In this path breaking book, Eiko Ikegami uncovers a complex history of social life in which aesthetic images became central to Japan's cultural identities. The people of premodern Japan built on earlier aesthetic traditions in part for their own sake, but also to find space for self-expression in the increasingly rigid and tightly controlled Tokugawa political system. In so doing, they incorporated the world of the beautiful within their social life which led to new modes of civility. They explored horizontal and voluntary ways of associating while immersing themselves in aesthetic group...

Between Politics and Markets examines how the decline of central planning in post-Mao China was related to the rise of two markets--an economic market for the exchange of products and factors, and a political market for the diversion to private interests of state assets and authorities. Lin reveals their concurrent development through an account of how industrial firms competed their way out of the plan through exchange relations with one another and with state agents.

Commodifying Communism is an ethnographic study of the role of personal ties between private entrepreneurs and local officials in the organization of China's emerging market economy. It is based on almost two years of fieldwork in Xiamen City, Fujian, one of China's five special economic zones. A close examination of how private business is conducted through these ties sheds light on the dynamism of China's market economy and its political consequences.

Based on case studies of four organizations that were sued for pay discrimination, Legalizing Gender Inequality challenges existing theories of gender inequality within economic, sociological, and legal contexts. The book argues that male-female earnings differentials cannot be explained adequately by market forces, principles of efficiency, or society-wide sexism. Rather it suggests that employing organizations tend to disadvantage holders of predominantly female jobs by denying them power in organizational politics and reproducing male cultural advantages. The book argues that the courts...

Drawing on primary historical material, The Struggle for Control of the Modern Corporation, provides a historical overview of decision making and political struggle within one of America's largest and most important corporations. Freeland examines the changes in the General Motors organization between the years 1924 and 1970. He takes issue with the well-known argument of business historian Alfred Chandler and economist Oliver Williamson, who contend that GM's multidivisional structure emerged and survived because it was more efficient than alternative forms of organization.

Between Politics and Markets examines how the decline of central planning in post-Mao China was related to the rise of two markets--an economic market for the exchange of products and factors, and a political market for the diversion to private interests of state assets and authorities. Lin reveals their concurrent development through an account of how industrial firms competed their way out of the plan through exchange relations with one another and with state agents.

This book is about the way in which industrial production in Germany was conditioned by social, political, and regional factors from the seventeenth century to the present. The argument is distinctive because it pays so much attention to small and medium sized firms, and because it suggests that Germany does not have a single coherent national system of industrial governance. This social constructivist point of view presents a direct challenge to the Gerschenkronian, Schumpetarian, and Chandlerian approaches to Germany's economic history.

In this path breaking book, Eiko Ikegami uncovers a complex history of social life in which aesthetic images became central to Japan's cultural identities. The people of premodern Japan built on earlier aesthetic traditions in part for their own sake, but also to find space for self-expression in the increasingly rigid and tightly controlled Tokugawa political system. In so doing, they incorporated the world of the beautiful within their social life which led to new modes of civility. They explored horizontal and voluntary ways of associating while immersing themselves in aesthetic group...

Departing radically from traditional content analysis approaches to the quantitative study of texts, this work is based on a linguistic theory of narrative, rather than the ad hoc approaches of context analysis. The book illustrates a set of tools--story grammars, relational data models, and network models--that can be profitably used for the collection, organization, and analysis of narrative data in socio-historical research (e.g., narratives of strikes, demonstrations, lynchings, and riots).

In recent years, sociologists have taken up a fruitful examination of institutions such as capital, labor, and product markets; industrial organization; and stock exchanges. Compared to earlier traditions of economic sociology, recent work shows more interest in phenomena usually studied exclusively by economists while it challenges the adequacy of the neoclassical model.

In The Sociology of Economic Life, editors Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg incorporate classic and contemporary readings in economic sociology and related disciplines to provide students with a broad...