The Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays on Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship

Foreword

Foreword THE TITLE AND SUBTITLE of this finely calibrated volume serve its potential readers well. The title instantly directs attention to its principal scholarly aim-a linkage and partial fusion of ideas central to both economic sociology and the sociology of immigration, fields that are experiencing an energetic renewal and, I think it safe to say, definite advancement. In turn, the subtitle signals us that the book draws upon theoretically oriented empirical studies of immigration, ethnicity, and entrepreneurship, thus providing readers with far more than another set of wholly programmatic reflections on those reemerging fields of sociological inquiry. The title and general objective if not the subject of this volume have inevitably put me in mind of the sociological essay, "Die sozialen Klassen im ethnisch homogenen Milieu," first published in 1926 by Joseph Schumpeter, that giant among twentieth century economists who lay much store on what he, like Max Weber, described as "Sozialokonomik." For, as I had forgotten but as the economic-sociologist Richard Swedberg remembered in his anthology of Schumpeter 's writings,! when that essay, which Schumpeter numbered among his six "most important works,"2 finally found its way into English a quarter-century later, I found myself gravely proclaiming that it "builds a bridge carrying two-way intellectual traffic between economics and sociology." Just as rather more recently I was privileged to observe the authors of this volume building a bridge between economic sociology and the sociology of immigration during their year as Visiting Scholars at the Russell Sage Foundation. During that year of participant-observation, it soon became plain that the authors were an exemplary research team intent on examining the socio-economic phenomena of immigration as a strategic research site (SRS) for advancing certain frontiers of economic sociology in the course of making specific contributions to our sociological knowledge of immigration. The considerable results of that collabovii VIJI Foreword rative work are admirably summarized and placed in broad theoretical context by Alejandro Portes in his introductory chapter, thus relieving a mere foreword of that heavy responsibility. Still, there is room for a few further expressions of specific interest and pleasure in the volume when viewed from the standpoint of the history and sociology of science. The authors exhibit a keen sense of continuities and discontinuities in historically evolving socio-economic thought. Thus, their systematic research draws upon and significantly extends Karl Polanyi's theoretical orientation that he liked to describe as his "substantive [as distinct from formal] economics." Looking forward rather than backward, it can be argued that the authors' own evolving theoretical orientation would profit from replacing the current, often adversarial , stance dividing the "New Economic Sociology" (so effectively exemplified in this volume) from the "New Institutional Economics" (so effectively exemplified by the work of Douglas North, Oliver Williamson and, in his frequent use of immigration as a strategic research site, particularly by the sociologist Victor Nee) with a less competitive and more productive synergy. Such a move might resemble the Schumpeterian program for SozialOkonomik that comprises "economic theory," "economic sociology," "economic history," and "statistics." After all, we know that concrete socio-economic phenomena cannot be exhaustively accounted for by anyone theoretical orientation. Why, then, allow a misplaced contest among diverse but complementary theoretical perspectives to reintroduce a latterday version of Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness? A disciplined pluralism, constrained by the norm of "socially organized skepticism" that has long been institutionalized in science, seems indicated . Several of the chapters in this volume that center on ethnic entrepreneurial patterns bring Schumpeter back to mind. Precisely because he had gone to some pains to exclude ethnic variation in his analysis of class formation by confining himself to an "ethnisch homogenen Milieu" (as few contemporary economists would have bothered to note they were doing), there is reason to suppose that Schumpeter, as the prime mover of a theory of entrepreneurial innovation as the spur to economic development, would have resonated to these studies of ethnic entrepreneurial patterns embedded in institutional structures. Along with their theoretical contributions to economic sociology, the studies greatly advance a sociological understanding of our multicultural and multi-ethnic society. In doing so, moreover, they counter the ethnic chauvinism that has each ethnic group insisting on its unique and preeminent contribution to Foreword ix American society and culture. As we have cause to know, such excesses of defensive ethnic pride have a way of degenerating into an offensive ethnocentrism that in...