Embedded in Whiteness: How the New Economic Sociology Came to Ignore Race & Racism

Race is central to economic life, but race is not central to economic sociology. We explore how this inattention to race and racism developed. First, we outline a history of the new economic sociology as it emerged in the 1980s and defined itself against dominant trends in economics and sociology through its emphasis on the role of meso-level social orders in shaping economic action. Second, we offer a partial explanation for how economic sociology came to ignore race, highlighting both programmatic and contextual factors. Economic sociology's intellectual agenda emphasized identifying the local social factors that made possible the seemingly rational behavior of elite economic actors. As such, economic sociologists studied primarily white men and white- dominated institutions, but, in line with understandings of race and racism at the time and in keeping with the field's emphasis on networks over category memberships, did not recognize the role of race in these settings. Economic sociologists did not study poverty or racial inequality, and so economic sociology was understood as not being about race. This strategy was capable of succeeding in an academic context where studies of race and racism centered racial attitudes, failed to theorize whiteness, and typically treated race as an individual-level variable. Third, we elaborate on two consistent foci of the subfield – ethnic enclaves and corporate interlocks. The canonical literature on ethnic enclaves conceptualized these spaces as sites for researching social capital, but not as sites for studying processes of racialization, leading this literature to largely ignore the role of racism in differences between ethnic enclaves. In contrast, the literature on interlocks ignored race and gender, despite the overwhelming dominance of white men on corporate boards.