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1. Economic Sociologies in Space................................................................................................................... 1
25 October 2014 ii ProQuest

Document 1 of 1
Economic Sociologies in Space
Author: Peck, Jamie
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Abstract: How might economic geography (re)position itself within the interdisciplinary field of heterodox
economics? Reflecting on this question, this article offers a critical assessment of the "New Economic
Sociology," making the case for moving beyond the limited confines of the networks-and-embeddedness
paradigm. More specifically, it argues for a more broadly based and purposive conversation with various
currents within social-constructivist and macroeconomic sociology, which, in turn, calls for a more full-blooded
critique of market relations and analytics and a more militant attitude toward economic orthodoxies. The
promise of such a conversation, strategically focused on the simultaneously social and geographic constitution
of economic relations, is an emboldened economic geography with a more persuasive voice in the field of
heterodox economic studies. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Full text: Headnote
Abstract:
How might economic geography (re)position itself within the interdisciplinary field of heterodox economics?
Reflecting on this question, this article offers a critical assessment of the "New Economic Sociology," making
the case for moving beyond the limited confines of the networks-and-embeddedness paradigm. More
specifically, it argues for a more broadly based and purposive conversation with various currents within social-
constructivist and macroeconomic sociology, which, in turn, calls for a more full-blooded critique of market
relations and analytics and a more militant attitude toward economic orthodoxies. The promise of such a
conversation, strategically focused on the simultaneously social and geographic constitution of economic
relations, is an emboldened economic geography with a more persuasive voice in the field of heterodox
economic studies.
Key words: economic sociology, economic geography, markets, embeddedness, social construction, varieties of
capitalism.
Many of the same things that make economic geography dynamic and creative as a subdiscipline also make it
appear fickle, magpie-like, and sometimes collectively incoherent. Theoretical commitments are often relatively
short-lived, dominant methodological conventions are rarely codified, and extradisciplinary "reading around" is
normal practice. On the positive side, though, these are also markers of a vibrant, unruly, and polycentric
research field, in which no would-be orthodoxy goes unchallenged for long. Economic geography is more
heterodox and pluralist today than ever before, its practices and positions encompassing spatial science and
nonrepresentational theory, neo-Marxism and new geographical economics, modeling and ethnography,
feminism and poststructuralism, and just about everything in between. There are still those who lament the
passing of more "centered" forms of economic geography, in which neoclassical economics/regional science
and then political economy/industrial restructuring dominated the subdiscipline in ways that now seem almost
unthinkable, but in the wake of economic geography's cultural, relational, and institutional turns during the
1990s, there has been an increasingly widespread acceptance of the merits of a more decentered and
heterodox intellectual culture. The so-called new economic geographies are pluralized for more than merely
presentational reasons. They have become associated with a kind of post-programmatic research program
within which virtue is made of active engagement on multiple theoretical, methodological, and substantive
fronts. With this comes an explicit embrace of variegated conceptions of "the economic" and the multiplex
character of economic identities and relations (see Lee and Wills 1997; Barnes 2001b; Sheppard, Barnes, Peck,
and Tickell 2003).
25 October 2014 Page 1 of 45 ProQuest

Yet there is an apparently growing sense of unease with some of the potential downsides of this self-
administered decentering of economic geography. Some of the concerns may be strategic, since as just one
part of a relatively small discipline, economic geography may be spreading its resources too thinly. But more
seriously, economic geography may be losing its capacity to speak for itself or even about itself; it may be
splintering into no more than the sum of its increasingly diverse parts. More seriously still, there are some who
fear that these centrifugal tendencies may be undermining economic geography's theoretical and
methodological integrity, its social and political relevance, its collective spirit and purpose. Hence, the recent
concern with issues like the subdiscipline's prevailing methodological and conceptual practices (Markusen
1999); with its social and policy relevance (Martin 2001); with its apparent estrangement from some "big picture"
issues of political-economic restructuring (Wills 2002); with its Anglocentricity (Olds 200Ib); and, not the least,
with its relationship to orthodox economics (Clark 1998; Martin 1999; Clark, Feldman, and Gertler 2000; Amin
and Thrift 2000; "Debating Economic Geography" 2001; Agnew 2002). If economic geography is having some
kind of anxiety attack, or if it is simply experiencing one of its sporadic-and often healthy-episodes of critical self-
reflection, there are surely many underlying causes, just as there are a variety of symptoms. It is becoming
increasingly evident, though, that the contested nature of "the economic" in economic geography is one of the
diagnostically critical issues in play at the present time, not the least because it opens up so many wider
questions that are related to theory, method, and practice. What, in other words, does the economic in
economic geography stand for?
The underlying challenge here was posed most pointedly by Amin and Thrift (2000, 5); sensing a kind of
malaise in the subdiscipline, they argued that attempts to "revive economic geography as an imaginative,
relevant and socially useful subject" will turn fundamentally on "the kind of economic theory that is practiced."
