Situating Zelizer: A Beginners’ Guide

This short text could work both as a long footnote that contextualizes the interview with Viviana Zelizer published in this issue, and as a very brief beginner’s guide to Zelizer’s economic sociology. The premise is that a good way of introducing Zelizer’s contribution to the study of economic life is by situating her oeuvre in the context of recent research. The main argument is that Zelizer’s work is not simply a cultural counterbalance of the mostly structural “new economic sociology”. She has constructed an original angle to the study of economic life. From this perspective, sociologists learn to focus on the frictions in which economic life unfolds.