LAUSR

The idea of unintended consequences of social action constitutes one of the core meta-assumptions of new economic sociology. Yet neither its US nor its European branch seem to make a direct statement about this. This state of affairs appears to be the result of various cumulative circumstances, such as the role played by the competition from other meta-assumptions which address similar or related issues and the rather general treatment of the unintended consequences within the field. This article takes a closer look and tries to establish whether the approach to the unintended in the US and European new economic sociologies is indeed so general. It concludes that the source of the low visibility of the unintended consequences as a fundamental problem for new economic sociology is not the fact that this is not granted proper systematization. The problem rather lies in the lack of awareness and cumulative knowledge about the unintended consequences as a main sociological problem that was already taken up in sociology.