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Market societies have created more wealth, and more opportunities for more people, than any other system of social organization in history. Yet we still have a rudimentary understanding of how markets themselves are soicial constructions that require extensive institutional support. This work seeks to make sense of modern capitalism by developing a sociological theory of market institutions. Addressing the unruly dynamism that capitalism brings with it, leading sociologist Neil Fligstein argues that the basic drift of any one market and its actors, even allowing for competition, is toward stabilization. "The Architecture of Markets" represents a major stop beyond recent, largely empirical studies that oppose the neoclassical model of perfect competition but provide sparse theory toward a coherent economic sociology. Fligstein offers this theory. With it he interprets not just globalization and the information decades - among them, the 1980s merger movement. He makes new inroads into the "theory of fields", which links the formation of markets and firms to the problems of stability. His political-cultural approach explains why governments remain crucial to markets and why so many na