Toward a Sociology of Contract

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• contract, status, labor, economic sociology, legal realism