Economic, Social, and Symbolic Capital: New Aspects for the Development of a Sociological Theory of the Market

Since the mid-1980s, economic sociology has experienced an enormous upturn. In this context, the notion of "social embeddedness" as the organizing principle of economic sociology was of particular importance. Ironically, the basic intuition that markets are socially embedded--while containing an important insight--has led economic sociologists to take the market itself for granted. Economic sociologists have focused their attention on the institutions that surround the market and on alternative mechanisms of economic governance. Relatively little attention has been directed toward the actors and social processes constituting markets. In the first section, the article presents results of a research project studying the market-entry process of East German enterprises after the reunification. It describes what ideas East German executives have concerning the ways in which capitalistic markets function. On the basis of the reconstruction of managers' orientation and their logic of action, in the second section the author determines the importance of the social and symbolic capital of a firm as well as trust and power in the market-entry process. In this context, the article intends to show the contribution of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of inequality for explaining the logic of market processes and for the further development of a sociological theory of the market.