Arguing against a rapprochement with orthodox economics, Amin and Thrift instead advocated playing to
economic geography's newfound strengths in "the understanding of open systems, appreciation of context, and
qualitative techniques," while developing a deeper engagement with various forms of heterodox economic
thought, such as evolutionary political economy, organizational theory, feminist economics, and economic
sociology. They urged economic geographers to
think seriously about whom we ... want to play out with. We think we would be fooling ourselves if we believe
that we can lie down with the lion [of orthodox economics] and become anything more than prey. Instead,.. . our
main friends should be in the new areas of economic study that are currently both flourishing and providing a
genuine ground for the kind of contributions we can make. . . . By standing on our own terms, out of the long
shadow of economics, we may then draw young researchers back into economic geography, as they see the
place of a different kind of economic theory in a postdisciplinary social science. (Amin and Thrift 2000, 8)
While aspects of Amin and Thrift's (2000) diagnosis have been contested ("Debating Economic Geography"
2001), the basic question that they posed is a pertinent, timely, and awkward one, even if the answer cannot be
constructed in similarly pithy terms. For Barnes (2001a, 162), the answer calls for a thoroughgoing
problematization of "economic theory," as practiced both inside and outside economics departments, coupled
with a more searching interrogation of those various strands of what may be called extra-Economic economic
theory, perceived by some to be the subdiscipline's "salvation."
Taking Amin and Thrift's (2000) question and Barnes's (200Ia) advice seriously, this article examines one of the
more important strands of heterodox economic theory-economic sociology-presenting a critical commentary on
its recent evolution and an assessment of its potential role in economic geography (and vice versa). The article
examines the rise of the "new economic sociology" (NES) to pose a set of questions about the development of
theory in the "new economic geographies"; about the methodological status of orthodox economics and the
conceptual and political status of the market; and about the scope, costs, and benefits of different forms of
interdisciplinary engagement. This choice of focus is not random, of course, because economic sociology is
arguably one of the most energetic and influential of economic geography's proximate fields. Concepts that

have been drawn from economic sociology-most notably concerning "embeddedness" and "networks"-now have
extremely wide currency in economic geography. Indeed, if the new economic geography may make a claim to
paradigmatic coherence, in no small measure it will have been due to the positive influence of economic
sociology. A shared enthusiasm for network forms of analysis, in particular, has established a new bridge
between the subdisciplines.
Many of the most significant contributions in economic geography in recent years have drawn explicitly on some
part or another of economic sociology,1 while citations within economic geography of Granovetter's (1985) path-
breaking article on the social embeddedness of economic relations now number in the hundreds. Taylor and
Asheim (2001, 320) observed that the networks-and-embeddedness framework has had a "profound impact" on
contemporary economic geography (see also Markusen 2002; Park 1996; Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Yeung
200Oa, 2003). Yet economic geographers have only recently begun to explore the theoretical antecedents of
the network paradigm. What theories of social action and structure are presumed? What roles, if any, do
uneven development and scalar constitution play in network theories? How do networks mesh with markets and
hierarchies? Why are network analytics so appealing? Despite the widespread invocation of network thinking in
geography, there have been surprisingly few sustained discussions of the lineage of economic-sociological
theories and methods or of the constitution of the NES as a subfield. Indeed, some have argued that economic
geography's engagement with such proximate fields and their associated master concepts and methodological
traditions is too shallow (Martin and Sunley 2001). The restless and fast-moving nature of economic geography
means that the deeper antecedents of "imported" theories are often only fitfully explored. The subdiscipline
possesses a worldly skepticism with respect to these imported frameworks and concepts, which represents one
of its conspicuous strengths. But one of the downsides is that this skepticism can give license to faddishness
and superficiality, perhaps even a reluctance to sustain theoretical or methodological commitments.
Although the recently established connections between economic geography and economic sociology have
been productive, these two fields are only just getting to know one another. Beyond the initial attraction, it
remains to be seen whether this relationship can, or should, blossom into a meaningful one. Here, it is important
to understand that economic sociology has its own issues, of organizational identity, of theoretical coherence,
and of methodological integrity, not the least of which is the fact that the long shadow of economics falls across
economic sociology, too. Indeed, this troubled relationship with economics may be jeopardizing parts of the
project itself, notwithstanding its apparently rude health. Even though most of the NES defines itself by way of
its differences with orthodox, neoclassical economics, this stance has distorted and constrained its theoretical
project. While a far-reaching critique of orthodox economics is, in a sense, baked into the cake of economic
sociology, the NES, qua explicit intellectual project, has fostered its own orthodoxy, whose relationship with the
economic mainstream looks increasingly like constructive coexistence, rather than concerted contention.
Orthodox economics, for its part, remains resolutely impervious to most outside influences, its machinic
worldview and preference for deductive, anticontextual reasoning setting it apart from its heterodox cousins. It is
telling, in this context, that some of the things that economic sociology, broadly conceived, shares with
economic geography-a preference for socialized and plural conceptions of the economic; a commitment to
primary data collection and grounded theorizing; a focus on "real," situated economies; skepticism about the
logical and normative superiority of markets; and a healthy disregard for disciplinary boundaries-also tend to
reinforce their joint incompatibility with orthodox economics.
Although some economic geographers see in this shared estrangement from mainstream economics the
potential for a fruitful union with economic sociology, economic sociologists have thus far been receptive to
economic-geographic ideas only in principle, not in practice. Although the potential for "spatializing" economic
sociology is enormous, with the notable exception of Saxenian's (1994, 2001) work on industrial networks, there
has been little serious engagement with geographic issues in "mainstream" economic sociology in the United
States, which constitutes the heartland of this revivalist project (see Swedberg and Granovetter 2001;

Swedberg 2004; cf. Triglia 2002). This situation throws into sharp relief questions that are related to how, and
with what consequences, economic geographers may "play out" in wider interdisciplinary fields and the extent to
which this can be done, as Amin and Thrift (2000, 8) pointedly put it, "on our own terms."
