I take the ideas in these papers and their underlying sociological literatures quite seriously. In fact, one sociologist friend recently declared that I have an “economist’s eye for the sociological guy.” More precisely, my interest is in economic sociology, which I will define as the sociology of economic actors and institutions; see the two Handbooks of Economic Sociology by Smelser and Swedberg (1994, forthcoming) for volumes of detail. In this introduction, I will highlight some of the prominent themes from economic sociology that are illustrated in these papers and suggest which kinds of economists might find these themes interesting
