117: Economic Sociology & Valuation -- Marion Fourcade (Part 1)

Economic sociology bridges economics and sociology, exploring questions such as how social environments explain and influence economic activities. Of interest for this episode is the subfield of economic valuation, in which researchers have been studying how the monetary worth of something is formed or constructed. One influential work is Marion Fourcade’s “Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of ‘Nature’,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2011. The article explores the economic valuation of peculiar goods, things that are intangible or otherwise cannot be exchanged in a market yet have a social value, and uses a case study of the legal proceedings following oil spills in the US and France to explain why the monetary awards were calculated so differently from each other.