Weingast B.R., Wittman D. The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy

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932 laboratory experiments

There are two other kinds of laboratory experiments that are related to the voter

turnout question. The ﬁrst of these is voluntary contribution public good games,

where individuals can sacriﬁce some personal earnings for the beneﬁt of other group

members. The most striking results are seen in experiments where it is a dominant

strategy to contribute nothing, as in the prisoner’s dilemma. This has a long tradition,

and the interested reader is referred to the excellent (but now somewhat dated)

survey by John Ledyard (1995). This research has identiﬁed an array of environmental,

institutional, psychological, and sociological factors that inﬂuence the degree of coop-

eration in these games. This variety reﬂects the many disciplines that have contributed

(and continue to contribute) to experimental research in this area.

The second group of related experiments examine threshold public goods games.

In these games, there is a single group and each member faces a participation cost.

If the total number of participants exceeds a known ﬁxed threshold, then everyone

in the group receives a prize, and the value of the prize exceeds the participation cost.

These are generalizations of the game of chicken and the stag hunt games, rather

than the prisoner’s dilemma game. The voter turnout game is only slightly more

complicated, with the threshold of each party being endogenously determined by the

turnout choices of the other party. Thus it is as if there were a random threshold.

series of experiments by Palfrey and Rosenthal (1991a, 1991b, 1994)studyincomplete

information versions of these games (analogous to the Levine–Palfrey incomplete

information versions of the turnout game) and explore the eﬀects of communication

and repeated play. They ﬁnd that the Nash predictions are fairly accurate, but there is

strong evidence that the players have biased beliefs about the contribution behavior

of their opponents: they behave as if they think the other members of the group are

more generous than is actually the case. Goeree and Holt (2005)investigateamore

general class of games that include these threshold games.

6 Concluding Thoughts

.............................................................................

The short length of this chapter required leaving some gaping holes in the political

economy laboratory experimental literature. To complete the picture of political

science experimentation (or at least the “economic” brand of such) would require

a much deeper discussion of all the above topics, especially the early experiments on

committee bargaining in a spatial setting.

What is on the horizon in the coming decade of laboratory research in political

economy? Using history as a guide, laboratory experiments in political economy will

follow the current trends in theory. Thus, for example, new experiments relating to

the design of optimal voting procedures in committees are a good bet, since there has

been a ﬂurry of theoretical research on this recently. In fact, we are beginning to see

¹⁷ See Suleiman et al. 2001.

thomas r. palfrey 933

some experiments along this line, such as Hortala-Vallve (2004), Casella, Gellman,

and Palfrey (2006), and Casella, Palfrey, and Riezman (2005), which explore the

behavior of laboratory committees using novel voting methods that allow members to

express strength of preference. The research on deliberation and information transmis-

sion in committees with conﬂicting preferences (e.g. Austen-Smith and Feddersen 2005;

Meirowitz 2004) suggests a wave of experiments that would be a hybrid of the early

committee experiments and the more recent experiments on information aggregation

in juries. A third set of experiments is suggested by theoretical models of endogenous

candidate entry. These could blend insights from the earlier experiments on candi-

date spatial competition and more recent experiments on entry and coordination in

abstract games. Fourth, in the study of both politics and economics, there is a new

behavioral revolution in theory that relaxes the model of perfect rationality, borrow-

ing liberally from results in experimental psychology. This theoretical approach will

surely be complemented and enriched even more by laboratory experiments in the

coming years.

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chapter 52

..............................................................

THE TOOL KIT OF

ECONOMIC

SOCIOLOGY

..............................................................

richard swedberg

While the standard deﬁnition of economic sociology—the application of the socio-

logical perspective to economic phenomena—shows that economic sociologists are pri-

marily interested in analyzing the economy and its main institutions, here I will argue

that the ﬁeld also brings important insights into politics and the interrelationship

between the political and economic spheres. This goes for the classics—Marx, Weber,

Schumpeter—as well as for recent studies in economic sociology (e.g. Fligstein 1990;

Evans 1995;Beckert2004).

