Polanyian

Hi all - Fred Block is NOT a Marxian, he's Polanyian, which is a different animal. He was pretty big in economic sociology when it was first revived in the 80's, and is currently very well-respected in the economic sociology subfield. Note that he was the editor of a special edition of Politics & Society on using Viviana Zelizer's notion of "relational work" as a microfoundation for economic sociology in general. When Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson had a review symposium in Politics & Society on their book "Winner-Take-All Politics," Fred Block, along with Margaret Somers at Michigan, was one of the people invited to respond. Ask anyone in economic sociology section, and they all know who he is and often have working relationships with him. Sure, Politics & Society and Socio-Economic Review are not "top-rated" journals if your idea of "top" is only ASR and AJS, but they're top-notch in economic sociology and those 2 journals are probably the top journals for economic sociologists. Fred Block was also recently published in Studies in Comparative International Development, which is probably the leading sociological journal for the sociology of economic/Third World development. Michigan Sociology's own Greta Krippner used Fred Block's work, as well as that of James O'Connor and Daniel Bell, in her recent book "Capitalizing on Crisis," published by Harvard Press, and she acknowledges her personal and intellectual debts to Fred Block in the acknowledgements section of said book. -A former student

The organizational sociologists have a lot to say on management topics, in my view. Check out the group blog OrgTheory and search around using the search box with keywords that you think are relevant to your research. Also check out "The new institutionalism in organizational analysis" by Dimaggio and Powell. Organizational sociology looks at dynamics within firms (the particular culture and politics within the firm, and formal and informal structures/practices/norms) as well as dynamics between firms. They also look at particular organizational forms and the ways in which they fail or succeed - which has to do with the particular environment they are in (Alfred Chandler's "Visible Hand: The managerial revolution" and Neil Fligstein's "Transformation of Corporate control.").