ECONOMY

chapter 52
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THE TOOL KIT OF
ECONOMIC
SOCIOLOGY
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richard swedberg
While the standard definition of economic sociology—the application of the sociological
perspective to economic phenomena—shows that economic sociologists are primarily
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. Contemporary
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.