As the year comes to an end, this is a opportune moment to celebrate some of the most notable books in Economic Sociology and Political Economy acknowledged by leading associations in our field. These studies are distinguished by their empirical originality and theoretical significance, and stand out as meticulously researched, intellectually thought-provoking, and beautifully written works.
The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics bestowed the 2025 Alice Amsden Best Book Award on Kim Pernell‘s Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation (Princeton UP, 2024) and Ya-Wen Lei‘s The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China (Princeton UP, 2023). Ya-Wen Lei’s The Gilded Cage offers powerful insights into the policy and legal instruments that underpin the functioning of the Chinese state and its relationship with private firms through the lens of techno-developmentalism. Kim Pernell’s Visions of Financial Order brilliantly shows how political institutions in the US, Canada, and Spain represented principles of order and/or conflict, which in turn informed the developments in each country’s national banking regulatory system.
The American Sociological Association’s Economic Sociology section granted the 2025 Zelizer Best Book Award to Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy‘s The Ordinal Society (Harvard UP, 2024) and Georg Rilinger‘s Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Fourcade & Healy masterfully argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state. Rilinger reveals market design as a novel multi-dimensional organizational form with its own structures, processes, and socio-technical-economic concepts. Kim Pernell’s Visions of Financial Order received a Honorable Mention.
The ES/PE community extends warm, collegial congratulations to these outstanding and committed scholars who crafted these superb and groundbreaking books!

> The past Alice Amsden Book Award recipients:

2024: Kimberly Kay Hoang’s Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton UP, 2022)
Honorable Mentions: Smitha Radhakrishnan’s Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022) and Victor Roy’s Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price (University of California Press, 2023).

2023: Megan Tobias Neely’s Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (University of California Press, 2022)
Honorable Mention: Sidney A. Rothstein’s, Recoding Power: Tactics for Mobilizing Tech Workers (Oxford UP, 2022)

2022: Yuen Yuen Ang’s China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Honorable Mentions: Rebecca Elliott, Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States. Columbia University Press, 2021 and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States. Stanford University Press, 2021

2021: Amy Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. Princeton University Press, 2019
Honorable Mention: Aldo Madariaga’s Neoliberal Resilience: Lessons in Democracy and Development from Latin America and Eastern Europe (Princeton UP, 2020)

2020:  Sarah Quinn’s American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (Princeton UP, 2019)
Honorable Mention: Zsófia Barta’s In the Red: The Politics of Public Debt Accumulation in Developed Countries (University of Michigan Press, 2019)

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2019: Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

> The past Zelizer Best Book Award recipients:

2024: Jordanna Matlon’s A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism (Cornell UP, 2022)
Honorable Mention: Megan Tobias Neely’s Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (University of California Press, 2022) and Jessi Streib’s The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

2023: Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America. Oxford University Press, 2021
and
Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy. Princeton University Press, 2022

2022: Rebecca Elliott, Underwater: Loss, Flood Insurance, and the Moral Economy of Climate Change in the United States. Columbia University Press, 2021.
and
Angèle Christin, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms. Princeton University Press, 2020
Honorable Mention: Mitchel Abolafia, Stewards of the Market: How the Federal Reserve Made Sense of the Financial Crisis. Harvard University Press, 2020.

2021: Nitsan Chorev, Give and Take: Developmental Foreign Aid and the Pharmaceutical Industry in East Africa. Princeton University Press, 2019
and
Jeffrey J. Sallaz, Lives on the Line: How the Philippines Became the World’s Call Center Capital. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Honorable Mention: Erin L. Kelly and Phyllis Moen, Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do About It. Princeton University Press, 2020

2020: Sarah Quinn, American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation. Princeton University Press, 2019

2019: Monica Prasad, Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution. Russell Sage, 2018
Honorable Mention: Stephanie L. Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism. Harvard University Press, 2018

2018: Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap. Cornell University Press, 2016

2017: Marc Steinberg, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution. University of Chicago Press, 2016

2016: Gabriel Abend, The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics. Princeton University Press, 2014

2016: Debbie Becher, Private Property and Public Power for Eminent Domain in Philadelphia. Oxford University Press, 2014

2015: Martin Reuf, Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South. Princeton University Press, 2014

2014: Ofer Sharone, Flawed System, Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences. University of Chicago Press, 2013

2013: Lyn Spillman, Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations. University of Chicago Press, 2012

2013: Monica Prasad, The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty. Harvard University Press, 2012

2012: Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Harvard University Press, 2012

2010: Terence G. Halliday and Bruce G. Carruthers, Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis. Stanford University Press, 2009

2008: Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. MIT Press, 2006

2006: Olav Velthuis, Talking Prizes: Symbolic Meaning of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton University Press, 2005

2006: James R. Lincoln and Michael L. Gerlach, Japan’s Network Economy: Structure, Persistence and Change. Cambridge University Press, 2004

2004: Harrison White, Markets from Networks Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton University Press, 2002

2004: Sarah Babb, Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism. Princeton University Press, 2001

2003: Neil Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies. Princeton University Press, 2002