Inspired by Berger and Luckmann’s work The Social Construction of Reality, this paper describes the social construction of the market, specifically focusing on the Austrian understanding of the market as a product of human action, acknowledging that knowledge is socially distributed, and focusing on the subjectively held though socially mediated meanings that actors ascribe to market activity.

This paper identifies the four elements that compose the sociological tradition: social action, embeddedness, social problems, and social construction. The author argues that these elements are more pronounced in sociology than in any other academic discipline and hence contribute to the value-added character of sociology.

Dambisa Moyo’s new book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, has received a great deal of attention in the last few months. Moyo’s book is a must-read for any person interested in the question of why some countries are rich while others remain stagnant or poor.

Under modern ideological conditions, a national emergency produces a virtual free-for-all of policies, programs, and plans that expand the government’s power. This expansion leaves the public with altered political and ideological sensibilities. Efforts to rein in the government’s crisis-driven overreaching must concentrate, first, on affecting the public’s thinking about how the government ought to act during an emergency and, second, on changing the machinery of government so that ill-considered or poorly justified measures cannot be adopted so easily.

When deviating from best responses, do people have a stronger propensity to increase or decrease other people’s payoffs? The authors find that negative intentions are more likely to induce payoff decreases than positive intentions are to induce payoff increases.

Few social scientists have taken the direct route to the roots of phenomenology. They have instead been lead, guided and accompanied by others, whose works have been like bridges of knowledge. The work that has spawned the interest among social scientists in phenomenology is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's famous work The Social Construction of Reality (1991; Berger 1970:15).

This paper investigates the evolving meaning of the term coordination as used by economists. The paper is based on systematic electronic searches (on “coord,” etc.) of major works and leading journals.

Robust institutional change is difficult to achieve.  However, the growth paths of some countries are more likely to be affected by contemporaneous political turmoil than others.  This paper supports this claim using data on GDP growth during periods of extreme political turmoil for 69 countries between 1870 and 2000.  The authors argue that the robustness of a country’s growth path to political uncertainty depends on the degree to which individuals are invested in its current institutions.