This article explores the reasons for the stubborn persistence of gender discrimination in insurance long after gender classifications have been banned in employment, housing, and credit markets. In order to understand why insurance is the last bastion of overt, legally sanctioned discrimination in the post-Civil Rights era, I draw on a historical analysis of political contestation surrounding insurers' pricing practices in life and auto insurance markets in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that insurers' persistent discrimination can be explained by attending to the way in which gender comes to be embedded in the tools insurers use to price risk. This analysis has implications for understanding how social difference can be understood not simply as providing a context for market behavior but as built into the infrastructure of the economy itself, a durable part of the apparatus used to price and value.

Economic sociology has neglected contract as an institutional foundation for market relations. It has also given inadequate attention to the role of forms of social difference such as race, gender, and sexuality in constituting market exchange. We argue that these omissions share common origins in the status/contract division that figured prominently in nineteenth-century sociological and legal thinking. In excavating these origins, we trace two alternative routes to “socializing the economy” associated with sociological and sociolegal traditions, respectively. The sociological approach rests on a dichotomous understanding of “status” and “contract,” with the result that social (“status”) relations are seen as regulating market exchange from the outside. By contrast, Legal Realists treat status and contract as copresent elements of social organization. Because status and contract are intertwined, they operate through the internal constitution of power and inequality in the bargaining relationship. We conclude by considering how insights from sociology and Legal Realism might be productively joined in analyzing the labor contract.

In this article, I explore how risk transformed from being understood as a property of groups to being understood as a property of individuals by examining the history of public and private insurance in the United States. Rather than locate changes in how risk is managed in our society in the "great risk shift" that occurred with the emergence of neoliberalism, I suggest the individualization of risk in recent decades is only the latest instantiation of a recurrent conflict between security and freedom that has marked the evolution of capitalism. Seen from this longer historical perspective, the "personal responsibility revolution" appears not as the handiwork of neoliberal policymakers but, rather, as the unintended result of social movements that contested discriminatory practices in insurance markets. Thus, paradoxically, my account suggests that struggles against discrimination seeded the individualization of risk that is now the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism.

In recent years, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have turned their attention to how the rise of digital technologies is reshaping political life in contemporary society. Here, we analyze this issue by distinguishing between two classification technologies typical of pre-digital and digital eras that differently constitute the relationship between individuals and groups. In class-based systems, characteristic of the pre-digital era, one’s status as an individual is gained through membership in a group in which salient social identities are shared in common with other group members. In attribute-based systems, characteristic of the digital era, one’s status as an individual is determined by virtue of possession of a set of attributes that need not be shared with others. We argue that differences between these two types of classification technologies have important implications for how persons attach (or fail to attach) to groups, and therefore what kinds of political mobilization are possible. We illustrate this argument by examining contention over the use of gender as a variable in the pricing of risk in insurance and credit – two markets in which individuals directly encounter class-based and attribute-based systems of classification, respectively.

Erik Olin Wright's scholarship is often considered to be formed by two entirely disjoint projects represented by his early work on class analysis and his later writings on "real utopias." This essay uses Michael Burawoy's recent formulation of the "two Marxisms" thesis as a foil to argue for the continuities rather than discontinuities in the body of work produced by Wright. More particularly, the critical spirit of the real utopias project infused Wright's work on class analysis from its inception. It is further argued that the limitations Wright encountered in realizing those critical aims directly seeded the search in his later work for institutional design principles and an explicit articulation of normative values that could undergird alternatives to capitalism.

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The route to political studies of financialization RR: If you could you come back on the very beginning of your academic career, how did you come to study financialization and what was your perception of the distinctive US fields of research involved in financial issues? In the 1990s, social studies of finance were still in their early years. GK: When I began graduate studies in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of interest in trying to understand the proliferation of apparently new forms of org...

In recent years, sociologists have noted the increasing centrality of credit for determining life chances in our society, but they have not given adequate attention to the credit market as a key site where individuals assert claims over economic resources. This article explores distinctive features of the credit transaction that differentiate claims making in the credit market from more familiar forms of claims making in the labor market. Rather than the quid pro quo exchange between formal equals that characterizes the wage relation, the extension of credit creates an obligation that marks the debtor as inferior to the creditor. The hierarchical and asymmetrical nature of the loan contract appears to erode the possibility for effective political demands in this arena. However, this article demonstrates that to the extent the status of ownership is institutionalized in the credit transaction, borrowers may be able to overcome some of the disadvantages associated with occupying the weaker position in an unequal relationship of exchange.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssaysPolanyi for the Age of TrumpGreta R. KrippnerGreta R. KrippnerUniversity of Michigan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 4, Number 2Fall 2017 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693902 Views: 599Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Journal Article On Kimberly Kay Hoang’s, Dealing in Desire. Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 2015 Get access Socio-Economic Review, Volume 15, Issue 3, July 2017, Pages 679–690, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwx024 Published: 11 September 2017

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsCreating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. By Elizabeth Popp Berman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. x+265. $35.00.Greta R. KrippnerGreta R. KrippnerUniversity of Michigan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 118, Number 5March 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/669066 Views: 105Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In the context of the recent financial crisis, the extent to which the U.S. economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In "Capitalizing on Crisis", Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation. Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state's attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979. Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.