The Future of Economic Sociology
WINIR-WSES Workshop on
The Future of Economic Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison (hybrid)
18-19 April 2025
In its prime, economic sociology was premised on the moral and communal contours of economic life, with research centered on questions of embeddedness, relational work, and performativity. But in recent years, the limits of these perspectives have become apparent. Many now rehearse the same tired stories of social capital or accumulate still more evidence of our “financialized” lives. An ungenerous critic might allege the field has functioned as the reluctant left wing of market fundamentalism or yet another cultural turn devoid of material politics.
As previous agendas grow stale, the field is increasingly rudderless. Economic sociology today lacks a well-defined object of study. There is no consensus as to what questions, if any, it seeks to answer. Worse yet, it is politically impotent — effectively divorced from policymaking and lacking any real capacity to transform the world. This does not bode well if the world in question happens to be on fire.
Yet there may be reason for cautious optimism. As global leaders sound the death knell of neoliberalism, so too have scholars begun re-engaging the macrosociological. In response to decades of tax evasion and capital flight, they are exploring central banking and democratic finance. In response to the climate crisis, they are grappling with questions of state power and green planning. And in response to technological transformations, they are interrogating platform capitalism and digital currency.
What is now urgently needed is an agenda capable of weaving together these threads. The WINIR-WSES Workshop on The Future of Economic Sociology seeks to contribute to this goal by drawing together a variety of presentations under a new theoretical framework. Our contention is that economic sociology’s perennial topics — markets, money, law, firms, states, and the like — must be conceptualized not as sites of cultural exchange but as a matrix of institutions and protocols. Drawing on the best of economic sociology, political economy, and institutionalisms old and new, we are interested in mapping the “rules of the game.” Because it is only by attending closely to these rules that we might begin to ponder how to change them.
The two-day WINIR-WSES Workshop on The Future of Economic Sociology — organized in collaboration with the Wisconson School of Economic Sociology (WSES) based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — will revive and update this important debate.
Keynote speaker:
Benjamin Bradlow (Princeton University, USA)
Registration: free, open to all
