mar-ket’s moral categories and in the construc-tion of competing moralizing instruments andtechniques.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the participants of the 2006 Summer Institute on “Economy and Society” at theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for a discussion of a previous draft, aswell as Len Seabrooke and Viviana Zelizer for helpful advice.

LITERATURE CITED

Abolafia M. 1997. Making Markets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press

Acemoglu D, Robinson JA, Johnson S. 2001. The colonial origins of comparative development:an empirical investigation. Am. Econ. Rev. 91:1369–401

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 305

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Ackerman F, Heizerling L. 2005. Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value ofNothing. New York: New Press

Adorno T, Horkheimer M. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. PressAkerlof G. 1970. The market for lemons: quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. Q.

J. Econ. 84:488–500Amable B. 2003. The Diversity of Modern Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford Univ. PressAmable B, Palombarini S. 2005. L’Economie n’est pas une science morale. Paris: Raisons d’AgirAnderson E. 1996. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. PressAppadurai A, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge Univ. PressBarnes B. 1988. The Nature of Power. Cambridge, UK: PolityBartley T. 2003. Certifying forests and factories: states, social movements, and the rise of

private regulation in the apparel and forest products fields. Polit. Soc. 31:433–64Beckert J. 2002. Beyond the Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressBest J. 2005. The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell Univ. PressBeunza D, Stark D. 2004. Tools of the trade: the socio-technology of arbitrage in a Wall Street

trading room. Industr. Corp. Change 13:369–400Biernacki R. 1995. The Fabrication of Labor. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressBoltanski L, Thevenot L. 2006. On Justification. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressBourdieu P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. PressBourdieu P. 1984. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. PressBourdieu P. 2000. Making the economic habitus: Algerian workers revisited. Ethnography 1:17–

41Bourdieu P, Wacquant L. 1999. On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory Cult. Soc. 16:41–58Bowden B, Seabrooke L, eds. 2006. Global Standards of Market Civilization. London:

Routledge/RIPEBowles S. 1998. Endogenous preferences: the cultural consequences of markets and other

economic institutions. J. Econ. Lit. 36:75–111Bryson B. 1996. “Anything but heavy metal”: symbolic exclusion and musical dislikes. Am. Soc.

Rev. 61:884–99Bukovansky M. 2006. Civilizing the bad: ethical problems with neoliberal approaches to cor-

ruption. See Bowden & Seabrooke 2006, pp. 77–92Callon M, ed. 1998a. The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: BlackwellCallon M. 1998b. The embeddedness of economic markets in economics. See Callon 1998a,

pp. 1–57Callon M. 2005. Why virtualism paves the way to political impotence: a reply to Daniel Miller’s

critique of The Laws of the Markets. Econ. Sociol.: Eur. Electron. Newsl. 6:3–20Callon M, Muniesa F. 2005. Economic markets as calculative collective devices. Org. Stud.

26:1229–50Carruthers BG, Stinchcombe AL. 1999. The social structure of liquidity: flexibility, markets

and states. Theory Soc. 28:353–82Chan C. 2004. Making insurance a way of life in China: how culture matters in creating a market.

PhD thesis. Northwestern Univ., Evanston, ILChibber V. 2003. Locked in Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressCollins R. 1997. An Asian route to capitalism: religious economy and the origins of self-

transforming growth in Japan. Am. Sociol. Rev. 62:843–65Collins R. 2000. Situational stratification: a micro-macro theory of inequality. Soc. Theory

18:17–43

306 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Cowen T. 2002. Creative Destruction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pressde Montesquieu C. 1989 (1749). The Spirit of the Laws. Transl. AM Cohler, BC Miller, H Stone.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. PressDe Soto H. 2003. The Mystery of Capital. New York: Basic Booksde Tocqueville A. 2003 (1835). Democracy in America. London: Penguin BooksDiMaggio P, Louch H. 1998. Socially embedded consumer transactions: For what kinds of

purchases do people most often use networks? Am. Sociol. Rev. 63:619–37Dobbin F. 1994. Forging Industrial Policy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. PressEasterbrook G. 2004. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. New

York: Random HouseElyachar J. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo.

