Economic growth, sociological traditions, and the restoration of social ecology in economic sociology

Of the three traditions in economic sociology, only the Weberian/Marxian (German) and Durkheimian (French) traditions are still vital; the third Parsonsian or American tradition is essentially moribund. This chapter reviews the content of each of these traditions and argues for the restoration of the earliest sociological model of economic change: original evolutionary functionalism, augmented by Lenski’s ecological-evolutionary theory and Hawley’s human ecology. This blending of ecological theories yields an abstract, universalist theory that is a distinct improvement on Parsons and can easily rival the other two traditions in predictive power and parsimony.