Economy and Society

by Robert J. Holton

Economy and Society is a major landmark in the recent emergence of economic sociology. Robert J. Holton provides a major new synthesis of social scientific thinking on the inter-relationship between economy and society arguing for the importance of politics and culture to the functioning of the economy and drawing on the strengths but avoiding the weaknesses of economic liberalism and political economy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415029104
• ISBN13: 9780415029100
• Release Date: August 1992
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

No more than programmatic remark

...The author seems to intend to be read in the second way. The aim of this book is to explain the relationship between economy and society: so called the problem of embeddedness. In the early 1990s, the functionalist view was taken to found that concept in the circle of sociology. In other word, the social factor in economy was captured as culture in the functionalist meaning. This approach has not much problem for the functionalist definition of culture can be read as routine, and can be translated into the term of ¡®institution¡¯ in the line of institutional economics. In doing so, the author reviews various lines in sociological tradition, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and so forth and recent developments in the theory of the state. But the problem is this: Is this book effective till now? I don¡¯t think so. Nobody argues the conception of embeddedness is problematic. It¡¯s now the established concept. Moreover, embeddedness is no more than a programmatic remark. Now institutionalism prevails over social sciences. What is needed now is a set of vocabulary to analyze the phenomena: for example, the buzzword like social capital.