Estudios de la Economía

I met Richard Swedberg on March 18th in the lobby of his hotel in Copenhagen (therefore the music that accompanies this recording). The interview was carried out the day before the beginning of his activities at Copenhagen Business School, where he gave a public lecture and conducted a smaller seminar. I was lucky to sneak into both of them, which helped me to better grasp some of the topics discussed in this interview. Particularly, Swedberg’s recent attempt to conceptualize the role played by confidence in financial markets, and, perhaps more fundamentally, his passionate defense of theorizing (not in the sense of automatically recycling the classics, but as an active research practice). In these events, I got the impression that this latter project is motivated by a deep dissatisfaction (that I don’t know if I share) with the state of sociological theory today. There were certainly many other things discussed during these two days that are not registered in this conversation (for instance, a story about Swedberg interviewing Parsons and a recorder that didn’t work as well as an analogy between doing theory and dancing tango). What you do get here are answers to nine questions about key challenges of current economic sociology from one of the most important actors in the institutionalization of this influential sub-discipline.

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