David Stark, 2009, The sense of dissonance. Accounts of worth in economic life, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press

Abstract

At first glance, economic sociologists and evolutionary economists should have a lot to offer to each other. Both departed from mainstream economics embracing bounded rationality, heterogeneity of firms, endogenous preferences, imperfect markets, and last but not least institutions. Nevertheless, intellectual exchange between the two fields has been rare, and mostly concentrated on the specific sub-field of organizational ecology (as it is called in economic sociology) viz. industrial dynamics (as it is known in evolutionary economics). After reading the book by Stark, I understood better why these fields have seen so little crossovers. As Stark explains at length in chapter 1 and chapter 5, economic sociologists have carefully avoided the explananda of mainstream economists hereby creating a stable mode of peaceful co-existence. In particular, while economic sociologists would emphasize the role of social values in economic behavior and institutions, they left the explanation of value as expressed in prices and profits entirely to economists. Evolutionary economists choose an opposite route. From its start (Nelson and Winter 1982), its ambitious aim was to change mainstream economic theory altogether by providing an alternative theory based on different assumptions and mechanisms, particularly in the fields of the theory of the firm, industrial organization and economic growth. A growing number of economic sociologists argue that their discipline should no longer shy away from questions of economic value. In doing so,