Bruce G. Carruthers

Bruce Carruthers is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, where he is also involved in the graduate Comparative Historical Social Science (CHSS) program and the Kellogg-Sociology Joint-PhD program.

His current research projects include a comparative study of the institutional foundations of long-term decision-making, the adoption of “for-profit” features by U.S. museums, the relationship between corporate taxation and corporate social responsibility, and how “big data” affects credit markets. He has had visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Library of Congress, and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, he is a non-resident long-term fellow at the Swedish Collegium. He is methodologically agnostic, and does not believe that the qualitative/quantitative distinction is worth fighting over.

Carruthers has authored or co-authored six books, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton, 1996), Rescuing Business: The Making of Corporate Bankruptcy Law in England and the United States (Oxford, 1998), Economy/Society: Markets, Meanings and Social Structure (Pine Forge Press, 2000), Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis (Stanford, 2009), Money and Credit: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press, 2010), and The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America (Princeton, 2022).