A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of the mortgage-securitization industry, which explains the complex roots of the 2008 financial crisis. More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack an adequate explanation for why it happened. Existing accounts identify a number of culprits-financial instruments, traders, regulators, capital flows-yet fail to grasp how the various puzzle pieces came together. The key, Neil Fligstein argues, is the convergence of major US banks on an identical business model: extracting money from the securitization of mortgages. But how, and why, did this convergence come about? The Banks Did It carefully takes the reader through the development of a banking industry dependent on mortgage securitization. Fligstein documents how banks, with help from the government, created the market for mortgage securities. The largest banks-Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns, Citibank, and Washington Mutual-soon came to participate in every aspect of this market. Each firm originated mortgages, issued mortgage-backed securities, sold those securities, and, in many cases, acted as their own best customers by purchasing the same securities. Entirely reliant on the throughput of mortgages, these firms were unable to alter course even when it became clear that the market had turned on them in the mid-2000s. With the structural features of the banking industry in view, the rest of the story falls into place. Fligstein explains how the crisis was produced, where it spread, why regulators missed the warning signs, and how banks' dependence on mortgage securitization resulted in predatory lending and securities fraud. An illuminating account of the transformation of the American financial system, The Banks Did It offers important lessons for anyone with a stake in avoiding the next crisis.

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 social constructions that require extensive institutional support. This groundbreaking work seeks to fill this gap, 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 and timely step 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 economy, but developments more specific to American capitalism in the past two 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 national variations of capitalism endure. States help make stable markets possible by, for example, establishing the rule of law and adjudicating the class struggle. State-building and market-building go hand in hand.

Fligstein shows that market actors depend mightily upon governments and the members of society for the social conditions that produce wealth. He demonstrates that systems favoring more social justice and redistribution can yield stable markets and economic growth as readily as less egalitarian systems. This book will surely join the classics on capitalism. Economists, sociologists, policymakers, and all those interested in what makes markets function as they do will read it for many years to come.

Finding ways to understand the nature of social change and social order-from political movements to market meltdowns-is one of the enduring problems of social science. A Theory of Fields draws together far-ranging insights from social movement theory, organizational theory, and economic and political sociology to construct a general theory of social organization and strategic action. In a work of remarkable synthesis, imagination, and analysis, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam propose that social change and social order can be understood through what they call strategic action fields. They posit that these fields are the general building blocks of political and economic life, civil society, and the state, and the fundamental form of order in our world today. Similar to Russian dolls, they are nested and connected in a broader environment of almost countless proximate and overlapping fields. Fields are mutually dependent; change in one often triggers change in another. At the core of the theory is an account of how social actors fashion and maintain order in a given field. This sociological theory of action, what they call "social skill," helps explain what individuals do in strategic action fields to gain cooperation or engage in competition. To demonstrate the breadth of the theory, Fligstein and McAdam make its abstract principles concrete through extended case studies of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise and fall of the market for mortgages in the U.S. since the 1960s. The book also provides a "how-to" guide to help others implement the approach and discusses methodological issues. With a bold new approach, A Theory of Fields offers both a rigorous and practically applicable way of thinking through and making sense of social order and change-and how one emerges from the other-in modern, complex societies.

The European Union's market integration project has dramatically altered economic activity around Europe. This book presents extensive evidence on how trade has increased, jobs have been created, and European business has been reorganized. The changes in the economy have been accompanied by dramatic changes in how people from different societies interact. This book argues provocatively that these changes have produced a truly transnational-European-society.
The book explores the nature of that society and its relationship to the creation of a European identity, popular culture, and politics. Much of the current political conflict around Europe can be attributed to who is and who is not involved in European society. Business owners, managers, professionals, white-collar workers, the educated, and the young have all benefited from European economic integration, specifically by interacting more and more with their counterparts in other societies. They tend to think of themselves as Europeans. Older, poorer, less educated, and blue-collar citizens have benefited less. They view the EU as intrusive on national sovereignty, or they fear its pro-business orientation will overwhelm the national welfare states. They have maintained national identities. There is a third group of mainly-middle class citizens who see the EU in mostly positive terms and sometimes--but not always--think of themselves as Europeans. It is this swing group that is most critical for the future of the European project. If they favor more European cooperation, politicians will oblige. But, if they prefer that policies remain wedded to the nation, European cooperation will stall.

The European Union's market integration project has dramatically altered economic activity around Europe. This book presents extensive evidence on how trade has increased, jobs have been created, and European business has been reorganized. However, changes in the economy have been accompanied by dramatic changes in how people from different societies interact. In this book Neil Fligstein argues provocatively that these changes have produced a truly transnational-European-society.
The book explores the nature of that society and its relationship to the creation of a European identity, popular culture, and politics. Much of the current political conflict around Europe can be attributed to who is and who is not involved in European society. Business owners, managers, professionals, white-collar workers, the educated, and the young have all benefited from European economic integration, specifically by interacting more and more with their counterparts in other societies. They tend to think of themselves as Europeans. Older, poorer, less-educated, and blue-collar citizens have benefited less. They view the EU as intrusive on national sovereignty, or they fear its pro-business orientation will overwhelm the national welfare states. They have maintained national identities. There is a third group of mainly-middle class citizens who see the EU in mostly positive terms and sometimes-but not always-think of themselves as Europeans. It is this swing group that is most critical for the future of the European project. If they favor more European cooperation, politicians will oblige. But, if they prefer that policies remain wedded to the nation, European cooperation will stall. Written in anaccessible style this is a major new interpretation of the drive to European integration and essential reading for all those with an interest in the topic.

This book provides an account of the development of the European Union, from a relatively specialized organ of economic cooperation in the 1960s to the complex, quasi-federal entity that today governs over an increasingly diverse set of policy domains. The book is a must for anyone interested in understanding the past and future of European integration and supranational governance.

Neil Fligstein challenges prevailing theories of the corporation and proposes a radically new view in which the firm is driven not so much by market forces as by the state and its policies toward business. Fligstein traces the evolution, over the past century, of corporate strategy from an initial emphasis on direct control to one of manufacturing, then sales and marketing, and finally today's focus on finance.