Making Sense

Sophie Mützel is Professor of Sociology at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She is the author of Making Meaning of the Move of the German Capital (2002).

• Introduction1. Markets and Stories2. Breast Cancer Therapies and Innovation3. A Market of Expectations4. Making Sense of a Market5. Patterns in Meaning-Making: Categories over TimeConclusion: Markets from Stories

"Mützel brilliantly connects market emergence and creation of a market of expectations in a book that defines the next level of excitement in theorizing entanglements of structure, culture, and meaning."—Ronald Breiger, University of Arizona "Deftly interweaving text analyses and computational methods to examine thousands of stories, Mützel fashions a virtuoso example of relational sociology."—Woody Powell, Stanford University "Making Sense makes a seminal contribution to the understanding of markets and innovation processes."—Jens Beckert, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne "By focusing on the role of stories in market emergence and by combining qualitative and computational text analysis, Making Sense—as Mützel highlights in the conclusions—partakes in the debates among economic sociologists concerning the relevance of culture in market emergence and how to measure it.... Making Sense offers readers the opportunity to approach the topic through a fascinating methodology."—Penelope K. Hardy, H-Sci-Med-Tech "Indeed, Mützel's book can be read as much for its substantive contributions as it can be for its method. This text is innovative in its approach to analysis through its combination of close textual analysis to study meaning-making processes, alongside its deployment of computational methods to understand the macro discursive trajectories and patterns in meaning making in breast cancer therapeutics over two decades."—Melanie Jeske, Social Forces "Mützel's work represents a milestone in a field in which systematic data analyses are sparse, and it points toward avenues for fruitful future research. It serves as a valuable reference for readers interested in exploring the temporal dynamics of market construction, a topic that is increasingly relevant in our turbulent economy fueled by innovation-driven imaginaries."—Mia Chang-Zunino, Administrative Science Quarterly "[Making Sense] is an important piece of new economic sociology and contains significant insights about the role of intersubjectivity in economic life as well as in the construction of thought and meaning more generally. It also offers a virtuoso performance of multimethod analyses and theoretically valuable deployment of techniques of computational assisted text analysis."—Emily Erikson, American Journal of Sociology