What Is New about Unintended Consequences in New Economic Sociology?

The aim of the present paper is to review what is new about unintended consequences in new economic sociology. The starting point of this investigation is Portes's observation that unintended consequences of purposive social action constitute one of the meta-assumptions which ground this field, but that its treatment is rather general, unfalsifiable and inconsistent. In response, the paper argues in a Mertonian fashion that the problem is not that the treatment of the unintended is erratic, but that there is a lack of systematization and cumulative knowledge about the recent advancements in this field. In order to check the validity of this proposition, the state of the art discusses the contributions to the unintended theme in relation to three main research contexts, which happen to be quite often mixed up in the literature. These are the unanticipated-perverse effects; the externalities-side effects and the invisible hand-spontaneous order.

The overall conclusion seems to be that, indeed, there is something new in the manner in which new economic sociology analyzes the unintended. This seems consistent and concrete enough to disavow Portes’s claim that the treatment of unintended consequences in new economic sociology does not manage to pass the level of generic and unfalsifiable formulations. On the other hand, it cannot escape notice that there are certain theories and programs that are quite coagulated within these three streams – such as externalities, performativity, latent function, unintended fit. So that the Mertonian sort of hypothesis regarding the lack of systematization and cumulative knowledge in new economic sociology does not hold either – not one hundred percent at least. This is so because, at least at the level of the three research contexts, the sociologists make use of a common toolkit. What the present paper will show is that any effort to systematize the relevant literature should start with locating the contributions in relation to the three specific research contexts. It is more accurate to talk about three analytical streams to study the unintended, in which new economic sociology manifests itself, rather than about an integral new economic sociology of the unintended. So that as long as the existence of the three analytical traditions are not taken into account, the general idea of unintended consequences will further remain, as Portes noticed, just too general.