Abstract
Recent years have brought a significant change in the evolution of eco nomics and sociology, including an unexpected convergence in their ap proaches to issues like firms and economic development. This convergence pivots around the concept of "institutions," a familiar term in sociology and social anthropology but something of a revolution in economics, dominated so far by the neoclassical paradigm. This development has been accompa nied by confusion about what the new master term means and, importantly, by a failure to mine prior theoretical work that sought to order, classify, and relate the multiple aspects of social life that are now brought under the same umbrella concept. The result has been a number of ad hoc typologies that highlight some features of what needs to be explained, while obscur ing others. In this essay, I seek to reverse these trends by recalling key concepts and distinctions in sociological theory and illustrating their analytic utility with examples from the recent literature on economic development. My argument is that recourse to these concepts and distinctions enhances our ability to analyze economic and "economically relevant" phenomena (We ber [1904] 1949). I provide an illustration of the utility of a systematic so ciological perspective by addressing the issue of fertility transitions, one of the central subjects of debate in modern demographic theory.