Abstract
In order for today’s economic sociology to develop in a forceful manner, it is important that a deliberate effort at cumulation of knowledge takes place. The insights of the works that make up the classic tradition of economic sociology play a central role in this process. The term classic tradition comes from C. Wright Mills; and the chapter contains an attempt to spell out what constitutes the classic tradition in a field such as economic sociology. This is followed by a presentation of the different contributions by such scholars as Tocqueville, Marx, Weber, Schumpeter, Polanyi, Granovetter, and Bourdieu. Some additional studies are also mentioned. In the concluding section an effort is made to suggest some practical guidelines that can be of help for today’s economic sociologists when they work in the classic tradition. These are respecification, reconceptualization, and recombination.
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Swedberg, R. (2021). The Classic Tradition in Economic Sociology. In: Maurer, A. (eds) Handbook of Economic Sociology for the 21st Century. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61619-9_1
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