摘要：There is a long tradition among sociologists of using economics as an intellectual straw man. For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, every economic sociology article, on every topic, ran something like this: it began by ritu- alistically presenting the view from economics, and then proceeded to pull it to pieces by showing that “it is, in fact, much more complicated” than the play of interests and incentives. Against what they regarded as naive economism, sociologists and anthropologists “demon- strated” the relevance of social networks, or culture, or politics to explaining various economic outcomes, and questioned the standard of “economic rationality.” They celebrated their “dirty hands” against the economists’ “clean models” and worried about the encroachments of rational choice theory into their discipline (Hirsch et al. 1987; Wacquant and Calhoun 1989). To the “anthropo- logical monster” that they saw in Homo Economicus, and in Stigler and Becker's injunction that “De Gustibus non est disputandum”, they opposed their own socio- logical theories of action, rooted in a fine-grained under- standing of how necessity shapes choice and how relative social position shapes taste (Bourdieu 2000). Paradoxically perhaps -but in what amounts to a clas- sic defense of the disciplinary boundary- the sociologists’ main targets in those days were often those economists closest to them intellectually: the economic historian Al- fred Chandler, the institutionalists Oliver Williamson and Douglas North; and the microeconomist Gary Becker (who had a joint appointment in the Chicago sociology department).' Economists, of course, did not care very much about all of this agitation on the other side of the disciplinary border. Most were probably un- aware of the sociologists’ anxious fixation with their sci- ence. And those who knew about it, like Gary Becker, possibly felt: never mind, all publicity is good publicity.
