Sociology versus economics: Economic life as social fact and social struggle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This review essay critically engages with recent works by Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist whose articles about social networks are among the most cited in the history of the discipline, and Thomas Piketty, a French economist whose early, illustrious career turned to worldwide public recognition with the publication of le Capital au XXieme siècle in 2015. The contrast is therefore between a well-known sociologist, one of the foremost scholars in economic sociology in the English language, and an economist of international renown who has challenged mainstream economics with his research on economic inequality and his call for participatory public involvement in economic decision-making. Both insist on the economic as social, but in distinctive ways. In this essay, first, I consider Granovetter’s long-awaited Society and Economy: Framework and Principles and Piketty’s recent Capital et idé ologie, a follow-up to his earlier, best-selling book, on their own terms. Second, I think through how each scholar might understand and critique the other, pointing to complementarities and important differences in their approaches. I conclude that although both Granovetter and Piketty challenge mainstream economistic accounts of economic life, while emphasizing human agency and so the contingency of given economic relationships, they differ significantly in their respective analytical and political-normative focus. For Granovetter, what matters is that economic life is a social fact, while for Piketty it is a social struggle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".