More than twenty-five years after the end of apartheid, water access remains a striking reminder of racial inequality in South Africa. This book compellingly argues that in the post-apartheid period inequality has not only been continuously reproduced but also legitimized.

Michela Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. The Waterberg Plateau is a space where agriculture, conservation, and extraction coexist and intersect. Marcatelli examines the connections between neoliberalism, race, and the environment by showing that racialized property relations around water and land are still recognized and protected by the post-apartheid state to sustain green growth. She argues that the government depicts growth as the best, if not only, solution to inequality. While white landowners maintain access to water, however, black ex-farmworkers are dispossessed once again of this essential-to-life resource.

If the promise of growth serves to normalize inequality, the call to save nature has the effect of naturalizing it even further.

 

Networks and Markets argues that economists' knowledge of markets and sociologists' rich understanding of networks can and should be combined. Together they can help us achieve a more coherent view of economic life, where transactions follow both the logic of economic incentives and the established channels of personal relationships. Market exchange is impersonal, episodic, and carried out at arm's length. All that matters is how much the seller is asking, and how much the buyer is offering. An economic network, by contrast, is based upon more personalized and enduring relationships between people tied together by more than just price. Networks and Markets focuses on how the two concepts relate to each other: Are social networks an essential precondition for successful markets, or do networks arise naturally out of markets, as faceless traders build reputations and gain confidence in each other? The book includes contributions by both sociologists and economists, applying the concepts of markets and networks to concrete empirical phenomena. Among the topics analyzed, the book explains how, in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, firms combine into tightly-knit business blocs, how wholesalers in a Marseille fish market earn the loyalty of customers, and how ethnic retailers in the U.S. share valuable market information with other shopkeepers from their ethnic group. A response to each chapter discusses the issue from the standpoint of the other discipline. Sociologists are challenged to go beyond small-scale economic exchange and to integrate their concept of networks into a broader understanding of the economic system as a whole, while economists are challenged to consider the economic implications of network ties, which can be strong or weak, unconditional or highly contingent. This book proves that both economics and sociology provide stronger insights when they study markets and networks as parallel forms of exchange. But it also clarifies the healthy division of labor that remains between the two disciplines. Sociologists are adept at showing how markets are framed by social institutions; economists specialize in explaining how markets perform, taking the social context as a given. Networks and Markets showcases what each discipline does best and reveals where each discipline would do better by borrowing from the other.

As the American economy surged in the 1990s, economic sociology made great strides as well. Economists and sociologists worked across disciplinary boundaries to study the booming market as both a product and a producer of culture, tracing the correlations they saw between economic and social phenomena. In the process, they debated the methodological issues that arose from their interdisciplinary perspectives. The New Economic Sociology provides an overview of these debates and assesses the state of the burgeoning discipline. The contributors summarize economic sociology's accomplishments to date, identifying key theoretical problems and opportunities, and formulating strategies for future research in the field. The book opens with an introduction to the main debates and conceptual approaches in economic sociology. Contributor Neil Fligstein suggests that the current resurgence of interest in economic sociology is due to the way it brings together many sociological subdisciplines including the study of markets, households, labor markets, stratification, networks, and culture. Other contributors examine the role of economic phenomena from a network perspective. Ron Burt, for example, demonstrates how social relationships affect competitive dynamics in the marketplace. A third set of chapters addresses the role of gender in economic sociology. In her chapter, Barbara Reskin rethinks conventional notions about discrimination and points out that the law only covers one type of discrimination, while in recent years social scientists have uncovered other forms of hidden discrimination, which must be addressed as well. The New Economic Sociology also addresses the problem of economic development and change from a sociological perspective. Alejandro Portes and Margarita Mooney elaborate on one of the key emerging concepts in economic sociology, arguing that social capital—as an attribute of communities and regions—can contribute to economic and social well-being by fostering collaboration and entrepreneurship. The contributors concur that economic action must be interpreted through the cultural understandings that lend it stability and meaning. By rendering these often complex debates accessible, The New Economic Sociology makes a significant contribution to this still rapidly developing field, and provides a useful guide for future avenues of research.

Institutions play a pivotal role in the economic functioning of any society. Understanding the foundation of social norms, networks, and beliefs within institutions is crucial to explaining much of what occurs in modern economies. Recently, economic sociologists have explored how ties among individuals and groups facilitate economic activity, while "institutional economists" have focused on the formal "rules of the game" that regulate economic processes via government and law. The New Institutionalism in Sociology argues that a full understanding of economic life will depend on blending these new lines of research on institutions with traditional sociological insights into the social structures that lie at their core. The contributors to this volume explore many questions about the way institutions emerge and operate. How do grassroots mores and practices evolve to an institutional level? How do institutional norms then regulate economic activity, and what are the advantages of formal versus informal constraints? What are the sources of trust and cooperation in trading markets? What role do cultural networks play in the economic survival of immigrant communities? And how does conflict and bargaining affect the evolution of community norms? The New Institutionalism in Sociology also discusses how economic fluctuations arise from interactions between local agencies and the institutional environment. Among the topics addressed here are the influence of labor activism on the distribution of income, the association between highly competitive "winner-take-all" job markets and increased wage inequality in the United States, and the effect of property right conventions on technical innovation and productivity in pre-industrial England. A final section explores how deeply embedded cultural traditions have colored the transition from state socialism to market economies in Eastern Europe. The New Institutionalism in Sociology establishes a valuable template for a sociological conception of economic organization. Its interdisciplinary paradigm signals an important advance in understanding how institutions shape social and economic life.

Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.