The Next Catastrophe: Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters

sociology by defining capitalism as the appropriate terrain for sociological analysis, they also risk narrowing that analysis in more subtle ways. In particular, the concern in these essays is almost exclusively with the dynamic properties of capitalism. While Weber was vitally interested in the institutional and ideational features of capitalism that are associated with economic growth, he also explored other, darker aspects of capitalism as a form of social organization. With the exception of Robert Frank’s gripping tour of recent trends in the distribution of income and wealth in U.S. society, we learn little in this collection about capitalism as a social system that produces not only growth but also inequality, not only dynamism but also dehumanization. For attention to these latter issues, we await another volume from Nee and Swedberg and their collaborators.