How does financialization of the economy impact public governance of natural resources? One way includes a shift in how savings and cash accumulation are understood and practiced within public agencies. This article proffers that in the second half of the twentieth century, it became a taken-for-granted understanding that long-term savings should be held in financial investment accounts instead of traditional savings accounts. As a result of this, municipal organizations act as fiscally independent investors, marshaling economic resources to pursue strategic objectives that align with financialized institutional logics. Using a case study of the largest supplier of drinking water in the US, this article examines how the use of financial investments by a major public resource agency, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, evolved since first establishing an investment policy in the 1940s. Today, this organization maintains investments worth over one billion dollars. Analysis of archival documents suggests that financial activities, even if yielding dwindling returns over time, are counted upon as a source of revenue, deployed to obtain favorable bond ratings, used for access to earmarked funds, and leveraged to acquire land in water-strategic locations. Considering the ubiquity of these financial practices among medium to large-sized municipal governing bodies, the results of this study are suggestive and generalizable across substantive governing fields and in other locations. Ultimately, this study shows that public governance agencies are intertwined with private capital flows, problematizing the oft-assumed distance between public and private actors. The article also interrogates the influence that financial markets have over of public policy, showing that elected governance officials engage in the commodification of money, encouraging the further commodification of environmental resources.

Behavioral economics has become a dominant set of theories in explaining economic behavior, yet such behavior remains under the limited purview of psychological, cognitive, or neural approaches. This article draws on and extends Viviana Zelizer's social meaning of money framework in conjunction with new work in ‘relational accounting’ to suggest a sociological counterpoint, focusing in particular on the social and symbolic meaning attached to individual 401(k) retirement accounts. Following a market downturn, neoclassical and behavioral economics predict various types of behavioral responses, in particular loss aversion - where investors seek to increase risk-taking rather than locking in a sure loss (a loss is more painful to bear than an equivalent gain). A sociological theory that understands the shared meaning of retirement saving would predict something different, a behavior I call durable conservatism. In this article, I show how this concept better explains observed risk behavior in Americans’ 401(k) accounts following the 2002 and 2008 bear markets in stocks, and how that response differed from the behavior documented in non-retirement brokerage accounts.

This article examines the issue of prices from a sociological standpoint. We show that, contrary to popular belief, price setting is always the result of social practices. We identify two main perspectives in the relevant literature. The first deals with the central notion of quality: price setting is a matter of judgement, arbitration and equipment. The second focuses on measurement practices, such as valuation and pricing, which occur before or during the transaction. These two complementary perspectives reveal a variety of processes that both determine prices and can be used to construct a typology based on two criteria: the moment of price setting, and the level of competition. Four different types of pricing mechanisms are distinguished: self-regulated, administered, composed, and bargained. We use examples to describe these different pricing types, and to show how such an approach contributes to our understanding of the economy.

The economic discipline plays a performative role in constructing the moral order of market society. Yet, little attention has been paid to what economists explicitly regard as moral or how they conceive of morality. This article reflects a recent attempt to put morals into economics, that is, to introduce morality as a research topic in behavioural and experimental economics. It maps three research programs that theorize the moral economy. The programs emphasize the moral foundations of market society, the moral limits of market expansion, and the moral consequences of market trading and, thus, appear irreconcilable with classifications of economists as market enthusiasts or moral agnostics. At the same time, however, the literature centres on an “economized” form of morality that is corrective to market inefficiencies, attributed to the responsibility of the individual, and expressed in rational terms. In doing so, this literature contributes to redefining moral problems in economic terms.

In this article, we show how interpretive battles about compliance can lead to regulatory differentiation and, in turn, market segmentation. To do so, we study the evolution of unsecured lending in the United States, between 1900 and 1945. In the early 20th century, a large segment of the workforce relied on their wages to access credit: this required the “legal coding” of labor income into capital, where lenders would offer advances in exchange for a lien over future revenues. Regulating these transactions raised conflicts between Progressive reformers, lenders and, after 1929, federal regulators, which spanned over five decades. The historical comparison of three states—Illinois, New York and Georgia—, shows that local discussions revolved around three outcomes—legal status, pricing method and collateralization—, the issue of which led to distinct regulatory paths and market configurations at the state level. Finally, the New Deal policies created an additional strand of federal coding, furthering market divides between unregulated payday lenders, non-bank credit companies, and commercial banks. On financial markets, discussions about compliance often revolve around calculative technologies, and we suggest this as a possible crossing point between STS analyses of capitalization devices and Pistor’s theory of capital modulation.

