Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Current Sociology

Publication Date

2024

Keywords

Brokering, concepts, creativity, economic sociology, economics, economy and society, New Economic Sociology, sociology of knowledge, theorizing

Abstract

This Current Sociology Monograph draws together six articles that broker novel concepts into economic sociology. To orient this enterprise, this article examines the concepts of creativity and novelty in social theory and explains why it is challenging work to broker concepts across intellectual communities. To understand the existing boundaries across which one could broker, it next describes how the subfield of economic sociology has been shaped by the separation of economics and sociology as distinct fields, which ultimately led to a decline of sociologists studying the economy. Two counter-acting organizational forces that sought to institutionalize a subfield of economic sociology was the formation in the mid-1970s of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Economy and Society (ISA RC02), and the institutionalization in the mid-1980s of the New Economic Sociology. The latter became a global brand exported from the United States that eclipsed the former. The New Economic Sociology, a community of scholars primarily based in and focused on the United States and typically indifferent (if not skeptical) to neo-Marxist approaches and international political economy, became globally associated with what constitutes economic sociology (and what is not). Consequently, it would be beneficial to broker in concepts to economic sociology beyond the historic limitations of the New Economic Sociology.

Funding Source

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Illinois State University Faculty Research Award; Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Sage Journals.

Comments

First published in Current Sociology: https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921241292454

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed.

DOI

10.1177/00113921241292454

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