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Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 416 pp. $US 35.00 hardcover (978-0-691-11760-7)
Economists and Societies offers an institutionalist account of the national differences in the way economics is practiced, perceived, and institutionalized in the US, Britain, and France. It operates at the crossroads of several recently flourishing research areas: neoinstitutionalism, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of the professions, and economic sociology. With the latter it shares the fundamental commitment to offer "a critique of economics' universalizing discourse." But in this case the usual critique of the economists' alleged one-size-fits-all approach to the real world is extended to the discipline's own supposed universalism. Fourcade's main assertion is, simply put, that what it means to be an economist, how economics is practiced, what social status the economics profession enjoys and even the content of economic knowledge differs quite significantly between the three countries under investigation for reasons that have mostly to do with country-specific character of, and interactions between the educational, research, and state institutions.
The book is primarily based on 95 interviews with various "insiders" (mostly economics professors) in the three countries in question plus Germany, conducted between 1995 and 1997, plus what must have been a prodigious amount of archival, documentary, and secondary research on the economics profession in each of the three countries. The core of the book consists of three lengthy (50-60 pp.) chapters presenting the cases of the US, the UK, and France respectively. Fourcade's story runs, roughly, like this. In the US the decentralized, competitive system of higher education in combination with the absence of a professional civil service led academic economists to pursue an early and successful strategy of "scientific professionalism." They did this by presenting their expertise...