Trespassing into economic life: Alexander and Zelizer, Alexander and me

Jeffrey Alexander presented culture as acting autonomously in shaping outcomes in the civil sphere, by way of narratives, symbolic binaries and social performances. Using Viviana Zelizer and her academic progeny as his touchstone, Alexander analysed from above how cultural structure shaped economic action and the workings of markets, entering the territory of economic sociology and of economics where the dynamics of dramaturgical performances remained limited to Erving Goffman, religious-like performances to Randall Collins. With Zelizer, he was aligned, though his analysis worked from the top down, while her relational work discerned the cultural structure from the bottom up. For the economists and for traditional economic sociologists, culture had trespassed into territory they controlled. This article reviews how cultural sociology boldly entered the marketplace.