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John Urry on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath .

The book that turned me into sociologist was The Grapes of Wrath. I had left school in the mid-1960s as a Thatcherite avant la lettre. I was confident that markets were good and states and trade unions were bad. I was all prepared to read economics and to argue the case for laissez-faire capitalism in Cambridge, the hotbed of late Keynesianism.

But two events came to undermine my enthusiasm for the markets and especially for the view that social life could be reduced to market relations. First, I got a temporary job in a London bookshop a few weeks after many employees were sacked for saying they were going to join a union. I was forced to see that markets do not necessarily deliver fair wages and that forms of employee protection were needed and would not be provided through the "invisible hand" of the market. But, more importantly, working in the unhealthy bookshop basement brought home that the varied ways people live cannot be solely explained by modes of economic calculation.

It was also clear that, although this enterprise was apparently profitable, it was inefficient and misused the skill and enthusiasm of its workers. This was a market leader that seemed neither efficient nor fair. And that connected precisely to my reading of The Grapes of Wrath as I rode back and forth on the Tube. I began to see that even when people and organisations do act in terms of market signals and calculations, this does not necessarily produce rationality at the level of the system. What the novel recounts in stark detail are the unintended systemic effects of unregulated markets. Banks, landowners and fruit farmers, in seeking to maximise returns, destroyed the character of long-established farming communities as well as the fragile ecosystem that turned into a dustbowl.

What The Grapes of Wrath showed was that working behind the backs of people are powerful social relations that are only partially apparent and mean that simple categories of vice and virtue cannot be easily applied to human agents. While Adam Smith termed the way the market works as the "invisible hand", John Steinbeck denounces it as the "monster". All sorts of people get caught up in such a system dominated by the social relations of the "monster". Steinbeck captures how the "owners no longer worked on their farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it".

But the most important lesson I learnt from this simplified moral tale was that there was something called society; that it could not be reduced to markets but markets play a huge and often catastrophic role in the reshaping of social life; and that deciphering the multiple, overlapping and contradictory lineaments of "society" was a worthy endeavour for many like me intensely puzzled by the rapid social changes of the 1960s.

Thirty years on the ambition to make sense of such social relations is still there, even if we now know that preserving the "social" in the face of the putative globalisation of markets is a herculean task in which we are often forced to sup with the "monster".

John Urry is professor of sociology and dean of research, Lancaster University.