Bruce G Carruthers
Biographic Data
| ID | 90231 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce G Carruthers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce G |
| FAMILY NAME | Carruthers |
| SIGNATURE | CARRUTHERS B G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2703-3107 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 750 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Organizational Isomorphism during Crisis
How do organizations respond to extreme environmental challenges? We revisit DiMaggio and Powell and examine the shift in isomorphic behaviors that occur during a crisis, illustrating how shocks result in the use of nontraditional practices. We empirically examine the impact of the 2008 economic crisis on U.S. art museums’ isomorphic referent transitions in the use of market practices before and after the crisis, covering 2006 to 2011. Our findin…
Spiderweb Capitalism
Normalized Financial Wrongdoing
Reflections on the field of socio-economics
Correspondence: [email protected] The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) was born in 1989 out of the normative aspiration to anchor economic institutions and processes in communitarian values as opposed to egoistic ones. The name socioeconomics was chosen explicitly to signal this commitment, and mark a rejection, almost wholesale, of mainstream economics and the neoliberal politics with which a significant segment of the field…
Sanford M. Jacoby. Labor in the Age of Finance
Social Capital
Law, governance, and finance
Sovereignty, Law, and Money
Money has remained closely connected to political sovereignty even as polities changed from empires and kingdoms to dictatorships and democracies, and as money shifted from coin to paper and now to digital currency. Money constitutes a claim on value in exchange and a store and measure of value, so we consider the role law plays in these three articulations between money and value. We examine research on different instances of legal control over …
What Is Sociological About Banks and Banking?
Banks depend on a mysterious quality called "confidence," and even today confidence can disappear in a flash. In addition to analyzing the obvious importance that financial institutions possess, this chapter argues that banks and banking are sociologically interesting. It begins by explaining the role of banks and other financial institutions in the modern economy, and how that role has evolved over time. Sociologists have often studied the patte…
How to Think like an Economic Sociologist
Money Talks
Christine Desan. Making Money
The engraved picture of President Andrew Jackson on the U.S. twenty-dollar bill will soon be replaced by former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, a truly dramatic change in the social iconography of American money. But it will still say, “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Regardless of whose face is on the front, the note can be used to satisfy all debts, whether to a public entity (like the IRS) or a private one …
An Unlikely Alliance
Despite the recently demonstrated importance of consumer credit for the economic health of nations and families, little is known about the history of consumer credit markets and their regulation. An important chapter in the history of consumer credit regulation came between 1909 and 1941, when policy experts at the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) engaged in a national campaign to transform small loan markets and policy in the United States. Concent…
Financialization and the institutional foundations of the new capitalism
One of key features of capitalism as a form of economic organization concerns its ability to change. Innovation often occurs by using old things in new ways, or by taking pre-existing elements and rearranging them into novel configurations [termed ‘conversion’ by Streeck and Thelen (2005, p. 26)]. Change can also happen when old activities are simply discontinued, or when new activities are added [what Mahoney and Thelen (2010, p. 16) call ‘layer…
The Risk of Rating
From uncertainty toward risk
Economists and Societies
What's Haute in the Sociology of Finance
On Colin Crouch's The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, Polity, 2011
Journal Article On Colin Crouch's The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, Polity, 2011 Get access Socio-Economic Review, Volume 10, Issue 3, July 2012, Pages 605–623, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mws007 Published: 19 May 2012
Bringing “Honest Capital” to Poor Borrowers
The Uniform Small Loan Law (usll)—the primary tool of the Russell Sage Foundation (rsf) intended to improve credit conditions for poor people in the United States during first decades of the twentieth century—created a new class of lenders who could legally make small loans at interest rates exceeding those allowed for banks. By the 1930s, about two-thirds of the states had passed the usll. Econometric models show that urbanization, state-level e…
The Sociology of Finance
The economic crisis of 2008-2010 stimulated an already growing sociological interest in finance. Before the crisis, disintermediation and securitization changed how the U.S. financial system operated, as bank operations shifted from the traditional originate-and-hold model to originate-and-distribute. During the 1980s and 1990s, the overall size and profitability of the financial system grew as deregulation unleashed financial innovation and reor…
