Jens Beckert (born 21 July 1967, in Frankfurt am Main)
Education and career
Beckert earned his MA in sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1991 and his MBA at Free University of Berlin in 1993.
He earned his doctorate with a dissertation in the field of economic sociology in 1996 at Free University of Berlin and his
habilitation at the same university with a book on the sociology of inheritance in 2003.
An associate professorship in sociology at International University Bremen (2002–2003) and a professorship in sociology at the University of Göttingen (2003–2005) preceded Beckert’s appointment at age 37 as director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG),
Current position and activities
He is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in
Cologne. In addition, Beckert is a member of the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne.
He is a faculty member of the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, a doctoral program run jointly by the MPIfG and the Faculty of Management at the University of Cologne.
Beckert is an editor of the
European Journal of Sociology and a member of the editorial board of
Socio-Economic Review.
He was council member of the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Research
Economies as social orders within societies
Jens Beckert’s current work at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies reflects a research program he has developed with his former codirector
Wolfgang Streeck which “proposes to invest in a
theory of social action as the most promising approach to a deeper understanding and an improved theorization of the economy as a socially and politically constituted system of action.”
“Any economy is socially and politically constructed. The way it is socially embedded reflects both prevailing systems of meaning and the results of political ‘market struggles’ over social regulation. Investigating institutional regulation of the economy requires studying how economies are constituted as social orders within societies.”
Markets from a sociological perspective
In his research cluster on the “Sociology of Markets,” Beckert focuses on “markets as the core institution of capitalist economies,” seeking “to understand the functioning of markets from a distinctively sociological perspective.” Analyzing markets “from a Weberian viewpoint as arenas of social struggle in which actors confront each other under conditions of competition,” he explores the “social, cultural, and political underpinnings for the development of the order of markets.”
Embeddedness of economic action
“The problem of uncertainty market actors face when making decisions” is a key issue in Beckert’s research, which examines “the coordination problems market participants must cope with” – the problems of value, competition, and cooperation. “Uncertainty also provides a theoretical opening to explain the embeddedness of economic action.”
Awards and honours
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2021: Appointed to the Academia Europaea
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2018: "Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
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2010: Appointed to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
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2005: Best Law Book of the Year, by the German law journal Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, his book Unverdientes Vermögen Unearned
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2005: Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities donated by the Commerzbank Foundation.
Selected publications
Books
Articles
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Beckert, Jens (2023). " Varieties of Wealth: Toward a Comparative Sociology of Wealth Inequality". Socio-Economic Review
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Beckert, Jens (2022). "Durable Wealth: Institutions, Mechanisms, and Practices of Wealth Perpetuation". Annual Review of Sociology, 48: 233–255.
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Beckert, Jens (2021). "The Firm as an Engine of Imagination: Organizational Prospection and the Making of Economic Futures ". Organization Theory, 2 (2).
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Beckert, Jens (2020). "Markets from Meaning: Quality Uncertainty and the Intersubjective Construction of Value ". Cambridge Journal of Economics, 44 (2): 285–301.
External links
