Research Projects at the MPIfG
Research at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences
Research at the University of Cologne
Research at the Chair of Business Administration,Corporate Development and Organization (Professor Ebers), University of Cologne
Research at the Chair of Comparative Politics (Professor Kaiser), University of Cologne
Economic Sociology - the European Website
New Institutionalism
Socio-Economic Review
ECPR
Research and Academic Scope of the IMPRS-SPCE
Research at the School investigates the complex linkages between economic and social action.
Just as politics and social life are affected by pressures
for economic efficiency and by economic power, economic
action is embedded in and indeed presupposes an
infrastructure of social institutions and political
decisions. In this sense, the economy as a system of action is both politically and socially constituted. Dialogue between Disciplines
The mutual interdependence between the economy and society has long been a core subject of both sociology and political science, or political economy. The School undertakes to relate these two traditions systematically in an effort to exploit and enhance their synergies. In sociology, study of the social embeddedness of economic action is at the center of a fast-growing subdiscipline, often referred to as the "New Economic Sociology".Sociology is thus reclaiming territory it had long abandoned to economics. The focus of the new economic sociology is on the investigation of the functioning of markets. While economic sociology tends to emphasize the contribution of informal social structures to the facilitation and direction of economic action, political scientists have studied the contribution of formal political institutions and collective decision-making to economic governance. The latest offshoot of this literature, which goes back to the institutional economics of the early twentieth century and includes the study of organized capitalism in the 1960s and of neo-corporatism in the subsequent decades, is the current work on the convergence and divergence of different "varieties of capitalism".
Understanding Economic Behavior
Bringing into dialogue economic sociology and institutionalist political science, work at the School pursues an empirical-analytical rather than an efficiency-theoretical, prescriptive approach. Understanding and explaining how economic behavior is influenced by its social context and vice versa takes precedence over prescriptive theorizing aimed at finding optimally efficient solutions to economic problems. Unlike the various efficiency-theoretical approaches in political economy, the program's research tries to understand how economic institutions evolve in the real world, rather than determine how they should evolve, or would in an ideal world.Technically speaking, while efficiency theory and prescriptive modeling exogenize both the meaning of efficiency and the preferences of actors, economic sociology and institutionalist political economy see these as themselves socially and politically constituted, and therefore undertake to treat them as being endogenous. Endogenizing economic preferences in social theory and exploring the social and political constitution of economic efficiency is at the core of the theoretical program of the Research School.
Institutions and Markets
Two types of social formations receiving
particular attention in the research program, are institutions
and markets. Both by themselves and in their interaction institutions are normative constructs that generate social
order by constraining specific actions while supporting
others. Recently increased attention has been paid to
institutional change as a principal subject of research and
theorizing. Debates have moved from path dependency and
punctuated equilibrium models to the exploration of various
types of gradual but nonetheless significant change, and
especially of the social mechanisms that drive them. As
economic, social and political interactions have
internationalized, the conditions, mechanisms and effects of
international institution building have become another
vibrant field of research.Among the most promising analyses seem to be those that take historical sequences into account consider potential complementarities between institutions belonging to a common context, like a national economy, and make allowance for the effects of multi-level institutional arrangements. Historical-institutionalist analyses of this sort stand to benefit from a proper microfoundation in a realistic theory of social action which goes beyond conventional assumptions of strategic rationality and takes the impact of bounded cognitive capacities and environmental uncertainty seriously.
No less than institutions, markets are social constructions. Modern economic sociology has begun to explore the social-structural, institutional and cultural preconditions for the development and proper functioning of market relations. Much more research on this is needed, however, especially in a period of liberalization and internationalization in which a growing range of social transactions are defined as economic and are released from normative, political and bureaucratic control, to be relegated to voluntary and competitive contractual exchange under free price formation. Research will study market formation in a wide variety of areas from both a social and a political perspective, exploring how trust, good will and cultural norms of behavior interact with political and regulatory intervention to make markets possible or, for that matter, impossible.
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