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Abstract:
Andrew Schrank (Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University) is one of the few
academics with a true interdisciplinary trajectory and an exceptionally wide variety of interests in economic sociology and adjacent fields
working on Latin America. Although he defines himself as an organizational sociologist, Andrew has held positions in both sociology and
political science departments and has written about issues ranging from supply chains to foreign investment and labor standards, from
healthcare to industrial policy and urban studies, and from varieties of capitalism to the role of culture in development, doing both broad
comparative work and more focused case studies of small Mesoamerican countries like the Dominican Republic. Andrew co-authored the
article that became the manifesto for the re-foundation of Latin America’s political economy tradition in what is now the Red Economía
Política America Latina (REPAL) and is currently working on a book on economic sociology and development. Andrew agreed to talk about
his views on the discipline, the challenges of interdisciplinarity, and his focus on Latin America. This is the result of a deeply engaged
discussion over a Skype conversation and several e-mail exchanges where he calls for a return to sociology’s early motivation of studying
societies through the lens of development and claims that “what we need is an economic sociology that takes Latin America seriously.” We
thank Andrew for his generosity in sharing his thoughts with us.