This article posits that institutionalized mythologies can create comparative production advantages. Myths shape collective identity, mobilize actors, and fundamentally reshape production dynamics. Myths are institutionalized in market rules, regulations and structures, leading to the reification of the myth. The myth functions as if it is true, not because it is true, but because it shapes the rules of production. Yet without the initial myth, specific production incentives—and even their institutional comparative advantages—would not exist. My theory integrates approaches from modernist historians (“imagined communities”) and economic sociologists (“imagined futures”) to explain how myths (“imagined histories”) shape contemporary market outcomes, using the example of the French wine market. This argument contributes to the historical institutionalist approach, which focuses on the historical power dynamics between competing groups and the present-day social and market consequence of their institutionalized solutions.

This study proposes a new explanation for institutional differences of organizations in China. It focuses on how two organizational forms dominant in contemporary art markets – commercial galleries and auction houses – were first established in China in the 1990s. Based on archival and interview data, it argues that the organizational forms were introduced to China due to mimetic isomorphism, and that their divergences from the foreign models are the result of unintended consequences of institutional work. It highlights the role of individual agency, including the role of foreign nationals, in organization-building in China. The findings also have implications for institutional theory: the article shows how the political, cultural and institutional context in China shaped institutional work that needed to be conducted and led to unintended consequences of institutional work.

Fiscal explanations often given for Rome's first coins fail to account for the shape of monetary development. Nothing in the mid-republican budget matches the small scale and sporadic production of Roman coins during the early third century, or coinage's rapid expansion in the lead-up to the Second Punic War. Instead, I locate early Roman coinage within a broader reconfiguration of wealth and political power during the early phases of imperial expansion. Coins facilitated the exchange of wealth in the absence of strong social ties; conquest opened up Roman society to vast wealth of this order while also sparking debate about wealth's integration into the political community. Archaeological and textual evidence permits us to trace the contested and uneven development of elite accommodation to impersonal wealth during the third century. This context, I argue, offers the best explanation for Rome's initial coins.

Despite the ubiquity of illegality in today’s financial markets and the questions this raises with regard to the social legitimacy of today’s financial industry, systematic scrutiny of the phenomenon of financial crime is lacking in the field of sociology. One field of research in which the illegal dimensions of capitalist dynamics have long taken center stage is the field of white-collar crime research. This article makes available to economic sociologists an overview of the most important conceptual insights generated in the white-collar crime literature. In doing so, its aim is to provide economic sociologists with some orientation for future research on financial crime. Building on the insights generated in wcc literature, the article concludes by suggesting a number of promising avenues for future sociological research on the phenomenon of illegality in financial markets.

This article sets a new agenda for research on the trajectory of Chinese capitalism. We first critically review the conflicting views on the causes of China's economic development. Then we suggest that insights from the comparative capitalism and economic sociology literatures can provide theoretical tools to understand the critical features of Chinese capitalism in a more systematic manner. The comparative capitalism literature can help us understand how Chinese capitalism resembles or differs from other varieties of capitalism in terms of the relationships between government, firms, and workers. The literature on economic sociology provides insights about how particular markets have evolved and become stabilized. We use these perspectives to suggest a set of possible research agendas for studying Chinese capitalism.

“Weak ties”, a valuable aid in getting a job, are generally work ties. One reason for this feature is not that former colleagues increase one’s information but rather that they value the pursuit of past collaboration. We examine the consequence of the collaboration ties hypothesis in the financial industry labor market. In finance, the labor market values the assets that financial operatives take with them from one firm to another, such as knowledge, know-how and customers. Since assets are to a certain extent shared among co-workers, it is worth hiring business relations and former colleagues or moving in teams: this enables a better transfer of assets such as idiosyncratic work routines, distributed knowledge, or joint customers. To demonstrate our claims we rely on an online survey launched with eFinancialCareers.fr collected in September 2008 among French financial employees. This questionnaire shows that working at the core of financial markets favors the accumulation of key moveable assets on the one hand and of collaboration ties on the other. That is, collaboration ties and key moveable assets are strongly correlated. The moving of key assets, collaboration ties and notably the combination of those two dimensions all result in increased wages.

Cet article s'intéresse à la façon dont un sociologue, fondateur de ce que l'on appelle aujourd'hui la « New Economie Sociology », Harrison White, a repris presque à l'identique le modèle d'un économiste, Michael Spence, sur les relations employeurs / employés en situation d'asymétrie d'information et ce, afin de bâtir son propre modèle des marchés.

Il s'agit plus précisément de montrer que cet emprunt (méthodologique) cache en réalité des différences plus profondes entre les deux auteurs, et de déterminer dans quelle mesure il peut donner un éclairage nouveau concernant les rapports entre économie et sociologie.