To analyze what happens at the interface between politics and economics is clearly

not the exclusive task of economic sociology; it also is something that e.g. political

economy does. An important diﬀerence, however, is that political economy draws

on a type of analysis that is deeply inﬂuenced by analytical economics. Political

economy, in contrast to contemporary economic sociology, makes use of a variety

of economic ideas, such as constitutional economics, game theory, and so on. One

may even deﬁne the ﬁeld of political economy as the logic of economics applied to

political phenomena.

In this chapter I will argue that economic sociology would do well in some respects

to follow the example of political economy and pay more attention to analytical

economics and its general approach to what is central to economic behavior. Con-

temporary economic sociology, I argue, focuses far too much on social relations.

What is wrong with this approach is that it disregards the importance of interests or

∗

For helpful comments I thank the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy.

938 the tool kit of economic sociology

the forces that drive human behavior, not least in the economy, but also in the political

sphere. What needs to be done—and this will be the red thread throughout this

chapter—is to combine social relations and interests in one and the same analysis. If

we do this, I argue, we may be able to unite some of the basic insights from economics,

with some of the basic insights from sociology (e.g. Swedberg 2003).

As opposed to modern economics, economic sociology does not have a core of ba-

sic concepts and ideas, welded together over a long period of time. Instead economic

sociology, mirroring sociology itself, consists of a number of competing perspectives,

some more coherent than others. Many economic sociologists, for example, draw

on a social constructivist perspective, others draw on a Weberian perspective; some

follow Mark Granovetter in emphasizing embeddedness, while still others follow

Pierre Bourdieu in approaching the analysis of the economy with the concepts of ﬁeld,

habitus, and diﬀerent types of capital. The reader who is interested in an introduction

to these diﬀerent perspectives is referred to The Handbook of Economic Sociology

(Smelser and Swedberg 1994; 2nd edition 2005). In what follows I shall ﬁrst discuss

two of the most important concepts in modern economic sociology—embeddedness

(including networks) and ﬁeld. I will then proceed to a discussion of two concepts that

I argue should be at the center of contemporary economic sociology: asociological

concept of interest and an interest-based concept of institutions.

1 Embeddedness (Including Networks)

.............................................................................

The most famous concept in today’s economic sociology is by far that of embedded-

ness. While the term itself can be found in the work of Karl Polanyi, it was rarely

usedbyhimandhadtowaittillthe1980s and Mark Granovetter to be thrust to

prominence. While the centrality of embeddedness to what has become known as the

“new economic sociology” (mid-1980s–) is beyond doubt, its analytical status is, on

the other hand, contested. While some see it as a useful tool with which to show what

is distinctive about the sociological approach, a number of economic sociologists also

question its usefulness.

One reason why the concept of embeddedness is so controversial may well be its

many meanings, which range all the way from simply being a slogan that proclaims

the superiority of the sociological approach over the economic approach, to a more

analytical vision, as in Granovetter’s work (Granovetter 1985;cf.Granovetter1992).

Polanyi used embeddedness as part of his attack on liberalism and market-oriented

approaches more generally. The ﬁrst half of his argument is well known: in pre-

capitalist society the economy is integrated into (or embedded in) the rest of society,

especially in its political and religious institutions; but with the advent of capitalism

the economy was separated out and has come to dominate the rest of society. The

second half of Polanyi’s argument is less known, but follows logically from its ﬁrst

half: for society to become healthy again, the economy has to be re-embedded or

integrated into society. Political and other collective institutions have to acquire

precedence over the market.

richard swedberg 939

Through a much cited article in the mid-1980s Granovetter introduced a diﬀerent

and analytically more useful concept of embeddedness (Granovetter 1985). He ﬁrst of

all challenged the political dimension of Polanyi’s ideas by arguing that a pre-capitalist

economy was just as embedded as a capitalist economy is, in the sense that both are

social or embedded in the social structure. Secondly, he brought analytical sharpness

to the concept of embeddedness by insisting that all economic actions are embedded

in networks of social relations. There is no embeddedness of the economy in general;

all economic actions take an interpersonal expression; and thanks to network theory,

this expression can be traced with precision.

