The Asian Financial Crisis dramatically illustrated the vulnerability of financial markets in emerging, transitional, and advanced economies. In response, international organizations insisted that legal reforms could help protect markets from financial breakdowns. Sitting at the nexus between the legal system and the market, corporate bankruptcy law ensures that the casualties of capitalism are treated in an orderly way.
Halliday and Carruthers show how global actors--including the IMF, World Bank, UN, and international professional associations--developed comprehensive norms for corporate bankruptcy laws and how national policymakers responded in turn. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China, Indonesia and Korea, the authors reveal how national policymakers contested and negotiated domestic laws in the context of global pressures. The first study of its kind, this book offers a theory of legal change to explain why global/local tensions produce implementation gaps. Through its analysis of globalization, this book has lessons for international organizations and developing and transition economies the world over.

In this long-awaited second edition of Economy/Society Markets, Meanings, and Social Structure, authors Carruthers and Babb continue to offer an accessible introduction to the way social arrangements affect economic activity, and shows that economic exchanges are deeply embedded in social relationships. Understanding how society shapes the economy helps us answer many important questions. For example, how does advertising get people to buy things? How do people use their social connections to get jobs? How did large bureaucratic organizations come to be so pervasive in modern economies-and what difference does it make? How can we explain the persistence of economic inequalities between men and women and across racial groups? Why do some countries become rich while others stay poor? This book presents sociological answers to questions like these, and encourages its readers to view the economy through a sociological lens.

A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America-and how it continues to divide the haves from the have-nots The Economy of Promises is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitch together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debtors to repay money they have borrowed from lenders. Each promise poses a fundamental question: why does the lender trust the borrower? The book tracks the dramatic shift from personal qualitative judgments to the impersonal quantitative measurements of credit scores and ratings, which make lending on a much greater scale possible. It discusses how lending is shaped by the shadow of failure, and the possibility that borrowers will break their promises and fail to repay their debts. It reveals how credit markets have been shaped by public policy, regulatory changes, and various political factors. And, crucially, it explains how credit interacts with economic inequality, contributing to vast and enduring racial and gender differences-which are only exacerbated by the widespread use of credit scores and ratings for "big data" and algorithmic decision-making. Bringing to life the complicated and abstract terrain of human interaction we call the economy, The Economy of Promises is an important study of the tangle of indebtedness that, for better or worse, shapes and defines American lives.

The Asian Financial Crisis dramatically illustrated the vulnerability of financial markets in emerging, transitional, and advanced economies. In response, international organizations insisted that legal reforms could help protect markets from financial breakdowns. Sitting at the nexus between the legal system and the market, corporate bankruptcy law ensures that the casualties of capitalism are treated in an orderly way.
Halliday and Carruthers show how global actors--including the IMF, World Bank, UN, and international professional associations--developed comprehensive norms for corporate bankruptcy laws and how national policymakers responded in turn. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China, Indonesia and Korea, the authors reveal how national policymakers contested and negotiated domestic laws in the context of global pressures. The first study of its kind, this book offers a theory of legal change to explain why global/local tensions produce implementation gaps. Through its analysis of globalization, this book has lessons for international organizations and developing and transition economies the world over.

Corporate bankruptcy is a defining characteristic of the market economy. It encapsulates the fundamental conflict between capital and labour. Yet, with one or two notable exceptions, the political and social dynamics of bankruptcy law and practice have been largely overlooked by socio-legal scholars. This book remedies that neglect. It compares English and American insolvency laws to identify the underlying political forces that established corporate bankruptcy law on both sides of the Atlantic. It shows how corporate insovency regulation is the creation of the lawyers who interpret and administer it. This book will be welcomed as an important sociological study and advances our understanding of how substantive law results from conflicts among the professionals who help to create it.