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THIS CHAPTER concerns the role of gender in the economy, how the conceptual tools of economic sociology help us understand gender in the economy, and how gender studies provide a lens from which to reconsider the boundaries and claims of economic sociology. We start with a discussion of what topics economic sociology covers, arguing that subtle gender bias may have caused us to focus on formal organizations and exclude household behavior and much of even the paid care sector from economic sociology. If we take a broader view of the "economy," it includes households, the organizations in which people work for pay and from which they purchase goods and services, and the markets in which any of these are embedded. We then discuss the conceptual toolkit usually associated with economic sociology: (1) social networks, (2) culture, norms, and institutions, and (3) critiques of neoclassical economics. We appreciate these tools, but express disappointment that economic sociologists have not taken a more integrative view. We prefer to integrate what is valuable from the rational choice perspective of economists' analysis of market phenomena with considerations of networks and institutions, rather than rejecting the economic view whole cloth. We are equally disappointed that economists have taken so little interest in sociologists' insights. We apply our integrative view of economic sociology to explaining gender differentiation and inequality in paid employment and the household. We consider occupational sex segregation and the sex gap in pay. In the household, we consider couples' division of labor, power dynamics, and exits from marriages. We also consider the "care sector" that cross-cuts the family, paid employment, and the state. We focus on employment and household activities because most gender patterns are rooted in these two venues; most of us spend most of our time on the job and at home.
GENDER AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY
What is the subject matter of economic sociology? For the most part the boundaries of economic sociology have been set de facto rather than with programmatic statements. De facto, the post-1980 iteration of the subfield has come largely from sociologists studying formal organizations, mostly in the private sector. These sociologists, such as Granovetter (1985), Burt (1982), White (1981), and Powell and DiMaggio (1991), have disagreed with...