The positive argument of this article is that economic geography has much to gain from a deeper-and, at the
same time, more critical-engagement with economic sociology. The two subfields share a lot, including an
approach to theorizing and researching "the economic" that is, for the most part, robustly distinct from that of
orthodox economics. In contrast to the clean, abstract, and parsimonious modeling tradition of orthodox
economics, economic sociology and economic geography both have "dirty hands." They each produce
empirically rich accounts of concrete and socially situated economic processes; they each emphasize the
essential diversity of economic phenomena, favoring context-rich explanations in which history is taken
seriously; they each attach greater significance to plausibility and explanatory power than to elegance and
predictive power; and they each strive to explain, and often improve, the characteristically messy economic
worlds that they encounter. They share a similar language and, apparently, have things to talk about. This
conversation, it is argued here, should be a wide-ranging one. Although it would surely be a mistake to become
programmatically consumed with the limitations and flaws of orthodox economic theory, there is a need
explicitly to challenge the division of academic labor that concedes authority around issues that are related to
economic "fundamentals" (aka "the market") to neoclassical economics, while disciplines like sociology and
geography get to deal only with supposedly deviant formations, local curiosities, and various institutional
leftovers. As David Stark (2000, 2) remarked in relation to the project of economic sociology, "we would be
spinning our wheels if we leave the analysis of markets and economic relations to economists while focusing
our efforts on the social relations in which they are embedded." Maybe it is also time for economic geography to
get more "pushy," theoretically speaking, and to build new interdisciplinary alliances around such goals.
Providing a deliberately provocative review of the (actual and potential) connections between economic
geography and economic sociology, this article makes the case for a deeper, more selective, and more
purposeful engagement with those strands of economic sociology that make the boldest claims on "the
economic." Crucially, it means extending the dialogue beyond the confines of the NES and its networks-
andembeddedness paradigm, on the grounds that the strategy of intellectual coexistence with orthodox
economics tends to produce decontextualized and depoliticized readings of the economic. This strategy is
increasingly at odds with prevailing practices and positions within economic geography, given the recent
emphasis on the complex and constitutive roles of spatioinstitutional context. The argument of this article is that
such claims need to be pushed further and more aggressively, not as an act of disciplinary partisanship, but to
make a more productive contribution to the transdisciplinary cause of heterodox economics. The network
sociologies of the NES have a role to play here, but in many ways there are more constructive connections to
be made with macroeconomic sociology and heterodox political economy-in which the concept of a socially
constructed and variegated economy has real purchase and where economic geography has serious, if as yet
unrealized, contributions to make.
The article is divided into two parts. Part 1 presents a critical commentary on the development of the NES,
focusing on its origins, its relationship with economics, its self-constitution as a project, its contributions, and its
limits. Here, the article develops a somewhat sympathetic critique of the network sociologies that lie at the heart
of the NES. This critique is followed, in Part 2, by a discussion of the scope of a different kind of conversation
between economic geography and economic sociology, focused on overlapping issues of theoretical concern
and the potential for mutually informing engagement. The tasks of economic geography, it is argued, must
extend beyond network cartography to embrace issues that are related to the social, spatial, and scalar
constitution of economic systems, identities, processes, and development paths. It means superseding the NES
convention of visualizing networks in the analytical foreground, while leaving only fuzzily defined and
undertheorized "context" in the background. It means reconnecting with some of the long-standing concerns of

political economy-with uneven development, power relations, inequalities, the state, and exploitation-since
these concerns provide meaning, shape, and dynamism to "context" and enable context to play a constitutive
role in economic-geographic accounts, rather than a merely supporting role. Geographers have a positive, if
challenging, role to play in the interdisciplinary research program that is emerging around a radically different
form of economic analysis-rooted in neo-Polanyian and macrosociological traditions and in the attendant
conception of a politically constructed and institutionally variegated economy. Here, the challenge is to make
geographic ideas count, not passively to wait for them to be (re)discovered. The promise of a broadened
conversation with economic sociology, then, is a bolder and more purposive economic geography.
Part 1: Not Economics-The New Economic Sociology
The term new economic sociology was coined by Mark Granovetter in 1985, the same year that his seminal
article on the "problem of embeddedness" was published in the American Journal of Sociology. Granovetter's
work was distinctive in the explicit rhetorical challenge that it made to the accepted division of labor between
economics and sociology. Since Talcott Parsons, this intellectual boundary had been effectively
institutionalized. Parsonian sociology left the determination of economic rules to the economists, which it
combined with a certain deference to the methodology of neoclassical economics. Parsons (1935a, 1935b) had
insisted on a clear division of labor between economics and sociology, with the former being the proper domain
of abstract work on rational actors in market settings and the latter being concerned with cultural norms, social
values, and economic institutions. At the time, Parsons was especially critical of one of economic sociology's
potential allies in exile-institutional economics-for its disdain for analytical abstraction and its overconcretized
view of economic "reality" (Granovetter 1990; Velthuis 1999; Richter 2001). In fact, the next half century would
see both institutional economics and economic sociology recede into insignificance, while economics-having
been granted "the market"-bowled along its independent course.
Against this background, Granovetter took issue with the marginal role that was assigned to sociology in
economic analysis. He was not content to leave the big questions of economic rationality to the economists,
while sociologists busied themselves with the secondary tasks of studying ostensibly irrational actions, cultural
deviations, and suboptimal institutions. The NES would no longer passively cohabitate with economics, so the
argument went, but would instead seek to contest economic explanations: the defining difference between the
old and the new economic sociology, in this respect, would be its relationship with economics. The task of the
NES was to mount a challenge to the privileged claims of orthodox economics "by elaborating the sociological
viewpoint as forcefully as possible" (Swedberg and Granovetter 1992, 7). In practice, the bite of the NES would
turn out to be less than its bark, but rhetorically, at least, the project would seek to define itself in opposition to
(orthodox) economics. And out of this opposition, the NES's programmatic purpose would be defined around a
variegated set of ostensibly "extra-market" concerns: networks, institutions, organizations, and culture.
When Sociologists Attack ...
Granovetter revisited Polanyi to develop a set of arguments concerning the social embeddedness of economic
action. Granovetter's (1985, 504) insistence that economic behavior is inescapably "embedded in networks of
interpersonal relations" represented something of a departure from Polanyi's original use of the term, which
referred to the organic relationship between economy and society under different historical configurations (see
Block 1991; Piore 1996; Swedberg 1997; Jessop 2002; Burawoy 2003; Krippner et al. 2004). In fact, new
theoretical constructions were being developed under loosely defined Polanyian labels. According to
Granovetter (1990, 98, emphasis added), "[by] embeddedness I mean that economic actions, outcomes, and
institutions are affected by actors' personal relations and by the structure of the overall network of relations."
The pertinent contrast here is with that essentially antisocial character, homo economicus: "The model of the
rational calculating subject is the foundation stone of all economics and, at its narrowest, the neoclassical model
of the economising agent does not involve human interaction at all" (Ingham 1996b, 246). The marketplace, in
this sense, is a domain of instrumental transactions between strangers (Bourdieu 2000). In the NES, in contrast,

social action is embedded in ongoing and multiplex networks of interpersonal relationships, rather than carried
out by narrowly rational, atomized actors. This amounts to a form of socioeconomic theory in which (relational)
context matters, in contrast with the universal rationalism that is assumed in orthodox economics. An enduring
concern with networks represents one of the central threads of the NES qua project, if not its defining feature,
even though it is often unclear whether networks represent a method, a metaphor, or a microsociological theory
(see Powell and Smith-Doerr 1994).
To the revived and reworked notion of embeddedness, Granovetter (1985) added the second "master concept"
of the NES-the notion of the socially constructed economy. This notion refers to the process by which economic
institutions are produced, how they "lock in" patterns of sedimented or habituated behavior, and how they
become normalized (see Swedberg 1997). For Granovetter, network forms often represent proto-institutions, in
the sense that many will subsequently "congeal" into more stabilized and regularized configurations with the
passage of time. This, essentially, is how they become norm-making institutions. And again, the theoretical
disjuncture with orthodox economics is critical: in contrast to the impersonal play of market forces, the NES
draws attention to the essentially social processes of norm making and institution building, which, in turn, are
connected in significant ways to the patterning of "economic" behavior (see Swedberg and Granovetter 2001).
This line of analysis connects with one of the most important strands of contemporary economic-sociological
theory-the institutionalist tradition-which has close links with organization theory and Weberian sociology (see
DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Powell and DiMaggio 1991).
These basic conceptualizations would be developed and refined as the project of the NES was consolidated. A
key moment came with the publication in 1994 of Smelser and Swedberg's The Handbook of Economic
Sociology (hereafter the Handbook), which established a working definition of the NES, again largely in relation
to mainstream economics; surveyed the terrain; and reached out in modest ways to institutional, evolutionary,
and transactions-costs economics.2 Smelser and Swedberg (1994, 3) defined the project of economic sociology
as "the application of the frames of reference, variables, and explanatory models of sociology to that complex of
activities concerned with the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of scarce goods and
services." This definition underlined the fairly explicit claim that was being laid upon the territory of economics.
Economic sociologists would no longer be content with the "leftovers" after economists had finished theorizing
rational, market behavior (see Zafirovski 1999), what Williamson (1994) characterized as the residual "tosh" of
unsystematic social and institutional phenomena. This said, in a more than trivial sense, the NES was defining
itself in the mirror of economics, and it may be that, in this reflection, it looked its most coherent and distinctive.
Certainly, the distinctions are sharp ones, to the point that many of economic sociology's defining features are
antonyms of those of orthodox economics: inductive and grounded theory development is favored over
deductive and axiomatic model building; multiplex social groups, rather than narrowly rational individuals, tend
to be the objects of analysis; contingency and specificity are taken seriously; there is skepticism about
"universal" economic laws, while orthodox economics privileges abstracted forms of synchronie reasoning; the
flesh and blood of economic life receives more attention than the bare bones of mechanistic relations; and so
forth.
In this context, the following critical distinctions stand out. First, whereas orthodox microeconomics assumes
rational action by stylized, utility-maximizing individuals, economic sociology regards rationality as a variable,
one of many forms of "economic" action (or, more accurately, social action in the economy). By the same token,
the abstraction homo economicus, which Parsons enviously praised from the sidelines, is rejected in favor of a
richer and more complex conception of the socially constructed individual, the actions of whom are profoundly
shaped by cultural norms, group relations, and the legacy of past interactions. second, the sociological
conception of economic relations also places more emphasis on the role of power as a fact of economic life.
Although the extent to which "power matters" varies widely in economicsociological explanations, at the least,
power represents a legitimate analytical concern. Third, the frame of reference of economic sociology is wider:

in contrast to mainstream economies' restricted field of vision, which focuses narrowly on market relations while
"freezing" the wider societal context (or, increasingly, by viewing wider social relations through the market optic,
too), economic sociology explicitly seeks to locate "economic" relations within a much broader set of political,
cultural, and legal parameters, the latter playing an active analytical role. Bringing this socioinstitutional context
to life, in explanatory terms, enables sociologists to show how the rational "core" of market transactions is not a
separate and superordinate sphere, but is itself socially structured and constituted. "For example, the long-
standing assumption that economic analysis deals with peaceful and lawful transactions and does not deal with
force and fraud involves some important presuppositions about the legitimacy and stability of the state and legal
system" (Smelser and Swedberg 1994, 7). Fourth, conventional forms of economic analysis (characteristically
abstract, expressed in formal and mathematical principles, and organized around the controlled manipulation of
a priori assumptions in search of conclusions with predictive force) are rejected in favor of approaches that are,
generally speaking, more interpretive, descriptive, concretely empirical, and (sometimes) more qualitative.
Economic sociologists seek to develop post factum explanations of economic phenomena and behavior,
situated in their historical and (more implicitly) geographic context, in contrast to the synchronie forms of
reasoning and universalist claims of orthodox economics (see Piore 1996). And while economists (artificially)
analyze the economy as a closed system, economic sociologists accept its radical openness.
According to Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer (2002), economic sociology is substantially defined by its
attempts to avoid three traps of conventional economic analysis. The first is the fallacious separation of the
economic from the social. While this separation may facilitate the deployment of formal techniques of reasoning,
it does so at the expense of a grounded, contextualized, and integral understanding of economic processes.
Economic sociologists contend that all forms of economic behavior (including "market" behaviors) are socially
constructed, socially grounded, and socially enabled. The analytical privileging of the market, coupled with the
reductionism that is implicit in assumptions of economically rational behavior and perfect knowledge, means
that orthodox economics has a blinkered conception of the economic, dismissing social and institutional
relations as marginal sources of "interference" in what would otherwise be smoothly functioning, orderly, and
equilibrating markets. For their part, economic sociologists insist on widening the field of the visible in the
analysis of economic relations, not simply to produce more complex and contingent arguments, but as a means
of exposing and probing the fundamental motives and "ground rules" of economic behavior, many of which can
be traced to institutionally regularized modes of conduct and to constitutive social and legal norms. In other
words, market actions are constituted and shaped by the social relations, institutional norms, and interpersonal
networks in which they are embedded-which, among other things, provide the glue of "trust" and mutual
understanding that, in the final analysis, makes many markets workable and sustainable. Social relations, in this
sense, exist before the fact of markets; they do not merely disturb their operation ex post facto. This view
represents an inversion of Williamson's (1975, 20) vivid but historically incorrect assertion that "in the beginning
there were markets." One of the central tropes of economic sociology is the Polanyian insight that markets are
made; they do not spontaneously arise from some instinctive imperative to truck, barter, and exchange (see
Block 1991; Fligstein 2001). In this sense, economic sociologists look down the opposite end of the telescope
from orthodox economists-the all-encompassing gaze of the former locates market relations within the wide
terrain of social relations, while the microscopic perspective of the latter concentrates on the up-close
characteristics of markets, rendering the social context nothing more than a blur. Although Polanyi was
frustratingly inconsistent on this point, one of his basic propositions was that no market fonctions in a context-
free environment, that all markets are embedded in social relations and institutions (Barber 1977; Geertz 1963;
lie 1991).
The second mainstream economic fallacy to which economic sociology reacts is the related tendency to reduce
decision-making behavior to the working out of a rational, utility-maximizing calculus, shaped by exogenously
determined preferences. Economic sociologists insist, in contrast, that "preferences and actions [are]

fundamentally connected to and affected by cognitive biases, limited powers of reasoning, nonconscious and
ambivalent feelings, role expectations, norms, and cultural frames, schemata, classifications, and myths," the
cumulative consequences of which are that "social forces affect reasoning in ways that defy a strict rationality
assumption" (Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer 2002, 7). Homo economicus, in the context of this more
socialized view, exhibits the characteristics of a "reckless selfish monad" (Frank 1996, 117), the Pavlovian
actions of which bear little resemblance to "normal" human behavior, even in markets. It is important to
acknowledge that there is, however, a rational-choice strand in contemporary economic sociology (see
Coleman 1990, 1994), although there are some who regard it as antithetical to the project qua sociological
project (see Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman 1987; Zafirovski 1999). Sociologists are generally uncomfortable
with atomistic conceptions of individual action, just as there is resistance to any privileging of Hobbesian market
relations. Yet the presence of rational-choice impulses in the NES underlines the fact that, in some respects, the
relationship with orthodox economic practice is less antagonistic than the rhetoric suggests. For much of the
NES, orthodox economic practices and positions represent more of a foil than a foe.
The third point of difference is economic sociology's qualified rejection of methodological individualism. Even
though a great deal of the NES, including the work of Granovetter, has microsociological roots, there is
widespread acceptance of the view that explanations of economic phenomena that are constructed by
"aggregating up" individual behaviors are at least problematic, if not fundamentally flawed. Economic
sociologists typically invoke a range of structural, or at least mediating, factors in discussing the relationship
between individual actions and "aggregate" or systemlevel outcomes, paying more attention to class, race, and
gender relations (Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer 2002). Not even instrumentalist behaviors are
contextfree. Self-interest is typically defined, economic sociologists insist, within the parameters of larger
contexts of social action, while relations like trust, cooperation, power, and compliance act to drive a wedge
between individual action and the overall configuration of the social networks in which they are embedded
(Granovetter 2002). Their skepticism about methodological individualism leads economic sociologists to be
more careful about theorizing the connections between economic action at different scales or at different levels
of abstraction, yet they lack any consensus on how context matters. Although conceptions of networks and
embeddedness invoke these contextual relations in a stylized and nonspecific way, economic sociologists
realize that the ambiguity here may be a necessary form of ambiguity, since adequate explanations may
actually need to be situation specific. The way that context matters, in other words, is itself contextual.
"Although the concept of embeddedness is useful in understanding the sociological failings of standard
neoclassical economics," Brian Uzzi (1996, 674) commented that "it does not explain concretely how social ties
affect economic outcomes."
Although there have been continuing attempts to systematize and "clean up" sociological explanation, one of its
defining features remains a (perhaps necessary) level of complexity and indeterminacy. Dominant approaches
to theory building are certainly different:
Economics, at least in its neoclassical micro variants, relies on a highly simplified model of individual action
(rational choice) and a simple mechanism (market equilibrium) to aggregate individual actions to derive system-
level implications. Most sociology uses complicated models of individual behavior (including effects of values,
prior experience, commitments, location in social networks, and context), and complicated mechanisms to
aggregate interests and actions. (Baron and Hannan 1994, 1114)
Yet while economic sociology has substantially defined its project in relation to that of orthodox economics, it is
not blindly staking out diametrically opposed stances on every issue. Instead, a generalized skepticism about
conventional forms of economic reasoning, coupled with a growing unease with the imperialist claims that
orthodox economics has been staking on institutions, has helped economic sociology to construct a sense of
itself. An important expositional fact of life is that the alternative positions that economic sociology has
established are never going to be as singular and coherent as those that are defined by neoclassical economic

theory. Economic sociology does not have the luxury of such absolutist, reductionist, and essentialist forms of
theory construction, which contribute so much to the aesthetic force of blackboard proofs and the austere
elegance of economic reasoning. While the economists have their "clean models," the economic sociologists
seem destined always to have "dirty hands" (Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman 1987; Smelser and Swedberg
1994).
Dirty Theory?
Beneath the surface of economic sociology's loosely constructed theoreticalmethodological consensus,
however, lies a much more profound set of ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions. Economic sociology
labors with a persistent theoretical identity crisis, reflecting the fact that it "lacks one dominating tradition"
(Smelser and Swedberg 1994,4; see also Swedberg 1991). It counts among its founding figures Weber,
Durkheim, Polanyi, Parsons, Schumpeter, and Marx. It will be a surprise to no one that the tensions,
inconsistencies, and flat-out contradictions among these theoretical traditions have been impossible to reconcile
within the NES. Smelser and Swedberg's (1994, 18) exploration of the theoretical lineages led them to conclude
that this is a "fundamentally eclectic and pluralistic" field of inquiry: while "the influence of Weber and Parsons
can be seen," Polanyi represents little more than a "presence," as Marx, Schumpeter, and, to a lesser extent,
Durkheim fade into the background. Significantly, Granovetter's (1990, 94) account of this intellectual movement
does not refer to Polanyi (although in Polanyi's stead there is a stylized discussion of embeddedness), while
sociological work that is conducted in a "Marxist key" (such as industrial sociology, before and after Braverman)
is characterized as effectively outside the NES project.3 Swedberg's (2004, 4) recent overview of the project,
even while it radically understated the heterodox nature of the field more generally, concluded that "economic
sociology is currently characterized by several theoretical approaches [but] a firm theoretical core is missing."
Although in theoretical terms this may look like a pig's breakfast, in practice the eclecticism is distinctively
patterned: the center of gravity of the project of NES is probably best characterized as neo-Weberian. Critical of
its neglect of structural factors, Bourdieu (2000, 39) portrayed the NES as a "reappropriation of Polanyi and
Weber in U.S. sociology [along with] the development of 'network' analyses designed to move away from an
atomized conception of economic agents."
Michael Piore (1996, 742), a heterodox economist who may otherwise be expected to be sympathetic to the
project of economic sociology, was highly critical of Smelser and Swedberg's (1994) Handbook on the grounds
of its inconsistency and incoherence:
Economies, whatever its other characteristics, has intellectual coherence. .. . Against this background,
economic sociology . . . comes across as completely eclectic, a enormous hodge-podge of ideas and insights,
existing at all sorts of different levels of abstraction, possibly in contradiction with each other, possibly just
incommensurate, without a basic theory or structure to sort them out, to order them, or to serve as a guide for
research. In the face of this intellectual anarchy-the more generous term is Catholicism-what structure there is
must come per force from economics defined in the narrow sense. ... This makes economic sociology seem
largely derivative of economics, and a lot of it simplistic or quarrelsome.