Noter le crédit
Aux États-Unis, investisseurs et prêteurs ont souvent recours aux agences de notation, les credit bureaus , pour résoudre les asymétries d’information concernant la solvabilité des emprunteurs. Ces agences produisent des évaluations de solvabilité qui reposent sur des catégories standardisées et ordonnées. Cet article analyse la mise en place de ces systèmes et catégories de notation du crédit entre 1850 et 1880. En soulignant les divergences et …
The Meanings of Money
Money undergirds market exchange, but the social significance of money goes well beyond the obvious importance of its highly uneven distribution in modern market economies. In addition, modern money imposes an ostensibly precise and unidimensional valuation on social products, processes and relations that often conflicts with other modes of social valuation. In this regard, monetarization is a particular instance of quantification. Money’s status…
Rhetorical legitimation
This paper focuses on a largely neglected aspect of legitimation in international organizations (IOs)—the rhetorical work done by IO scripts as a legitimation strategy of IOs. Based on extensive research within regional and global IOs, we demonstrate four aspects of rhetorical legitimation. First, IO texts draw upon a finite repertoire of rhetorical devices (a) to propagate legitimation strengths of an IO, (b) to amplify or compensate for legitim…
Money and Credit
Accounting for Rationality
This article addresses claims made by Weber, Schumpeter, and Sombart concerning the importance of double-entry bookkeeping. They argue that accounting played a key technical role in enhancing rationality and furthering the development of capitalism methods of production. The history of accounting methods and practices from the Middle Ages to the 19th century is surveyed in order to evaluate these arguments. Two important dimensions of accounting …
The social structure of liquidity
The Sociology of Property Rights
Property rights matter for their effects on economic inequality and economic performance, and they unfold at the intersection of law, the state, politics, and the economy. Five dimensions of property are discussed: the objects of property (what can be owned), the subjects of property (who can own), the uses of property (what can be done with it), the enforcement of rights (how property rules are maintained), and the transfer of property (how prop…
The Recursivity of Law
For the past 15 years an enormous enterprise of global norm making and related national lawmaking has been underway in many areas of global commerce. This article shows that leading global institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations, are building an international financial architecture with law—including corporate bankruptcy law—as its foundation. Building on research on international institutions and three national cases (China…
The Color of Money and the Nature of Value
Money measures value in market economies. Money's own value is socially constructed since people attribute worth to a medium whose physical characteristics are essentially irrelevant to its monetary role. Money works best when it can be taken for granted and its social construction is hidden. During the greenback era, two monetary alternatives (gold-based money and paper money) were debated, which raised many questions about the nature of monetar…
The Sociology of Finance
The economic crisis of 2008-2010 stimulated an already growing sociological interest in finance. Before the crisis, disintermediation and securitization changed how the U.S. financial system operated, as bank operations shifted from the traditional originate-and-hold model to originate-and-distribute. During the 1980s and 1990s, the overall size and profitability of the financial system grew as deregulation unleashed financial innovation and reor…
From uncertainty toward risk
Financialization and the institutional foundations of the new capitalism
One of key features of capitalism as a form of economic organization concerns its ability to change. Innovation often occurs by using old things in new ways, or by taking pre-existing elements and rearranging them into novel configurations [termed ‘conversion’ by Streeck and Thelen (2005, p. 26)]. Change can also happen when old activities are simply discontinued, or when new activities are added [what Mahoney and Thelen (2010, p. 16) call ‘layer…
Conditionality
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is famous for its practice of conditionality—making the disbursement of resources to national governments contingent on the performance of certain policies. We survey the history of conditionality and show that the IMF is only one of many organizations that have historically engaged in this practice. Conditionality can be imposed by either private lenders (such as banks) or official organizations (such as int…
Negotiating Globalization
This article draws from a larger research project on the globalization of bankruptcy law that includes (1) a time-series analysis of all bankruptcy reforms worldwide from 1973 to 1998; (2) participation observation, several hundred interviews and documentary analysis of international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), international professional associations (Internat…
Money, Meaning, and Morality
