From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America | Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology

Date:

Monday, May 21, 2012 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Short bio
Marion Fourcade is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. She is a comparative sociologist, specifically interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Her first book, Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009), explored the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. Her second book, tentatively called Measure for Measure: Social Ontologies of Classification, will investigate the cultural and institutional logic of what we may call “national classificatory styles” across a wide range of empirical domains, including environmental valuation, the digitization of books and the classification of wines. Other ongoing research focuses on the role of the credit market in social stratification (with Kieran Healy); the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); and the role of business schools in the neoliberal turn (with Rakesh Khurana).

Abstract

This article draws on historical material to analyze the changing place of economics in American business education over the course of the twentieth century. We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (c. 1900–1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of "scientific" approaches to decision-making and management. Finally, we argue that the rise of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from the 1960s onwards marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines. We document the key role of this institution in diffusing “Chicago-style” economic approaches—offering support for deregulatory policies and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm—that sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo-liberal regime.