Of course, economic sociologists are far from oblivious to these difficulties. Smelser and Swedberg (1994,20)
noted the tendency of the field to "sprawl," seeing the solution to this problem in terms of more concerted efforts
to "sharpen the theoretical focus of economic sociology and to work toward synthetic interpretations of its
findings." This view tends to produce a yearning for methodological integrity and theoretical synthesis-which
are, of course, conspicuous strategic strengths of orthodox economics, for all its other limitations. In substantive
terms, the search for a rigorous and distinctive center leads to a "tendency to see network patterns as a
distinctive organizing motif of economic life" (Powell and Smith-Doerr 1994, 369). There could be a perverse
echo of orthodox economic practice here, though, the pristine models and market essentialism of which help to
make the same regularized world that they seek to "explain" (see Gallon 1998; Mirowski 2002). Perhaps the
NES runs a parallel risk of network essentialism?

While Granovetter (2002, 36) and others continue their search for a "unified theory" of economic sociology,
there is unease in other quarters about whether the project should, or even could, define itself in such a way. As
Randall Collins (n.d., 3) editorialized, "there is no prospect in the near future for theoretical closure in economic
sociology around a grand synthetic model." These awkward but fundamental questions continue to dog the field
of economic sociology, contributing to a sense of continuing theoretical insecurity. They may also explain the
NES's apparent preoccupation with renarrating its own history (see, especially, Swedberg 1990, 1997, 2004;
Biggart 2002; Swedberg, Himmelstrand, and Brulin 1987; Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer 2002), which
can be read as a series of attempts to fix discursively the essence of the subfield, its common purpose, and its
boundaries.4 Yet for all these efforts, the intellectual project of the NES exists in an oddly symbiotic relationship
with mainstream economics, continuing to react to orthodox economic precepts, rather than to transcend them,
or adopting an entirely independent point of departure. The project has been defined and shaped by its
antipathies to mainstream economic practice, but this also means, ironically, that the shadow of economics
continues to fall across much of this work. How, though, has economics responded?
The Emperor Has No Ears
An important precursor to the rise of the NES was the reawakening of interest in economic institutions within
mainstream economics. Beginning in the 1970s, but gathering momentum since the 1980s, neoclassical
economists have become increasingly concerned with applications of conventional economic reasoning to
ostensibly "noneconomic" spheres of social life, such as religion, crime, and marriage. Many have traced the
origins of this movement to Gary Becker's (1976) audacious treatise, The Economie Approach to Human
Behavior, in which Becker claimed that, "the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all
human behavior [which] can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility from a stable set of
preferences and accumulate an optimal amount of information" (p. 14), and his advocacy of a framework that
would be based squarely on "the combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable
preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly" (p. 5). This work effectively marked the end of the
"gentleman's agreement" struck by Talcott Parsons and Lionel Robbins in the 1930s, which had demarcated the
territory of economics in terms of the rational choices of means in the service of given (and narrowly defined)
ends and that of sociology in terms of institutional and cultural explanations of these ends (Ingham 1996b;
Velthuis 1999; Hodgson n.d.). The behavior of contemporary economics has been imperialistic in the sense that
it has represented a form of intellectual colonization: there has been virtually no attempt to respond to, or learn
from, the other intellectual cultures that have been encountered (see Michie, Oughton, and Willdnson 2002).
"Economics," it has been immodestly claimed, "really does constitute the universal grammar of social science"
(Hirshleifer 1985, 53).
This ungentlemanly behavior by some economists and the "territorial overconfidence" that it reflected certainly
helped to galvanize the revival of economic sociology (Smelser and Swedberg 1994, 18). The notion that the
existence of institutions can be put down to the need to find "efficient" solutions to market problems was one of
the issues that led Granovetter (1985) to reclaim the space for more sociological accounts of institutional
production. Yet while the rhetoric of the NES may have been confrontational, its practice has been more
conciliatory. "Network sociology," in particular, seems to have been predicated on a reworked accommodation
with orthodox economics. Often microsociological in orientation, the NES sometimes sees itself in a kind of
complementary (if not complimentary) and reformist relationship with economics. As Granovetter (1990,95)
noted:
Many such [social network] analysts are mathematically inclined and thus not scared off by the techniques of
microeconomics; and since network analysis often takes the individual as a fundamental unit of analysis, it is
methodologically more individualist than some other sociological traditions. But the underlying conception of
network arguments lends itself to a fundamental critique of the atomized conception of action in neoclassical
theory. Thus, this group, close enough to appreciate economic arguments but different enough to offer a basic

critique, has been in a structurally strategic position.... [Neoclassical theory [is] flawed in [a way] that a
sociological perspective can highlight and help remedy. The brilliant achievements of neoclassical arguments in
illuminating the efficient pursuit of welldefined preferences must be accompanied by an appreciation of the
extent to which such pursuit is intertwined with noneconomic goals, and deeply embedded in structures of social
interaction that extend backward in time and outward in space.
Granovetter (1990, 98, 106) expressed a desire to see orthodox economic theory "strengthened," rather than
overthrown, emphasizing that "I share with its proponents the positivist quest for general, universal
explanations." Speaking for the project as a whole, Smelser and Swedberg (1994, 20) optimistically hoped that
the zone that is defined by "economic institutions" might be one of interdisciplinary engagement, echoing
Parsons in their desire to see the disciplines "cooperatfing] and coexist[ing]."