Modern money creates, transforms, transports, and possesses meaning by virtue of how it is used. This article devises a framework for the systematic study of monetary meaning. In particular, monetary meanings depend on the flow of money (both its proximate source and future direction) and on who promulgates or issues it. Meanings also derive from how money's use and flow are restricted and on monetary media. Monetarization quantifies social activ…
Rhetorical legitimation
This paper focuses on a largely neglected aspect of legitimation in international organizations (IOs)—the rhetorical work done by IO scripts as a legitimation strategy of IOs. Based on extensive research within regional and global IOs, we demonstrate four aspects of rhetorical legitimation. First, IO texts draw upon a finite repertoire of rhetorical devices (a) to propagate legitimation strengths of an IO, (b) to amplify or compensate for legitim…
Spiderweb Capitalism
The Meanings of Money
Money undergirds market exchange, but the social significance of money goes well beyond the obvious importance of its highly uneven distribution in modern market economies. In addition, modern money imposes an ostensibly precise and unidimensional valuation on social products, processes and relations that often conflicts with other modes of social valuation. In this regard, monetarization is a particular instance of quantification. Money’s status…
When is the State Autonomous? Culture, Organization Theory, and the Political Sociology of the State
Pour aborder la question de l'autonomie de l'Etat, illustree par les politiques americaine et britannique en matiere de finances durant les annees 30, l'A. elabore trois approches : l'une, en termes d'affiliation a un groupe, considere les caracteristiques sociales des individus travaillant dans des organisations ; une autre, dite de la dependance structurale, considere la position de l'organisation dans un reseau de flux de ressources ; l'approc…
The Formative Years of U.S. Social Spending Policies
This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional analysis of emergency relief, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions in the 48 American states. It analyzes six outcomes: state emergency-relief expenditures andfederal emergencyrelief expenditures from 1933 to 1935; the timing of passage of unemploymentcompensation legislation; the timing of passage of old-age pension legislation; and the contents of old-age pension and unemployment-compe…
Economic Sociology in the New Millennium
Economic sociology is now a sociological specialization with a distinct identity (Smelser and Swedberg 1994). In the twentieth century, it focused on the internal workings of organizations human relations, organization design, and internal labor markets (Baron and Hannan 1994) . Using the economist's black box metaphor of the firm as a point of departure, economic sociologists formulated theories of how organizations influence individual action a…
Bringing “Honest Capital” to Poor Borrowers
The Uniform Small Loan Law (usll)—the primary tool of the Russell Sage Foundation (rsf) intended to improve credit conditions for poor people in the United States during first decades of the twentieth century—created a new class of lenders who could legally make small loans at interest rates exceeding those allowed for banks. By the 1930s, about two-thirds of the states had passed the usll. Econometric models show that urbanization, state-level e…
Reflections on the field of socio-economics
Correspondence: [email protected] The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) was born in 1989 out of the normative aspiration to anchor economic institutions and processes in communitarian values as opposed to egoistic ones. The name socioeconomics was chosen explicitly to signal this commitment, and mark a rejection, almost wholesale, of mainstream economics and the neoliberal politics with which a significant segment of the field…
An Unlikely Alliance
Despite the recently demonstrated importance of consumer credit for the economic health of nations and families, little is known about the history of consumer credit markets and their regulation. An important chapter in the history of consumer credit regulation came between 1909 and 1941, when policy experts at the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) engaged in a national campaign to transform small loan markets and policy in the United States. Concent…
Pandora's Box
recently remarked that: you never let a seri ous crisis go to waste. Scholars like Dan Immergluck have apparently taken heed. A specialist in urban policy and mortgage lending, Immergluck realized that his topic had become ground zero in the current financial crisis, and he has written a book offering a broader context than is available in current journalistic accounts. Readers who can't distinguish between CDO, HBO or si do will learn a great de…
Homo Economicus and Homo Politicus
The case of the early 18th-century London stock market is used to evaluate economic and sociological theones of market trading. Data from 1712 on shares in two companies (the Bank of England and the East India Company), and on trading among three different groups (political parties, ethnic-religious groups, and guilds) are used to show how economic theories of rational trading do not account for market behavior, even though the 1712 London stock …
Politics, Popery, and Property
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Law, governance, and finance
