The Bloomington school and the new economic sociology both attempt to understand how and why people actually act and interact, rather than pursuing single explanatory factors to explain human behavior. Both posit that an individual's economic action is embedded in their social relations, their social context, their social norms, their community, but that people are individuals who think freely and deeply, reflecting on their choices, and are not guided entirely by formal and informal rules. Both schools also share an important intellectual foundation in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Bringing together thought from these schools will show what each can offer the other, strengthening their shared ideas and opening up areas of research where knowledge from both can be combined to explore new and old puzzles. Economic sociology, as Emile Durkheim ([1909] 1978) described, is the application of the sociological perspective to the study of economic phenomena.

Economic sociology, thus, approaches the study of economic phenomena with an appreciation that social factors, forces and structures can affect economic phenomena and that in turn economic phenomena can impact social factors, forces and structures. Max Weber (1949) has, similarly, explained that the field of economic sociology, or Sozialokonomik as he called it, is principally concerned with pure economic phenomena like prices, consumers and firms, economically relevant phenomena like religion which can shape the economic behavior of adherents, and economically conditioned phenomena like the family whose structure can be shaped by economic outcomes. Consider, for instance, Max Weber's ([1905] 1998) most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he explores how Protestantism offered an ethical foundation for the particular spirit of enterprise that animates modern capitalism in the West. More recently, Viviana Zelizer (1978) has explained how a shift in attitudes about life insurance, from something that was stigmatized to something that was celebrated, changed the prospects of that industry.

Most early political economists, such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, could be quite accurately described as economic sociologists, although the term didn't come to be used until the late nineteenth century, with thinkers such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (Smelser & Swedberg 1994: 8).