ABSTRACT
Economists often argue that economics is a “pure” and “autonomous” discipline. In contrast, the relatively dense institutional and interpersonal networks owned by economists show how the discipline stands at the edge of several social fields and thus can be particularly heteronomous. These networks provide a certain volume and form of social capital which strengthen the discipline but also highlight its important porousness toward extra-academic powers. Very few studies have focused on the importance of social capital in fields and even less have systematically investigated the role of intra-disciplinary and extra-disciplinary social capital in economics. This chapter aims to focus on the structure and evolution of social capital in the Swiss field of economists. It relies on an original prosopographical database of all economics professors at Swiss universities between 1980 and 2000 (n = 200). We exploit the data in two ways: First, through multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), we identify two structuring forces among economists. The main opposition is marked by the volume of extra-disciplinary social capital, and the volume of intra-disciplinarity capital only comes in a second place. Second, we show, through class-specific MCA, that, despite the fact that intra-disciplinary social capital gains in importance in the recent period, extra-disciplinary social capital remains the prime structuring logic across time. Although the particularly strong cohesion and autonomy that characterise the discipline, this chapter points out the importance of heteronomous networks, which attest that economics is and stays much less autonomous than economists would argue.