Durham, NC: Duke Univ. PressEconomist. 1992. Let them eat pollution. The Economist, Feb. 8, p. 66Ertman MM, Williams JC, eds. 2005. Rethinking Commodification. New York: NY Univ. PressEspeland W, Stevens M. 1998. Commensuration as a social process. Annu. Rev. Soc. 24:313–43Evans P. 1989. Predatory, developmental, and other apparatuses: a comparative political econ-

omy perspective on the Third World state. Soc. Forum 4:561–87Evans P. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Prince-

ton Univ. PressEvans P. 2004. Development as institutional change: the pitfalls of monocropping and the

potentials of deliberation. Stud. Comp. Int. Dev. 38:30–52Fligstein N. 1990. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.

PressFligstein N. 1996. Markets as politics: a political-cultural approach to market institutions. Am.

Sociol. Rev. 61:656–73Folbre N, Nelson JA. 2000. For love or money—or both? J. Econ. Perspect. 14:123–40Foucault M. 1979. On governmentality? Ideol. Conscious. 6:5–21Fourcade M. 2007. Theories of markets and theories of society. Am. Behav. Sci. 50:1015–34Frank T. 2001. One Market Under God. New York: Anchor BooksFrey BS. 1997. A constitution for knaves crowds out civic virtues. Econ. J. 107:1043–53Frey BS, Stutzer A. 2001. Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human

Well-Being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressFriedman M. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: Univ. Chicago PressGalbraith JK. 1956. American Capitalism. New York: Houghton MifflinGao B. 2001. The state and the associational order of the Japanese economy: the institution-

alization of cartels and trade associations in Japan (1931–1945). Soc. Forum 16:409–43Geertz C. 1978. The bazaar economy: information and search in peasant marketing. Am. Econ.

Rev. 68(2): 28–32Glaeser EL, Shleifer A. 2003. The rise of the regulatory state. J. Econ. Lit. 41:401–25Goldman M. 2005. Imperial Nature. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. PressGordon C. 1991. Governmental rationality: an introduction. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in

Governmentality, ed. G Burchell, C Gordon, P Miller, pp. 1–51. Chicago: Univ. ChicagoPress

Gorski PS. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early ModernEurope. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press

Greif A. 1994. Cultural beliefs and the organization of society: a historical and theoreticalreflection on collectivist and individualist societies. J. Polit. Econ. 102:912–50

Greif A. 2006. Institutions and the Paths to the Modern Economy. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniv. Press

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 307

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Guala F. 2001. Building economic machines: the FCC auctions. Stud. Hist. Philos. Sci. 32:453–77

Guseva A, Rona-Tas A. 2001. Uncertainty, risk and trust: Russian and American credit cardmarkets compared. Am. Sociol. Rev. 66:623–46

Habermas J. 1985. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1. Boston: BeaconHall P, Soskice D. 2001. Varieties of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford Univ. PressHamilton G. 1994. Civilizations and the organization of the economy. In Handbook of Economic

Sociology, ed. R Swedberg, N Smelser, pp. 183–205. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressHamilton G. 2006. Chinese Capitalism: The Organisation of Chinese Economics. London: Rout-

ledgeHamilton G, Biggart N. 1988. Market, culture, and authority: a comparative analysis of man-

agement and organization in the Far East. Am. J. Sociol. 94:52–94Hansmann H, Kraakman R. 2001. The end of history for corporate law. Georgetown Law J.

89:439–68Hausman DH, McPherson M. 2006. Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2nd ed.Healy K. 2006. Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs. Chicago:

Univ. Chicago PressHenrich J, Boyd R, Bowles S, Camerer C, Fehr E, Gintis H. 2004. Foundations of Human

Sociality. Oxford: Oxford Univ. PressHirschman AO. 1977. The Passions and the Interests. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressHirschman AO. 1982. Rival interpretations of market society: civilizing, destructive, or feeble?

