Embedded in Whiteness: How the New Economic Sociology Came to Ignore Race & Racism

Abstract

Race is central to economic life, but race is not central to economic sociology. We explore how this inattention to race and racism developed as the subfield emerged. First, we outline a history of the new economic sociology as it emerged in the 1980s. Economic sociology defined itself against dominant trends in economics through its emphasis on the role of meso-level social orders in shaping economic action. Second, we show that the aims of economic sociology were incompatible with mainstream discussions of race in sociological literature throughout the 1980s. We find that economic sociology’s embrace of the anticategorical imperative was incompatible with the sociological focus on individual-level racial attitudes in the 1980s, as well as the treatment of race as a categorical variable. Third, we elaborate on two consistent foci of the subfield – ethnic enclaves and corporate interlocks. The canonical literature on ethnic enclaves conceptualized these spaces as sites for researching social capital, but not as sites for studying processes of racialization, leading this literature to largely ignore the role of racism in differences between ethnic enclaves. In contrast, the literature on interlocks ignored race and gender, despite the overwhelming dominance of white men on corporate boards.