THE ARCHITECTURE OF MARKETSFLIGSTEIN’S

Review essay on Neil Fligstein’s, The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 274 pp.Competitive markets are the sine qua non of economics principles texts. A system of competing firms, input suppliers including labor, and consumers is automatic and can be taken for granted. Firms are busy combining inputs and choosing what products to produce. They come and go, forming, dissolving and reforming. There is little place in this theory for cognition, social movements, shared meanings, that is, of economic sociology. Fligstein wants to change that. He wants to add a “political-cultural theory” to the theory of the firm.