The Risk of Rating
The Formative Years of U.S. Social Spending Policies
This paper reports the results of a cross-sectional analysis of emergency relief, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions in the 48 American states. It analyzes six outcomes: state emergency-relief expenditures andfederal emergencyrelief expenditures from 1933 to 1935; the timing of passage of unemploymentcompensation legislation; the timing of passage of old-age pension legislation; and the contents of old-age pension and unemployment-compe…
From Manor to Market
In-Laws and Outlaws
War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough. D. W. Jones
Books in review
Politics, Popery, and Property
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State and Society in Medieval Europe
Accounting for Rationality
This article addresses claims made by Weber, Schumpeter, and Sombart concerning the importance of double-entry bookkeeping. They argue that accounting played a key technical role in enhancing rationality and furthering the development of capitalism methods of production. The history of accounting methods and practices from the Middle Ages to the 19th century is surveyed in order to evaluate these arguments. Two important dimensions of accounting …
A Hero for the Aged? The Townsend Movement, the Political Mediation Model, and U.S. Old-Age Policy, 1934-1950
During the Depression, the Townsend movement enjoyed varied success in seeking pensions for the aged. Social-movement models predict that success depends on the mobilization of resources or on collective action. Other theories predict that economic or political conditions cause the emergence of movements and changes in public spending. The political mediation model used here holds that, to succeed, a movement must reinforce political action with …
Culture and Currency
Gender, States, and Social Policies
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Gender, States, and Social Policies
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Redistribution de la propriété et conflits de compétence à la frontière privé-public
Professions and Bankruptcy Reforms in Britain and the United States : Redistributing Property and Jurisdictional Rights across the Public-Private Frontier. The sociologies of law, professions, and politics rarely converge on the process of statutory reform. This paper argues that the concepts of property and jurisdictional rights provide a basis for theoretical convergence and a more compelling explanation of legal change where property redistrib…
Merchants and Revolution
Strategic Bankruptcy
The Making of a Bourgeois State
When is the State Autonomous? Culture, Organization Theory, and the Political Sociology of the State
Pour aborder la question de l'autonomie de l'Etat, illustree par les politiques americaine et britannique en matiere de finances durant les annees 30, l'A. elabore trois approches : l'une, en termes d'affiliation a un groupe, considere les caracteristiques sociales des individus travaillant dans des organisations ; une autre, dite de la dependance structurale, considere la position de l'organisation dans un reseau de flux de ressources ; l'approc…
Homo Economicus and Homo Politicus
The case of the early 18th-century London stock market is used to evaluate economic and sociological theones of market trading. Data from 1712 on shares in two companies (the Bank of England and the East India Company), and on trading among three different groups (political parties, ethnic-religious groups, and guilds) are used to show how economic theories of rational trading do not account for market behavior, even though the 1712 London stock …
City of Capital
While many have examined how economic interests motivate political action, Bruce Carruthers explores the reverse relationship by focusing on how political interests shape a market. He sets his inquiry within the context of late Stuart England, when an active stock market emerged and when Whig and Tory parties vied for control of a newly empowered Parliament. Carruthers examines the institutional linkage between politics and the market that consis…
State and Status
The Color of Money and the Nature of Value
Money measures value in market economies. Money's own value is socially constructed since people attribute worth to a medium whose physical characteristics are essentially irrelevant to its monetary role. Money works best when it can be taken for granted and its social construction is hidden. During the greenback era, two monetary alternatives (gold-based money and paper money) were debated, which raised many questions about the nature of monetar…
Introduction
In the past several years, economic sociology has grown into a new speciality within sociology. Numerous edited volumes, survey articles and handbooks herald its arrival and mark out its place in the sociological firmament (see, e.g. Granovetter and Swedberg, 1992; Swedberg, 1991; Smelser and Swedberg, 1994). Although classic social theorists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel frequently pondered the structure and conditio…
City of Capital
City of Capital
Making Markets
Political science (46 works) · Economics (40 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Law (32 works) · Politics (25 works) · Business (17 works) · Finance (15 works) · Law (15 works) · History (13 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (13 works)