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Rating: 
Summary: Great example of new economic sociology
Review: This book discusses the types of control (aka restraint) the author found in three settings of traders ('market makers'): the futures market, the bond market, and the stock exchange. The studies were conducted at different times, and under different conditions in each market, which makes comparing across the settings somewhat difficult. However, Abolafia does a good job of addressing those issues, and does a commendable job of drawing together three otherwise very different studies into a single rubric. His conclusion--that the social context of each market plays a big role in the opportunities and constraints actors in each market face--will come as no surprise to followers of the new economic sociology (since Granovetter's 1985 embeddedness article). But even other readers will find Abolafia's evidence quite convincing on this point. He uses his ethnographic data, collected over a decade, to demonstrate how market actors are embedded in social context. When I used this in an undergraduate Sociology of Work class, most students did not catch the distinctions Abolafia made between the various settings. I tried using this with Simpson's work on types of social control in the workplace (direct, hierarchical, bureaucratic, occupational, etc), and while students saw some connections, they did not get the fine distinctions Abolafia made which I had hoped they would, since his comparison across market settings forms a core element of his argument. Would work well in graduate level courses, or courses specifically on economic sociology. For scholars of the market (economists or sociologists) this is a book not to be missed!
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