J. Econ. Lit. 20:1463–84Hochschild A. 2003. The Commercialization of Intimate Life. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressJameson F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke

Univ. PressKenworthy L. 2004. Egalitarian Capitalism. New York: Russell Sage Found.Klein N. 2002. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. New York: PicadorKnorr Cetina K, Bruegger U. 2002. Global microstructures: the virtual societies of financial

markets. Am. J. Soc. 107:905–50Kollock P. 1999. The production of trust in online markets. In Advances in Group Processes,

Vol. 16, ed. EJ Lawler, MW Macy, SR Thye, HA Waker, pp. 99–123. Greenwich, CT:JAI

Kovacic W, Shapiro C. 2000. Antitrust policy: a century of economic and legal thinking. J.Econ. Perspect. 14:43–60

Lamont M, Thevenot L. 2001. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge Univ. Press

Landes D. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.New York: Norton

Lane RE. 1991. The Market Experience. New York: Cambridge Univ. PressLane RE. 2001. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. PressLa Porta R, Lopez-de Silanes F, Schleifer A, Vishny RW. 1998. Law and finance. J. Polit. Econ.

106:1113–55Larmour P. 2006. Civilizing techniques: transparency international and the spread of anti-

corruption. See Bowden & Seabrooke 2006, pp. 95–106Lerner A. 1972. The economics and politics of consumer sovereignty. Am. Econ. Rev. 62:258–66Lessig L. 2004. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: PenguinMacKenzie D. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press

308 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

MacKenzie D, Muniesa F, Siu L, eds. 2007. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativityof Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press

Martin P, Mayer T, Thoenig M. 2006. Make Trade Not War? CEPR Discuss. Pap. 5218Marx K. 1992. Capital: Vol. I. A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin BooksMcCloskey DN. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics in an Age of Commerce. Chicago: Univ.

Chicago PressMiller D. 2002. Turning Callon the right way up. Econ. Soc. 31:218–33Miller P. 2001. Governing by numbers: why calculative practices matter. Soc. Res. 68:379–96Mirowski P, Nik-Khah E. 2007. Markets made flesh: Callon, performativity and a problem in

science studies, augmented with consideration of the FCC auctions. See MacKenzie et al.2007, pp. 190–224

Mitchell T. 2002. The Rule of Experts. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. PressMitchell T. 2005. The work of economics: how a discipline makes its world. Eur. J. Soc. 46:297–

320Mohr JW. 2005. The discourses of welfare and welfare reform. In The Blackwell Companion to

the Sociology of Culture, ed. MD Jacobs, N Weiss Hanrahan, pp. 346–63. Oxford: BlackwellMolm LD, Collett JL, Schaefer DR. 2006. Conflict and fairness in social exchange. Soc. Forces

84:2331–52North DC. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge Univ. PressNorth DC, Thomas RP. 1973. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge Univ. PressPodolny J. 2005. Status Signals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressPolanyi K. 2001. The Great Transformation. Boston: BeaconPortes A, Haller W. 2005. The informal economy. In The Handbook of Economic Sociol-

ogy, ed. NJ Smelser, R Swedberg, pp. 403–25. New York/Princeton, NJ: Russell SageFound./Princeton Univ. Press

Putnam R. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ:Princeton Univ. Press

Radin M. 1996. Contested Commodities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. PressRajan R, Zingales L. 2003. Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial

Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity. New York: Crown Bus.Roland G. 2004. Understanding institutional change: fast-moving and slow-moving institu-

tions. Stud. Comp. Int. Dev. 38:109–31Romer P. 1986. Increasing returns and long-run growth. J. Polit. Econ. 94:1002–37Rose N, Miller P. 1992. Political power beyond the state: problematics of government. Br. J.

