I study markets as social forms, with a special interest in the ways global macro-structures like the market economy are enacted locally, in small group interactions. My primary research question is: how do individuals "perform" the market? You can get a quick overview of the empirical topics I address from my blog and from this selection of essays written for non-academic audiences:

Blog:
Economic Sociology

On Civil Society:
"Shareholder Democracy in America"
Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, July 2008

On Consumer Culture in Developing Countries:
"An Economic Sociologist Abroad: Observations from China and India"
Accounts, Spring 2007

On Social Security:
"Investor Beware: Can Small Investors Survive Social Security Privatization?"
The American Prospect, 10 September 2001

As a scholar, my work speaks to three broad areas of social scientific theory: economic and organizational sociology; the social psychology of small groups, with particular emphasis on social identity; and the practice and philosophy of qualitative methods. These research streams come together in my book, Pop Finance: Investment Clubs and Stock Market Populism, which was published by Princeton University Press in March 2008.

My second book, an edited volume on deception for which I served as both editor and contributor, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press, with an expected publication date of April 2009. I am currently conducting field research on the global offshore banking industry.