This book asserts that economists and sociologists need the combined concepts of conventions and structures to deal with markets and organizations. We argue that there is room for cooperation between the two disciplines when economists take into account conventions, and sociologists structures and flows of resources. Conventions refer to values, rules and representations that influence economic behavior. 2 Structures refer to patterns of interests and relationships reflecting resource interdependencies among members of any social system.

At first sight, the relationship between conventions and structures is obvious. On the one hand, for example, the principle of reciprocity (as described by sociologists such as Mauss or Gouldner) can be conceived of as a convention. This convention may influence, for example, whom members of an organization approach for advice. In effect, one might think that members approach others with the most expertise, but very often this is not what happens: because they probably cannot give anything in return (or because they do not want to recognize these others’ status, or because they do not want to be perceived as inexperienced), they often approach people who are at a similar level, who may not know more about this special subject than they do, but for whom, at some point in the future, they will be able to return the favour. The rule of reciprocity will informally determine in part the shape of advice flows in the organization, and thus the structural opportunities and constraints weighing on members’ productive abilities. On the other hand, structural features of a collective actor also influence the assertion or definition of rules. The shape of interdependence among members, especially asymmetric interdependence called status or power, also defines members’ capacity to decide what is fair and what is unfair in the distribution of efforts and allocation of rewards. However, the relationship between these two dimensions of economic activity (whether production or exchange) is not really spelled out in current social sciences. Both mainstream economics and new institutional economics feel rather uneasy about rules and values, because of their strong notion of instrumental rationality (either optimizing or bounded); symmetrically structuralist sociology is at pains to give a high analytical status to individual and collective representations, because of a traditional holistic bias.