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Crowds and economic life: bringing an old figure back in

Abstract This article revitalizes the notion of crowds and emphasizes its value for economic sociology. The relationship between crowds and economic life is examined both semantically and theoretically. From a semantic point of view, there is a long history of conceiving financial speculation and financial markets in crowd terminology. Even current analyses in sociology and economics suggest that financial markets are characterized by a crowd syndrome. While economic theory asserts that this crowd syndrome is mainly to be identified in fluctuating markets, the article contends that a reinterpretation of the basic assumption in early crowd theory, the idea of suggestion, improves our understanding also of everyday economic processes. Specifically, it argues that suggestion refers to a semiconscious state, a state between purposive and affective action. This notion of the semiconscious is contrasted with the embeddedness approach in recent economic sociology.