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Neil Fligstein's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Neil Fligstein recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Neil Fligstein's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.

Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally....
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Recommended by Neil Fligstein, and 1 others.

Neil FligsteinThis is one of my favourite books. (Source)

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2
The United States, France, and Britain use markedly different kinds of industrial policies to foster economic growth. To understand the origins of these different policies, this book examines the evolution of public policies governing one of the first modern industries, the railroads. The author challenges conventional thinking in economics, political science, and sociology by arguing that cultural meaning plays an important role in the development of purportedly rational policies designed to promote industrial growth. This book has implications for the study of rational institutions of all... more
Recommended by Neil Fligstein, and 1 others.

Neil FligsteinForging Industrial Policy is an economic sociology classic and looks at the evolution of railroad policies in England, France and the United States. Railroads are a track-bound means of transport, yet different countries with different cultural and political traditions organised railroads in different ways. (Source)

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3
This classic study of how 282 men in the United States found their jobs not only proves "it's not what you know but who you know," but also demonstrates how social activity influences labor markets. Examining the link between job contacts and social structure, Granovetter recognizes networking as the crucial link between economists studies of labor mobility and more focused studies of an individual's motivation to find work.

This second edition is updated with a new Afterword and includes Granovetter's influential article "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problems of...
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Recommended by Neil Fligstein, and 1 others.

Neil FligsteinYou can’t talk about economic sociology without talking about Mark Granovetter. Getting a Job is a classic work of economic sociology. It’s really the only book he wrote – he’s mostly an articles academic. (Source)

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4

The Social Meaning Of Money

A distinguished social scientist shows what money really does for us—and to us. The book describes how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise differentiating the process by which spending and saving takes place. less
Recommended by Neil Fligstein, and 1 others.

Neil FligsteinPeople tend to think that a dollar is a dollar. That money is interchangeable and impersonal. At least this is the argument that economics makes. What Viviana showed is that, in fact, people divide currencies in different ways, according to the social purposes for which they’re used. For example, if a holiday is coming people will sit down and put a bunch of money aside to spend on gifts. That... (Source)

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5

Distinction

A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Los sujetos sociales se diferencian por las distinciones que realizan -entre lo sabroso y lo insípido, lo bello y lo feo, lo distinguido y lo vulgar- en las que se expresa o se traiciona su posición. El análisis de las relaciones entre los sistemas de enclasamiento (el gusto) y las condiciones de existencia (la clase social) conduce así a una crítica social del criterio selectivo que es, inseparablemente, una descripción de las clases sociales y de los estilos de vida.

Podría comenzarse la lectura de este libro por el capítulo final, titulado «Elementos para una crítica "vulgar" de...
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Recommended by Juliet Schor, Neil Fligstein, and 2 others.

Juliet SchorBourdieu shows how the patterns of consumption in a society come out of structures of social inequality. He groups the consumer realm with the economic. (Source)

Neil FligsteinBourdieu doesn’t see consumption as something we do to satisfy needs, but a function of social status. We consume to become the person that we want to be. (Source)

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