The New Sociology of Economic Behaviour

"How, Fevre asks in his brilliant new book, can we critique Max Weber′s "iron cage" of economic rationality  if we′re looking at the world from inside it? The great intellectuals of the past  – Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Cooley and more recently Polyani – were deeply troubled by a growing market mentality that we now so tepidly accept as "inevitable." I won′t spoil the story but Fevre puts his finger on the moment when things went off track, and sets us back on track so we can take an honest look at our lives today.  This is an enormously important challenge to our basic thinking about the most important organizing force in the world today: the market. A must read."  Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Commercialization of Intimate Life, and co-editor of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy

 

′Fevre’s book is a long overdue iconoclastic assault on the pretensions of ‘economic sociology’. Drawing the reader back to the sociology classics the author forces the reader to reconsider long cherished beliefs about contemporary business and the long avoided issue of morality. It is compulsive reading and it ought to be compulsory reading′ - Keith Grint Saïd Business School and Templeton College, Oxford University

′A stimulating critical discussion of key issues in the field of economic behaviour and will constitute an invaluable resource for all those who believe social analysis is a moral-political practice. Economics has tended to affirm the existing market order of things, the task of sociology is to critically reinterpret economic life. The New Sociology of Economic Behaviour represents a significant contribution to the regeneration of a critical sociology of economic life′ - Barry Smart, Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth

′How, Fevre asks in his brilliant new book, can we critique Max Weber′s "iron cage" of economic rationality if we′re looking at the world from inside it? This is an enormously important challenge to our basic thinking about the most important organizing force in the world today: the market. A must read′ - Arlie Russell Hochschild, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley