Somers was the recipient of the Inaugural Lewis A. Coser Award for Innovation and Theoretical Agenda-Setting in Sociology.  

Her research can be divided into four overlapping  areas: 1) Political economy, Karl Polanyi, and the Political Economy of Moral Worth, which includes in-depth exploration, elaboration, and interpretation of the work of Karl Polanyi, whose intellectual and political commitments have influenced Somers' writings since her days in graduate school. 

2) Citizenship, Civil Society, Human Rights, and the Right to have Rights--the preconditions for mutual recognition and equal moral worth among all members of a polity.

3) "The People and the Law," English Class Formation, Civil Society and the Making of Modern Democracy and Citizenship Rights--long-term comparative historical sociology of citizenship formation and rights with a focus on English history from the 14th through the 19th century.

4) Historical Epistemology, Narrative Identity, Comparative Historical Analysis, and a Historical Sociology of Concept Formation--analyzing the complex and skewed relationships between the practical world of social organization and the conceptual vocabulary and cognitive maps that oblige us to think in certain ways.

Despite the plurality of this research program, there is a unifying thread to its multiplicity: That people’s life-chances, their access to the institutions, practices, and democratic principles of equity and mutual recognition of moral worth, their very “right to have rights” are most threatened by those aspects of social life that have taken on the appearance of being most “natural” (e.g. the ‘self-regulating’ market, ‘natural’ rights'), while they are best protected by those social institutions that are the product of human artifice, and thus the least natural (e.g. the rules of law, democratic citizenship rights, membership in a political community, and institutionalized human rights).  Exploring, testing, and further theorizing this hypothesis is one of the core commitments of Somers’ work.

Her book Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to have Rights (Cambridge 2008), was awarded the 2009 Giovanni Sartori Award for Qualitative Methods by the American Political Science Association, which honors Giovanni Sartori's work on qualitative methods and concept formation, as well as on problems of context for concepts in new spatial and temporal settings.  The book focuses on how decades of market fundamentalism have transformed increasing numbers of rights-bearing citizens into socially excluded internally stateless persons.  With Hurricane Katrina’s racial apartheid as a demonstration case, Somers alerts us that the growing moral authority of the market is distorting the meaning of citizenship from noncontractual shared fate to conditional privilege, making rights, inclusion and moral worth dependent on contractual market value.   

Her book (co-authored with Fred Block),  The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique (Harvard 2014, 2016), is an intellectual archeology and analytic development of Karl Polanyi’s thought.  The book aims to generate a repertoire of Polanyi-influenced concepts and theoretical insights that comprise a workable social theory for historical and contemporary analyses of social and economic life.

Margaret Somers is currently writing a new book, The People and the Law: The Making of Modern Citizenship Rights, a work of comparative historical sociology with a focus on English legal, social, and economic history.