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F.A. Hayek’s famous critique of the socialist planned economy turned on the role of information in markets. In competitive markets, decision-making is decentralized and relies on locally available market signals. Decision-makers do not have to be omniscient or predict the future; they simply have to focus on market prices. By contrast, socialist planners face a much more demanding situation where they have to acquire and process vast amounts of information in a centralized fashion. The author revisits Hayek’s early work in light of the contemporary revolution in information technology, using recent research on organizational decision-making. The author argues that a great deal of market information is produced by public and private institutions, and includes much more than market prices. The boundary between tacit knowledge and formalized knowledge changes as IT enables the spread of the latter. Furthermore, the growing “knowledge economy” underscores the importance of intellectual property, and the legal institutions that support it. Overall, some of Hayek’s early insights hold up well while others need updating.

In the past several years, economic sociology has grown into a new speciality within sociology. Numerous edited volumes, survey articles and handbooks herald its arrival and mark out its place in the sociological firmament (see, e.g. Granovetter and Swedberg, 1992; Swedberg, 1991; Smelser and Swedberg, 1994). Although classic social theorists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel frequently pondered the structure and conditions of industrial society and the problems its emergence generated, it was not until neoclassical economists recently began to study nonmarket social phenomena that sociologists reacted by taking up the market as an object of study.

This chapter examines the central role played by credit rating agencies in the production of “knowledge” about financial instruments. That “knowledge,” in the form of credit ratings, underpinned disintermediation in mortgage markets by giving investors confidence that they knew the risk-and-return properties of otherwise opaque collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and mortgage-backed securities. Credit ratings helped to “standardize” structured financial products and create liquid markets. However, this cognitive machinery failed and liquidity collapsed during the current crisis. I use this failure to examine the role of institutionalized cognition in the production of market liquidity.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).

This article’s indented contribution is to provide novel theoretical insights and empirical observations on “who gets what” in the way of incomes, including wages. The article challenges the conventional wisdom about stratification, especially power and status, as an outcome or function of economic distribution. It posits that income distribution is conditional on pre‐existing social stratification expressed in antecedent differences in class, power, status and related factors.