Richard Swedberg

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Richard Swedberg was born in Sweden on the 18th of May 1948. He now holds the title of professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. In the fall of 1998, he returned to the country of his birth as a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. For most of his career, Swedberg has pursued two questions that sound simple but resist easy answers. How does a researcher learn to theorize, rather than just describe? And how do markets, prices, and crises actually work as social phenomena, not just economic ones? Both questions run through decades of his published work.

• 2. From Law To Sociology

  ›

  In 1970, Swedberg earned a law degree, a juris kandidat, from Stockholm University. In 1978, he completed a PhD in sociology at Boston College. That progression, from a law degree to a sociology doctorate, hints at how he would build his career. He would spend it reading economic and legal systems through a sociologist's eyes. That path out of law and into sociology set up the central puzzle he would spend decades chasing. Not just describing society, but learning how to theorize about it.

• 3. Learning To Theorize

  ›

  In 2014, Swedberg published two books built around an unusual focus. Not what conclusions to draw, but how a researcher arrives at an idea in the first place. The Art of Social Theory, released that year by Princeton University Press, offers practical instructions for the process. The same year, Stanford University Press published his anthology, Theorizing in the Social Sciences: The Context of Discovery. It gathers different perspectives on where theoretical ideas actually come from. Well before that, in 1998, he had teamed up with Peter Hedstrom on Social Mechanisms, published by Cambridge University Press. The book argued sociologists should explain the underlying mechanisms behind social outcomes, not just describe the outcomes themselves. That same instinct for mechanism over description would carry his attention toward an entirely different, more concrete subject: how societies actually organize markets and money.

• 4. Reviving Economic Sociology

  ›

  Since the field's renewal in the mid-1980s, sometimes called the rise of "new economic sociology," Swedberg has published steadily within it. He has written extensively on the work of Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, two thinkers central to his approach to economic sociology. His 1990 book, Economics and Sociology, was published by Princeton University Press. In 1998, he published Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology, also through Princeton University Press. In 2009, Princeton University Press published his Tocqueville's Political Economy, extending the same approach to another classical thinker. His attention to classical thinkers, though, never crowded out an interest in modern subjects: money, markets, and machines built from something other than theory.

• 5. Markets, Machines, Money

  ›

  With Trevor Pinch, Swedberg wrote Living In a Material World, published by MIT Press in 2008 as part of the Inside Technology series. The book explores where economic sociology and science and technology studies intersect. Swedberg has also shaped the field as an editor. Alongside Neil Smelser, he edited The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism and the Handbook of Economic Sociology. Both appeared in editions dated 1994 and 2005, published by the Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press. With Mark Granovetter, he edited Sociology of Economic Life, which went through editions in 1992, 2001, and 2011 with the publisher Westview. That same editorial and analytical range feeds into the work Swedberg is currently pursuing: writing on the financial crisis. That blend of classical scholarship and live economic events would soon draw attention back to the country where his academic path began: Sweden.

• 6. An Honorary Return

  ›

  On the 29th of January 2016, the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University awarded him an honorary doctorate. The citation praised his insights into "how useful the work of classical thinkers can be in understanding contemporary society." His full list of writings, along with a formal vita, remains posted on his page at Cornell University, for anyone curious to read further.