One may ﬁnally also speak of a third way in which the term embeddedness is used.

This may well be the most popular (and least interesting) meaning, since embedded-

ness here is simply synonymous with “social.” The general hostility that sociologists

feel towards economic analysis may well be at the root of this usage. Whatever the

reason, the analytical content of this meaning is close to zero.

Critics of the embeddedness approach in its strongest version (that is, in the version

that Granovetter represents) have pointed out that it ignores the political and cultural

dimensions of society; that it is unable to handle economic phenomena at the macro

level; and that the term “embeddedness” is inadequate and confusing as a metaphor

(e.g. Zukin and DiMaggio 1990;NeeandIngram1998; Krippner 2001). To this should

be added that the embeddedness perspective does not single out and theorize the role

of interest, and thereby runs the risk of attaching too much importance to the role of

social relations in economic and political life.

What nonetheless makes the concept of embeddedness quite useful is its close

links to network theory. This type of method, which has become popular in current

economic sociology, provides the analyst with a metric to analyze social interactions,

including economic ones (for a technical introduction, see e.g. Wasserman and Faust

1994). Through its reliance on a method with a strikingly visual dimension, network

theory also provides the researcher with a tool that can quickly communicate complex

social relations.

It is, for example, quite easy to communicate the gist of Granovetter’s famous

thesis of weak ties with the help of a graph: an actor who is connected through a

casual link to one member in many diﬀerent groups (weak ties) is in a much better

position to acquire information than an actor who has long-standing links to each of

the members in a single group (strong ties; Granovetter 1973).

A special mention should also be made of a European version of networks theory,

so-called actor-network-theory (ANT), which is considerably less technical than con-

ventional networks theory of the type that is popular in the United States (e.g. Callon

1989; Law and Hassard 1999). The basic idea here is that not only individuals and

ﬁrms can be actors but also objects. What is meant with this paradoxical statement

is that the analysis must not exclusively focus on social relations but also include

objects; and the rationale for this is that objects can be part of social interactions or

steer social interaction in some special direction. As examples one can mention the

way that, say, surveillance technology enables supervisors to track employees or how

an assembly line presupposes that the workers coordinate their actions in a certain

way.

940 the tool kit of economic sociology

Conventional networks theory covers a host of diﬀerent topics. One of these has to

do with interlocks or the links between corporations that are created when directors

are members of more than one board. While big hopes were initially attached to this

type of study, it has by now been realized that interlocks do not automatically translate

into control or co-optation, but rather constitute potentially important conduits of

communication between corporations—which in some cases may mean control or

co-optation (Mizruchi 1996, 2004).

Firms can also be connected in the form of business groups—a topic that has

been pioneered by economic sociologists and by Granovetter in particular (1994,

2005). Business groups can be deﬁned as “sets of legally separate ﬁrms bound together

in persistent formal and/or informal ways” (Granovetter 2005, 1). They are located

somewhere on a spectrum between ﬁrms that are bound together by short-term

strategic alliances and ﬁrms that are legally to be considered a single entity.

Business groups play a major role in many economies around the world, such as India,

Japan, China, and Taiwan. Their absence in the United States Granovetter ascribes to

antitrust legislation.

Networks theory is a handy tool for analyzing not only corporate actors and their

interactions but also individuals. Ronald Burt, for example, has suggested that the

entrepreneur can be conceptualized as a person who connects two groups of people

(say, sellers and buyers) who otherwise would be disconnected (Burt 1993). In his

capacity as a middleman, the entrepreneur straddles a so-called “structural hole,” in

Burt’s terminology. Economic sociologists have also shown that consumers not only

use their personal networks to gather information about buyers and sellers, but also

select buyers and sellers from their personal networks in certain situations (DiMaggio

and Louch 1998). Consumers use their friends and acquaintances in particular when

it comes to acquiring second-hand cars and real estates where no realtor is involved.

