This paper considers the question of the relevance of sociological analysis of capitalism. It is argued that sociology has largely (self)withdrawn and that, even though sociology has more and better tools to analyse and explain the complexities of capitalism, many important topics that originally were the subject of sociological analysis are now being addressed by other social science disciplines, especially economics. This ‘loss’ of fields is not chiefly a problem of status of the discipline and its members being lowered. Instead, the core of the problem is that this lowering of the sociological profession’s status and narrowing of its jurisdiction in areas like social inequality and economic power have led to a lack of specific sociological insight, in turn making it impossible to analyse capitalism qualitatively and find appropriate responses to the development challenges of today’s society. In this contribution, we reflect on the appropriate directions for the thematic and methodological development of the sociological analysis of capitalism.
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