/pdf/social-capital-a-theory-of-social-structure-and-action-4m7poq6byy.pdf

Social capital: a theory of social structure and action

Even as the market seems triumphant everywhere and its laws progressively and ineluctably impose themselves worldwide, we cannot fail to be struck by the lasting topicality of the following wellknown quotation from D. North: 'It is a peculiar fact that the literature on economics ... contains so little discussion of the central institution that underlies neoclassical economics-the market' (North, 1977).) How can this surprising shortcoming be explained? How can this self-proclaimed failure of economic theory be accounted for? By distinguishing the thing from the concept which refers to it, the marketplace from the market, the English language suggests a possible answer. While the market denotes the abstract mechanisms whereby supply and demand confront each other and adjust themselves in search of a compromise, the marketplace is far closer to ordinary experience and refers to the place in which exchange occurs. This distinction is, moreover, merely a particular case of a more general opposition, which the English language, once again, has the merit of conveying accurately: that between economics and economy, between theoretical and practical activity, in short, between economics as a discipline and economy as a thing. If economic theory knows so little about the marketplace, is it not simply because in striving to abstract and generalize it has ended up becoming detached from its object? Thus, the weakness of market theory may well be explained by its lack of interest in the marketplace. To remedy this shortcoming, economics would need only to return to its object, the economy, from which it never should have strayed in the first place. The matter, however, is not so simple. The danger of abstraction and unrealism which is supposed to threaten every academic discipline-and which time and again has been exposed and stigmatized,

Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics:

Since the 1970s, market‐based economic policies have been institutionalized as a nearly global policy paradigm. Using four national case studies, this article shows that economic and financial globalization played a critical role in fostering the transition to neoliberal policies, but that local institutional conditions were decisive in shaping the nature and meaning of the shift. While the analysis finds that developing countries appear more dependent upon direct external pressures than developed ones, it also shows that institutionalized patterns of state‐society relations determined the way in which neoliberal transitions were carried out, somewhat irrespectively of the level of economic development. In Chile and Britain, poorly mediated distributional conflict created the ideological conditions for a “monetarist” revolution. In Mexico and France, on the other hand, neoliberalism was understood mainly as a necessary step to adapt the country to the international economy.

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The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries1

This article relies on an analysis of the institutionalization of economics worldwide during the 20th century to argue that the logic of professional development in this particular field has come to be increasingly defined in global terms. Connections to (mainly) U.S.‐based standards of work and professional practice are routinely used in the local competition whereby different professional segments and groups seek to assert their authority on particular jurisdictions (scientific, corporate, or political). In this process of professional construction (or reconstruction), economies are being transformed through complex transnational mechanisms which, ultimately, feed back into the identity and jurisdictional claims of the economics profession itself, both in the “core” and in the “periphery.”

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The construction of a global profession : The transnationalization of economics

In this essay, we analyze the dominant position of economics within the network of the social sciences in the United States. We begin by documenting the relative insularity of economics, using bibliometric data. Next we analyze the tight management of the field from the top down, which gives economics its characteristic hierarchical structure. Economists also distinguish themselves from other social scientists through their much better material situation (many teach in business schools, have external consulting activities), their more individualist worldviews, and their confidence in their discipline's ability to fix the world's problems. Taken together, these traits constitute what we call the superiority of economists, where economists' objective supremacy is intimately linked with their subjective sense of authority and entitlement. While this superiority has certainly fueled economists' practical involvement and their considerable influence over the economy, it has also exposed them more to conflicts of interests, political critique, even derision.

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The Superiority of Economists

La croyance économique : les économistes entre science et politique

How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data

This article, in the line of Bourdieu (1989), belongs to the research domain about elites and the field of power. Using data from the Norwegian Power and Democracy Survey on elites, conducted in 2000, it specifically seeks to uncover the main dimensions and fractions in the Norwegian field of power. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) has been used to address this issue. The three main findings are these : firstly, our results show that the three most important principal dimensions in the field are an economic capital axis, then an educational and social capital axis, and then an axis separating the judicial positions from positions in culture, organizations and politics. Secondly, the political positions are the most accessible. Thirdly, the public judicial group is the most homogeneous.

The norwegian field of power anno 2000

Economic beliefs play a central role in the social construction of economic reality. It is necessary to include in the programme of a new economic sociology the active contribution of the main producers of economic beliefs, namely the economists. The role of economists in the reproduction of the social order can, to a certain extent, be described as the function of a central bank of economic beliefs. Economists are the producers of economic beliefs that are received, interpreted, used by various kinds of social actors in everyday life. In a situation of crisis like the one the French government faced in December 1995, it seems more and more obvious that they are becoming the ultimate reference, the lender of last resort for most contemporary social actors - economic leaders, technocrats, politicians, unionists, intellectuals, etc. To understand this particular position, one needs to consider economists as members of a specific social field, which has its own laws, regularities and structure. The social ch...

ECONOMISTS AND THE ECONOMIC ORDER The field of economists and the field of power in France

The use of economic analogies by Bourdieu has often been the object of much criticism. For some scholars, it reveals an “economistic” vision of the social world too much inspired by neoclassical economics. For others, it is a kind of mechanical metaphor transposed to cultural phenomena in a determinist way, as in the holistic (Marxist) tradition. To understand this usage and to refute these contradictory criticisms, we return to and focus on the very first occurrences in the 1958–1966 period – the focus of our article – of what Bourdieu would call a “general economy of practices” in his book Esquisse d’une theorie de la pratique. Two central aspects, often forgotten by critics, are presented here: first, the close but very particular link between his work and economics as a growing scientific discipline during these years; second, the criticisms Bourdieu makes of the economic model as a general scientific tool for the social sciences. If one insists only on one of the two sides of the coin, one risks misunderstanding Bourdieu’s original scientific habitusand intellectual project. By contrast, this “double” position opens the possibility of an “integrated” vision of social and economic factors of practices, thanks to the introduction of the “cultural” and above all the “symbolic” dimensions of social life.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3649651

Frédéric Lebaron

Papers

La croyance économique : les économistes entre science et politique

How Bourdieu “Quantified” Bourdieu: The Geometric Modelling of Data

The norwegian field of power anno 2000

ECONOMISTS AND THE ECONOMIC ORDER The field of economists and the field of power in France

Pierre Bourdieu: Economic models against economism