Soc. 43:173–205Sandel M. 2000. What money can’t buy: the moral limits of markets. In The Tanner Lectures on

Human Values, 21:89–122. Salt Lake City: Univ. Utah PressSauder M, Espeland W. 2006. Strength in numbers? A comparison of law and business school

rankings. Indiana Law J. 81:205–27Scheper-Hughes N, Wacquant L, eds. 2002. Commodifying Bodies. London: SageSchneiberg M, Bartley T. 2001. Regulating American industries: markets, politics and the

institutional determinants of fire insurance regulation. Am. J. Sociol. 107:101–46Schor JB. 1998. The Overspent American. New York: Basic BooksSchor JB. 2004. Born to Buy. New York: ScribnerSchwartz B. 2005. The Paradox of Choice. New York: Harper PerennialSeabright PA. 2004. The Company of Strangers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 309

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Seabrooke L. 2006. The Social Sources of Financial Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. PressSinclair T. 2005. The New Masters of Capital: American Bond Rating Agencies and the Politics of

Creditworthiness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. PressSmith A. 1978. Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. RL Meek, DD Raphael, PG Stein. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge Univ. PressSmith A. 1994. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Modern

LibrarySomers MR, Block F. 2005. From poverty to perversity: ideas, markets, and institutions over

200 years of welfare debate. Am. Sociol. Rev. 70:260–87Steensland B. 2006. Cultural categories and the American welfare state: the case of guaranteed

income policy. Am. J. Sociol. 111:1273–326Stigler J. 1981. Economics or ethics? In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 2. Salt Lake

City: Univ. Utah PressStigler J, Becker G. 1977. De gustibus non est disputandum. Am. Econ. Rev. 67:76–90Strasser S, ed. 2003. Commodifying Everything. New York: RoutledgeThrift N. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. London: SageVaidyanathan S. 2003. Copyrights and Copywrongs. New York: NY Univ. PressVeblen T. 1994 (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. London: Penguin BooksVelthuis O. 2005. Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pressvon Hayek FA. 1944. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Pressvon Hayek FA. 1945. The use of knowledge in society. Am. Econ. Rev. 4:519–30Wacquant L. 1999. Les Prisons de la Misere. Paris: Raisons d’AgirWacquant L. 2001. The penalization of poverty and the rise of Neoliberalism. Eur. J. Crim.

Policy Res. 9:401–12Wacquant L. 2007. Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of Neoliberal Penality. Cambridge, UK:

Polity. In pressWatson M. 2006. Civilizing market standards and the moral self. See Bowden & Seabrooke

2006, pp. 45–59Weber M. 1951 (1915). The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. Glencoe, IL: Free PressWeber M. 1958 (1904–1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles

Scribner’s SonsWestern B. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Found.White HC. 1992. Identity and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressWhitford J. 2005. The New Old Economy: Networks, Institutions, and the Organizational Transfor-

mation of the American Manufacturing Economy. New York: Oxford Univ. PressWilliamson OE. 1985. The Economic Institutions of Capitalism. New York: Free PressYakubovich V, Granovetter M, McGuire P. 2005. Electric charges: the social construction of

rate systems. Theory Soc. 34:579–612Zaloom C. 2006. Out of the Pits. Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: Univ.

Chicago PressZelizer VA. 1979. Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States.

New York: Columbia Univ. PressZelizer VA. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressZelizer VA. 1988. Beyond the polemics of the market: establishing a theoretical and empirical

agenda. Soc. Forum 3:614–34Zelizer VA. 1994. The Social Meaning of Money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressZelizer VA. 2005a. Circuits within capitalism. In The Economic Sociology of Capitalism, ed. V

Nee, R Swedberg, pp. 289–322. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press

310 Fourcade · Healy

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

ANRV316-SO33-14 ARI 31 May 2007 12:29

Zelizer VA. 2005b. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. PressZorn D, Dobbin F, Dierkes J, Kwok M. 2004. Managing investors: how financial markets

reshaped the American firm. In The Sociology of Financial Markets, ed. KK Cetina, A Preda,pp. 269–89. London: Oxford Univ. Press

