organising principle of society. For instance they would look at how work in the home is linked to productivity outside. The defined scope of economics has helped in facilitating its development as a highly focused, coherent discipline. Sociologists often envy the economists for the precision of their terminology and the exactness of their measures.
And the ability to translate the results of their theoretical work into practical suggestions having major implications for public policy. Yet economists’ predictive abilities often suffer precisely because of their neglect of individual behaviour, cultural norms and institutional resistance which sociologists study. Activity ´ Do you think advertisements actually influence people’s consumption patterns? ´ Do you think the idea of what defines ‘good life’ is only economically defined?
´ Do you think ‘spending’ and ‘saving’ habits are culturally formed? Pierre Bourdieu wrote in . A true economic science would look at all the costs of the economy-not only at the costs that corporations are concerned with, but also at crimes, suicides, and so on. We need to put forward an economics of happiness, which would take note of all the profits, individual and collective, material and symbolic, associated with activity (such as security), and also the material and symbolic costs associated with inactivity or precarious employment (for example consumption of medicines: France holds the world record for the use of tranquilisers), (cited in Swedberg ).
Sociology unlike economics usually does not provide technical solutions. But it encourages a questioning and critical perspective. This helps questioning of basic assumptions. And thereby facilitates a discussion of not just the technical means towards a given goal, but also about the social desirability of a goal itself.
Recent trends have seen a resurgence of economic sociology perhaps because of both this wider and critical perspective of sociology. Sociology provides clearer or more adequate understanding of a social situation than existed before. This can be either on the level of factual knowledge, or through gaining an improved grasp of why something is happening (in other words, by means of theoretical understanding). Sociology and Political Science As in the case