When one comes down to it, what is the New Economic Sociology?

Abstract

João CARLoS GRAçA Afinal, o que é mesmo a Nova Sociologia Económica? situada algures entre a economia e a sociologia, a sociologia económica tem tido um estatuto teórico instável e um reconhecimento académico limitado. Mais recentemente, o projecto da chamada Nova sociologia Económica, para além da diversidade de empreendimentos acolhidos, tem vindo a ser definido com base em postulados que rejeitam quer o modelo do "agente racional", quer o determinismo cultural que celebrizou a sociologia parsoniana, optando-se por postulados metodológicos de "terceira via", nos quais predomina uma racionalidade balizada por molduras culturais. Haverá razões para questionar a coerência e a viabilidade intrínsecas daquilo que a NsE representa? Poderá ela própria ser considerada não tanto do ponto de vista da consistência do seu projecto teórico, mas sobretudo como um assunto de redes small world académicas?

Complexity, Interdependence and Autonomy in Social and Economic Systems

“…Por outro lado, o grupo hegemónico de leituras selectivas dos autores da tradição sociológica, até aos nossos dias devendo o fundamental da sua estrutura a Talcott Parsons e às suas interpretações "clássicas", sem dúvida contribuiu muito para reforçar esta atitude de valorização da divisória académica, na verdade separação quase esquizofrénica, que muito claramente tende a inibir a discussão e a compreensão global deste grupo de problemas (cf. Graça, 2005Graça, e 2008.…”

What is Economic Sociology?

“…Perhaps NES, independent of its limitations and inhibitions, represents a project to be welcomed above all because it remains open, with nothing or almost nothing excluded from the outset; for its expressing that opportunity for an enriching "synthesis" of the diverse "memetic" heritages which is much likely the basic condition for vitality. Indeed and as it was already noticed (see Hodgson 1997, Graça 2005, whereas at the level of biological realities convergences are only possible in terms of phenotypes, since within the material of genotypes inherently emerges an indefinitely diversifying and distancing logic that is particular to the very idea of "tree of life", with cultural realities, implicit and given the fundamental lack of distinction between genotype and phenotype in matters of "memetic" transmission, the effective in-depth mergers become possible. And thus seems to prove for evolution rather than the metaphor of the tree -based upon unity and leading to irreversible displacement -the one of the labyrinth -in which displacements and reapproximations are both indefinitely possible, though not necessary.…”

“…Hence, while assuming the absence of value-based facets in what is deemed "pure" political economy, within which deductive methods was supposed to tend to prevail -indeed, especially mathematical deduction, particularly in methods associated with the "marginalist revolution" and its analytical import of models emerging out of physics -there is furthermore broad recognition of the need for another form of learning, that termed "applied", or "social" political economy: a fairly approximate and roughly inductive field concerned about the realities of the distribution of wealth, hence tangential to theories of justice and therefore necessarily distant from the "positive" sobriety of the models of its "pure" peer. This antinomy is rendered explicit in the work of Léon Walras but it really underpins the works of several other authors (see, among others, Zafirovski 1999: 2-9;Ingham 1996;Velthuis 1999;Graça 2005).…”