Series

The series West-östliche Denkwege is not only a forum for the philosophical exchange of ideas, but also constitutes a shared effort towards the truth reached in dialogue not only with East-Asian and Western cultures, but also within the space of Europe itself, to the past and present of which a West–East structure of difference belongs. The primary aim of the series is not simply to compare thinking cultures, but to connect them together in order to make them fruitful for the purposes of a common effort. In dealing with the fundamental topics of theoretical and practical philosophy, political thinking and bioethics, the series aims to encourage a lively discourse between East and West by disclosing a wealth of different traditions.

Analysing economic phenomena from a sociological perspective poses a number of transdisciplinary challenges which are both highly topical and relevant. This means that the complementary research fields of economic sociology and political economics are among the most dynamic areas of the social sciences in both theoretical and empirical terms. Economic sociology offers analytical perspectives on the logic of economic activity and the way it is embedded into social structures, which are arranged in a continuum of market relations, networks, organisational hierarchies and other coordinating bodies. Research papers from this field therefore deal with a vast array of subjects, ranging from entrepreneurship, innovation and organisation in the workplace to monetary economics and financial markets. Political economics complements and supplements economic sociology’s focus on action by taking institutional interaction between economic and political systems into consideration and by treating the state’s involvement in the organisation of economic processes as particularly significant. In this respect, the issue of variations in capitalist market economies in the context of globalisation assumes a central role. The series of publications entitled “Wirtschaftssoziologie und Politische Ökonomie” (Economic Sociology and Political Economics) therefore provides a forum for theoretical and empirical works from these research areas with no thematic restrictions.