Zuckerman EW. 1999. The categorical imperative: securities analysts and the illegitimacydiscount. Am. J. Sociol. 104:1398–438

www.annualreviews.org • Moral Views of Market Society 311

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

AR316-FM ARI 31 May 2007 15:18

Annual Reviewof Sociology

Volume 33, 2007Contents

FrontispieceLeo A. Goodman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � x

Prefatory Chapter

Statistical Magic and/or Statistical Serendipity: An Age of Progress inthe Analysis of Categorical DataLeo A. Goodman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �1

Theory and Methods

Bourdieu in American Sociology, 1980–2004Jeffrey J. Sallaz and Jane Zavisca � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 21

Human Motivation and Social Cooperation: Experimental andAnalytical FoundationsErnst Fehr and Herbert Gintis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 43

The Niche as a Theoretical ToolPamela A. Popielarz and Zachary P. Neal � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 65

Social Processes

Production Regimes and the Quality of Employment in EuropeDuncan Gallie � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 85

The Sociology of MarketsNeil Fligstein and Luke Dauter � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �105

Transnational Migration Studies: Past Developments and Future TrendsPeggy Levitt and B. Nadya Jaworsky � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �129

Control Theories in SociologyDawn T. Robinson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �157

Institutions and Culture

Military Service in the Life CourseAlair MacLean and Glen H. Elder, Jr. � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �175

v

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

AR316-FM ARI 31 May 2007 15:18

School Reform 2007: Transforming Education into a ScientificEnterpriseBarbara L. Schneider and Venessa A. Keesler � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �197

Embeddedness and the Intellectual Projects of Economic SociologyGreta R. Krippner and Anthony S. Alvarez � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �219

Political and Economic Sociology

The Sociology of the Radical RightJens Rydgren � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �241

Gender in PoliticsPamela Paxton, Sheri Kunovich, and Melanie M. Hughes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �263

Moral Views of Market SocietyMarion Fourcade and Kieran Healy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �285

The Consequences of Economic Globalization for AffluentDemocraciesDavid Brady, Jason Beckfield, and Wei Zhao � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �313

Differentiation and Stratification

Inequality: Causes and ConsequencesKathryn M. Neckerman and Florencia Torche � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �335

Demography

Immigration and ReligionWendy Cadge and Elaine Howard Ecklund � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �359

Hispanic Families: Stability and ChangeNancy S. Landale and R.S. Oropesa � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �381

Lost and Found: The Sociological Ambivalence Toward ChildhoodSuzanne Shanahan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �407

Urban and Rural Community Sociology

The Making of the Black Family: Race and Class in Qualitative Studiesin the Twentieth CenturyFrank F. Furstenberg � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �429

Policy

The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction,Coercion, Competition, or Learning?Frank Dobbin, Beth Simmons, and Geoffrey Garrett � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �449

vi Contents

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.

AR316-FM ARI 31 May 2007 15:18

Workforce Diversity and Inequality: Power, Status, and NumbersNancy DiTomaso, Corinne Post, and Rochelle Parks-Yancy � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �473

From the Margins to the Mainstream? Disaster Researchat the CrossroadsKathleen J. Tierney � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �503

Historical Sociology

Toward a Historicized Sociology: Theorizing Events, Processes, andEmergenceElisabeth S. Clemens � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �527

Sociology and World Regions

Old Inequalities, New Disease: HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan AfricaCarol A. Heimer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �551

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 24–33 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �579

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 24–33 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �583

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Sociology chapters (if any, 1997 tothe present) may be found at http://soc.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

Contents vii

Ann

u. R

ev. S

ocio

l. 20

07.3

3:28

5-31

1. D

ownl

oade

d fr

om a

rjou

rnal

s.an

nual

revi

ews.

org

by U

nive

rsity

of

Cal

ifor

nia

- B

erke

ley

on 0

8/30

/07.

For

per

sona

l use

onl

y.