Organizations and Markets

| Randy Westgren |

I carried a few articles along with me to punctuate the tedium of consuming as many Belgian beers as one can, in tacit competition with 24 20-year olds. One of these is “The Sociology of Markets” by Neil Fligstein and Luke Dauter, from the 2007 Annual Review of Sociology (ungated version here). Those of you who throw brickbats at sociology will find this an interesting read, as Fligstein and Dauter describe the three major camps and a few lesser cabals as a “cacophony of voices” talking past each other. For others, the piece is a useful entry point for students to see the clear expositions of the development of network theory (i.e. Burt, White, and Granovetter) and institutional theory (i.e. DiMaggio and Powell, Durkheim, and Fligstein, himself). They also review the performativity school — unfortunately named and unfortunately constituted. They tie the review to March and Simon, Williamson, and some of the corporate governance literature, and discuss the roles efficiency plays in the alternative conceptions of markets.There is also some useful allusion to equilibrium and disequilibrium conceptions of markets. This is worth a read, or at least, worth making your grad students read. The entree to seminal literature that undergirds current articles in the management journals is useful.

I’d fault the review only for its insistence on trying to make population ecology appear to be a useful piece of sociology for the study of markets, though the authors admit it really isn’t true. Pop ecology should, like an overly large litter of unwanted kittens, be placed in a burlap sack with a large stone and cast into a deep river.