Economy and Society in Europe: A Relationship in Crisis

摘要

This volume is a welcome contribution from economic-sociological perspectives to debates on capitalist diversity that have been so prevalent over the past fifteen years. Although less obviously present in the discussions which took place earlier in this period-with political science and business systems scholars taking centre stage-economic sociology has become increasingly important more recently. In particular, the argument that institutions and social action are socio-culturally specific is highly complementary to the more general observation that capitalist diversity exists in a large range of ways across the world. As asserted by Beckert and Streeck (2008: 20) in their programmatic paper on economic sociology and political economy, 'the functioning of the advanced capitalist economy depends on contingent processes of socialization and social integration that might conceivably go into quite different directions'. However, there has been a tendency to neglect capitalism's crisis-prone nature and thus its systemic features: as a result, the analysis often proved less far-reaching than could have been the case (Bruff & Hartmann, 2014).