Release:
2026. Vol. 12.. № 1 (45)About the authors:
Elena V. Andrianova, Cand. Sci. (Soc.), Associate Professor, Head of the Department of General and Economic Sociology, University of Tyumen, Tyumen, Russia; Senior Researcher at the West Siberian Branch of the Federal Research Sociological Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Tyumen, Russia; e.v.andrianova@utmn.ru, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7769-9206, WoS ResearcherID: R-3798-2017, Scopus Author ID: 57202746090, RSCI: 612791Abstract:
The article presents an analysis of the essays included in the Handbook of Economic Sociology of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Milan Zafirovski. Given the absence of reviews of this volume at the time of writing (March 2026), the authors of the article consider it a great honor to take the risk of filling this emerging gap. The formulation of the research problem raised in the handbook lies in the fact that the evolution of socioeconomic schools has a history of more than two centuries, and conceptual conflicts in fundamental views on economic and social reality persist. More than fifty years ago, economist Abba Lerner put forward the idea that economics had assumed the position of the leading discipline among the social sciences because it had focused on the analysis of already resolved political problems and transformed them into the subject of scientific inquiry. This understanding contributed to the assertion of the primacy of economics over sociology. For a long time, the relationship between these disciplines remained virtually unchanged: the academic dialogue between economics and sociology remained relatively weak, largely due to the dominant position of economics in the field of social research. The publication of a new handbook on economic sociology was expected to clarify this long-standing dispute in some way, and it was of particular interest how the editor Milan Zafirovski and his scholarly team would overcome the confrontational relationship between sociology and economics, given their rather rigid disciplinary separation. The solution to this research problem was revealed in the handbook’s identification of creative and inventive approaches to the revival of economic sociology, namely within the framework of economics rather than sociology. As a brief characterization of the results of their reflections on the book, the authors of the article argue that the indicated disciplinary division between economics and sociology, in the context of their century-long confrontation, is nevertheless exaggerated; it is based on historically conditioned claims to a monopoly of thought by economists vis-à-vis sociologists due to political conjunctural factors. The intensity of this struggle, on the whole, harms both subject areas, whereas their constructive cooperation should strengthen both academic disciplines. The article is structured as follows: it consists of two parts; the first analyzes sixteen essays from the handbook, and the second analyzes fifteen essays.Keywords:
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