Abstract
About thirty years ago, Anthony Giddens, John Thompson, and David Held started Polity Press. By all accounts it is a great success in the textbook trade because it is able to persuade talented and well-known scholars to produce short, “accessible,” but well-constructed introductions to a very broad range of topics that are often found in upper-level undergraduate and lower-level graduate courses in the global anglophone college market. These titles are a cut above standard textbooks. Polity has also published significant studies that do not fit this model, such as very long biographies of Weber and Durkheim recently, in addition to everything Lord Giddens has written for the last several decades. Its “business model” has worked such that even the most distinguished scholars, especially in theoretically-driven subfields, have lined up to write for the press. In the case of the book under review, Polity garnered blurbs from Viviana Zelizer, Richard Swedberg, and Jeffrey C. Alexander, a virtual trifecta for a book about “culture.”
Frederick Wherry was an associate professor at Michigan when he wrote this primer on a topic relatively new to sociology. He wants to answer the question of how culture, usually understood to be distant from the hurley-burley of commerce, has come to infiltrate market relations, and how sociologists should understand this putatively new aspect of business. He does this in four tight chapters, one each on how markets respond to “culture” writ large, how market supply is inspired by cultural inputs, how money and prices operate, and (very handy for students), how to carry out research on markets from a cultural/sociological standpoint. He concludes the book with a brief theoretical overview which features two tables, one adapted from Lyn Spillman’s work, the other a tabular summary of his own arguments, highlighting the predictive capacity of cultural sociology depending on whether it involves “weak” or “strong” programs. All of this is followed by a useable bibliography.
Wherry’s book is cleanly written, draws on and quotes from a wide variety of current thinking by sociologists on how markets function and why they are pervious to cultural influences, and provides a handy introduction to this new field which any reasonably literate student could follow. Scholars already attuned to Granovetter and Swedberg’s The Sociology of Economic Life, various works by Bruce Carruthers or Viviana Zelizer, and related research will not be enlightened quite so much, but will appreciate Wherry’s efficient restatement of the field’s basic principles.