Storr - Understanding the culture of markets / Virgil Henry Storr.

Storr issues a challenge to the entire discipline of economics in this deep and innovative study. It should be required reading in every undergraduate class on markets and economic theory. A brave and spirited work that carves out new intellectual territory for economics, this book opens a crucially important conversation between economists and other social scientists, asking fundamental questions about what determines behavior in markets. Storr is definitely pushing the boundaries of economics, opening up the most fundamental issues in the theory of markets. This work will be welcomed by social scientists in many disciplines, and it should be read by any serious student of markets.

Richard Wilk, Provosts Professor of Anthropology,
Indiana University, USA

Storrs beautifully written book puts forward a theory of the animating spirit in an economy, in the style of Max Webers ethicwithout the Protestantism. He replies to Samuelsonian economists who want to reduce everything to Capital and to Austrian economists who are not willing to take the next step into culture that their theories demand. In short, he and a handful of others, may their tribe increase, are initiating a humanomics, that is, an economics with people instead of sociopaths at its center.

Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History,
English, and Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Economists have all too often either ignored culture completely, or failed to do justice to it by assimilating it to some other phenomenonsuch as capitalthat provides a poor model for understanding its true nature and significance. Virgil Storr is different. He has thought hard about how to conceptualize culture, about the relationship between culture and economic activity, and about how an appreciation of culture should affect the way that economists carry out applied work. This careful, insightful, and persuasive book is the outcome of his reflections. Economists who want a more sophisticated way of thinking not only about culture but also, given cultures impact on economic activity, about markets, will benefit greatly from reading it. Social scientists from other disciplines who have previously despaired of finding a culturally literate economist will also find much to ponder and value in this fine work of scholarship.

Paul Lewis, Reader in Economics and Public Policy,
Kings College London, UK

In one of the most controversial works in social science, Max Weber argued that without taking the spirit of capitalism into account, you cannot understand the modern economy. More than a century later, Virgil Storr argues that without taking the spirits that animate markets into account, you cannot understand the modern economy. Was Weber right or wrong; is Storr right or wrong? Different readers will no doubt give different answers. But all will agree that Storr raises questions that are absolutely essential to get a better grip on the modern economy.

Richard Swedberg, Professor of Sociology, Cornell University, USA

In Understanding the Culture of Markets Virgil Storr makes a major contribution to the under-explored intersection between cultural and economic processes. The customary perspective the economics discipline brings to cultural analysis is either to collapse nuanced cultural processes into a rational choice model of human decision making or to cast culture in the role of economic spoileras a set of constraints that stands in the way of productive life. In Storrs hands, culture receives the nuanced treatment it deserves as he explores the ways in which culture shapes and undergirds all of productive life. In short, Storr delivers on his promise to offer an economics of meaning.