The concept of embeddedness can be used to analyze what happens at the interface

of the economy and politics. Polanyi, for example, developed the concept of em-

beddedness precisely to give voice to his discontent with the way that the economic

sphere and the political sphere are separated from each other in capitalist society.

Granovetter’s concept of embeddedness is, however, considerably more useful than

Polanyi’s ideas on this score and also less normative. The reason for their usefulness

has much to do with the close link between embedddedness and networks analysis in

Granovetter’s work.

As an example of how a networks approach to embeddedness can be of help in

analyzing the interaction of economics and politics, one can mention The Structure

of Corporate Political Action by Mark Mizruchi (1992). Rejecting the assumption

that the business community is either united (elite theory) or that it contains many

divergent interests (pluralist theory), Mizruchi argues that one should instead treat

business unity as a dependent variable. Drawing on a sample of contributions by large

manufacturing corporations to PACs in 1980, he shows that ﬁrms that are connected

to one another via ﬁnancial intermediaries, as well as ﬁrms that are economically

interdependent, are more likely to be in agreement with one another on political

questions.

richard swedberg 941

2 The Field

.............................................................................

After embeddedness, the concept of ﬁeld may well be the most important concept in

contemporary economic sociology. This term denotes a distinct area of social space,

in which all the relevant actors are inﬂuenced by the overall structure. This deﬁnition

is admittedly somewhat vague, and just like embeddedness, the concept of ﬁeld has

its critics.

There currently exist two versions of the concept of the ﬁeld: one that has emerged

in the sociology of organizations in the United States, and another that has Pierre

Bourdieu as its author. While they overlap to some extent, these two versions also

diﬀer on important points. Sociologists of organization basically use the concept of

ﬁeld in the sense of an organizational ﬁeld—that is, to analyze phenomena in social

life that can be conceptualized as a number of similar and related organizations. A

ﬁeld, from this perspective, typically denotes a number of organizations that belong

together, either by virtue of directly interacting with one another or because they take

each other into account in some other way. To cite a standard text in organizational

sociology: “by organizational ﬁeld we mean those organizations that, in the aggregate,

constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product

consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services

or products” (Powell and DiMaggio 1991, 64–5). Examples of ﬁelds include industries,

professions, and nations.

For Bourdieu, in contrast, a ﬁeld is not so much a middle-range concept as an

integral part of his general theory of society. The ﬁeld, in all brevity, constitutes

together with the concepts of habitus and diﬀerent types of capital (social capital,

symbolic capital, and so on) the basic building stones of Bourdieu’s theory of society.

There exist a huge variety of ﬁelds in society, according to Bourdieu, such as the

ﬁelds of art, photography, literature, the economy, an industry, a ﬁrm, and so on

(e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 94–115).

The main function of the concept of ﬁeld, Bourdieu argues, is to represent the

structure of some part of society. This structure is primarily important in that it

assigns a speciﬁc place to each actor; it also exerts pressure on the actor to remain

in his or her position. Each ﬁeld is centered around a speciﬁc interest; and the actors

in a ﬁeld all basically pursue the same interest—be it prestige in the ﬁeld of art, market

share in an industry, or political power in a democracy.

One advantage with the concept of ﬁeld, according to its advocates, is that it is not

restricted to what happens in direct interactions. If you rely primarily on networks

and the concept of embeddeness, you are restricted to actual interactions, and thereby

miss the impact of the structure of the ﬁeld (e.g. Bourdieu 2000, 242).Butitisalso

well understood in sociology that it is hard to trace the exact impact of a ﬁeld, and that

the social mechanisms that translate the power of the overall structure into pressure

on the actor are often unknown. Even the advocates of “ﬁeld theory” agree that this is

the case, though they emphasize that the positive outweighs the negative (e.g. Martin

2003).