From its base within the Sociology Department, the Centre’s principal objectives are:
- To create the first UK centre for research in economic sociology, with the aim of building a centre of expertise with an international reputation for world-class research.
- To establish a distinctive approach to innovation studies with an economic sociology perspective, addressing issues of technological innovation, including ‘social technologies’, at the forefront of global change.
- To foster international and comparative research drawing on external funding from a wide range of sources (European, UK Research Councils, and government departments).
- To promote interdisciplinary and inter-departmental collaborative research, including across the social and natural science divide.
- To consolidate or establish collaborative links with major European and US equivalent research centres in the field of economic sociology.
Research Culture
The Centre aims to provide a space for the development of a shared set of theoretical and empirical interests, encouraging dialogue between different perspectives and approaches in order to advance the field of economic sociology. On the basis of the breadth and range of its research interests, its combination of economic sociology and political and cultural economy, its interest in the multi-modality of capitalist economies, and a strong focus on consumption and innovation, CRESI is developing a distinctive identity. A strong feature of this culture is the global reach of its research, and an approach that is both historical and comparative. International collaborative research in Europe, USA, South America and the Asia Pacific are established areas of CRESI research.
Theoretical Approaches
A number of economic sociology approaches are strongly represented within the Centre. These include network theory, fiscal sociology, political economy, economic and social rights theory, neo-Polanyian approaches, sociology of consumption, economic history, cultural economy and history. CRESI aims to stimulate dialogue between these, and with closely related intellectual traditions such as innovation studies, evolutionary economics, the new geography, feminist economics, institutional economics, management and accountancy.
Hi. Being rather slow on the uptake, I’ve only just seen your site. Here in East London we have a ‘Field’ in our School of Social Sciences that combines Sociology and Innovation Studies – I’m from the latter side, though I did study Sociology a long time ago. There may be some useful connections to be made between us. Our Innovation Studies work focuses on ICTs, but we also have people interested in political economy, gender, etc. We also have people in the School who have done a lot of work on consumption, from different perspectives.
I’ve put in a link to the School staff list. Scroll down to the Sociology and Innovation Studies field in the first instance, but also look at other people too (e.g. Massimo de Angelis (Anthropology…), Marta Rabikowska (Cultural Studies…)).
We’re currently in the early stages of putting together a book on the themes of innovation, consumption and inequality. If you want to know more about that you could contact Alvaro de Miranda.
Best regards,
Graham Thomas