Welcome:

I am currently a doctoral candidate (Ph.D.) at Brown University with research and teaching interests in economic sociology, social stratification, and social theory. During the 2007 academic year, I will be an exchange scholar and teaching fellow at Harvard University.

Sociologists have a long history of attempting to break down the disciplinary boundary between economics and sociology. From its inception, the founders of the discipline--Marx, Weber, and Durkheim--focused on understanding how markets and the actions of individuals in those markets are influence by society, culture, and politics. For example, each theorist focused on a particular mechanism--class interests, religious institutions, power relations, legal institutions, and social networks--to show how society shapes markets.

As the discipline has evolved, the sub-discipline of economic sociology has come to the forefront of understanding how each of these particular mechanisms operates to construct, regulate, change, and reproduce markets. Contemporary scholars such as Polanyi, Granovetter, White, Bourdieu, Fligstein, Smelser, Swedberg, and Dobbin have each chosen particular markets to analyze--labor, housing, and financial markets--and each scholar has contributed to the overall project to show how economic life and markets are dependent on, and embedded within, social and cultural foundations.

This leads to my research and intellectual focus. My work lies at the intersection of the economy and society and sets out to understand how the evolution of markets are embedded on social and cultural foundations--class interests, religious institutions, power relations, legal institutions, and social networks.

Please take the time to view the following pages. If you have any questions or comments send me an email and/or sign my guestbook.

Thank you,
Todd Arthur Bridges