The Beauty of Competition?

Abstract

More than 20 years ago, David Stark (2000: 2; see also Stark, 2009) identified what he called ‘‘Parsons’s Pact,’’ a tacit agreement that Talcott Parsons had made with economists: ‘‘you, economists, study value; we, the sociologists, will study values. You will have claim on the economy, we will stake our claim on the social relations in which economies are embedded.’’ That implicit division of labor preserved Parsons’s imperial ambitions for sociology by bracketing the hegemony of economics. But, Stark argued, it also increasingly constrained economic sociologists to examining embedded social relations, whereas they should treat the economy as a social phenomenon. Only by dropping Parsons’s Pact could economic sociology realize its potential. These two edited volumes are a measure of how far the discipline has come in escaping that pact. Both claim value and competition—two concepts at the heart of economics—as sociological phenomena. In Competition: What It Is and Why It Happens, Arora-Jonsson, Brunsson, and Hasse stake a firm claim in Chapter 1: ‘‘Rather than seeing competition as being within the purview of economics, we argue that it should be considered along with such other master trends as individualization and rationalization’’ (p. 5). The Performance Complex takes a more expansive approach with its claim, examining what Stark calls ‘‘a performance society: a society saturated with performances of many and various kinds, with a wide range of attendant capacities, techniques, and creativities—but also anxieties’’ (p. 1). Stark’s edited volume shows how value is performed through competitions and contests, rankings and ratings, and measurements and metrics. Meanwhile, Competition offers a program for research, parsing competition into four elements: actors, relationships, desire, and scarcity (p. 6). That structure is valuable; it provides a framework for exploring how competition originates in and brings meaning to different sectors of society. While the two volumes take different routes through their explorations of competition, together they take us directly into the study of value that economic sociologists had so long avoided.