I'm a sociologist who studies the social underpinnings of markets and money. My special interest is in the ways global institutions like the stock market are built upon local, small-group interactions, such as those within neighborhoods and voluntary associations.

You can get a quick overview of the empirical topics I address from my blog and from this trio 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

 

In the language of academia, my work addresses three general topics: economic and organizational sociology; the social psychology of small groups; and the practice and philosophy of qualitative methods. These research streams come together in my two books: Pop Finance (Princeton 2008) and Deception (Stanford 2009). You can read excerpts from the books, as well as reviews, via the links in the upper-right section of this page.

Currently, I am doing field research on the global offshore banking industry. One article from this project has already been published (click on the link "Trust and Estate Planning" at right), and several more are in the works; I expect to publish a book-length manuscript on the project in the next two to three years.