While there may have been coexistence, there has been precious little cooperation, since mainstream
economics has remained largely oblivious to these sociological attentions. Citation studies have revealed that
the traffic has largely been in one direction, with economic sociologists engaging selectively with the economics
literature, while mainstream economists have largely remained in their own world (Baron and Hannan 1994;
Davern and Eitzen 1995; cf. Swedberg 1990; Krippner et al. 2004). Perhaps it is the case that, as Keen (2003,
74) caustically observed, "economists have no ears." Although parts of the NES have sought to initiate a
reformist dialogue with economics, the influence on orthodox economic practice has been negligible. As Ingham
(1996b, 244) argued in his assessment of the two fields, "economists and sociologists are largely ignorant of
each others' work and intellectual inheritance and, despite significant encroachments from each side into the
other's territory, the cores of the two subjects are probably moving further apart."
It is important to recognize that neoclassical economics is not a singular enterprise (Tabb 1999; Mayhew n.d.),
but at least in comparison with most of the alternative worldviews it confronts, it places a strong premium on
integrity and coherence. A side effect of this drive for essentialized coherence is that alternative ways of reading
the economic world are typically rendered, in comparison, as decentered, disorganized, undisciplined, messy,
ad hoc, and opportunistic. Economic sociology shares this tactical disadvantage, the variegated research
programs and disconnected thematic concerns of which "have just enough overlap or family resemblance to be
lumped together [though] its component strands vary a good deal in their militancy vis-à-vis neoclassical
economics and their drive to replace it with a new paradigm" (Collins n.d., 1). Ironically perhaps, given its
location in the vanguard of the NES, network sociology has just about the least-militant attitude toward the
economic mainstream.
Networking Sociologists
A key objective of network sociology has been to insist upon the existence of and then document the effects of
"the mixture of economic and social purposes that motivate people while they are engaged in production,
consumption, and distribution" (Granovetter 2002, 37). This microsociological perspective is typically
complemented with a searching set of questions concerning the nature of the various contexts that shape
"economic" behavior. If action frameworks are not reducible to the aggregated outcomes of individual actions,
as the critique of methodological individualism would suggest, then "the problem of how contexts of action arise
remains unresolved" (Granovetter 2002, 38; see also Uzzi 1996). And not only is the question an open one, it is
one that is considerably beyond the reach of conventional economic theory, the central postulates of which
presume the deep-freezing of such contextual factors.
Once thawed, so the economic-sociological argument goes, these contextual factors meld with ostensibly
"economic" relations in a way that makes it impossible to parse out rational-instrumentalist motivations from
those that are related to, say, sociability or trust. In this context, Granovetter (2002) drew a telling distinction
between "horizontal" and "vertical" social relations-in which the former are largely nonhierarchical and concern
issues like trust, cooperation, and solidarity, while the latter relate to hierarchical issues like power, domination,
and compliance. He went on to concede that the NES has, in practice, been preoccupied with horizontal or

nonhierarchical relations, although in principle (need it really be said?), vertical or power relations are no less
significant in shaping socioeconomic behavior and economic institutions. The horizontal inclination of much of
the NES is hardly accidental, however, since it reflects a fairly systematic tilt against the underlying principles of
political economy and a great deal of macroeconomic sociology.
Randall Collins (1995, 302) pointedly characterized Smelser and Swedberg's (1994) Handbook as a "triumph
for network sociology," while Samuel Bowles (1995, 306) contrasted its indebtedness to Williamsonian
transaction-costs economics with an apparent indifference to the question of class-"once the organizing
principle of much work on economy and society," class and class analysis had become "virtually absent."
Viviana Zelizer (2002, 109) made a parallel point about gender relations, which when they emerge at all in the
NES tend to be read through the lens of network relations: "The result is to treat gender as one more attribute of
single, decisionmaking economic actors instead of an organizing principle of economic life." In network
sociology, networks become (relatively concretized) condensates of both social agency and social structures:
social agents act in the context of network relations, and the same relations mediate-albeit in a displaced and
muted way-structural forces (see Alexander 1992; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994). In other words, network
sociology has its own way of freezing contextual relations, even as it insists on thawing out more of them than
does orthodox economics.
Granovetter's (1985) original formulation of the networks-and-embeddedness argument sought to tread a new
path between "oversocialized" conceptions of human action, which reduced the individual to a bearer of deeply
internalized social relations, and the "undersocialized" actor that is homo economicus, an atomized individual
who has been stripped of all motives except utilitarian self-interest. He argued, in fact, that atomization is a
consequence of both underand oversocialized conceptions of human action: each interpret action in relatively
mechanistic terms (say, through reduction to instrumental self-interest or recourse to relatively fixed social
identities), while neither take much account of "ongoing social relations" or of the "immediate social context"
(Granovetter 1985, 485, emphasis added). In the Granovetterian conception, necessarily fluid networks become
the indirect carriers of social relations, and it is they that become the focal point for analysis, not the big
structures (say, of patriarchy) that sit behind them. While Granovetter did not deny the causal significance of
these deeper social structures, he declared that he was more concerned with the intermediating mechanisms of
the social embedding process and their associated "proximate" sources of causality:
I have had little to say about what broad historical or macrostructural circumstances have led Systems to
display the social-structural characteristics they have, so I make no claims for this analysis to answer large-
scale questions about the nature of modern society or the sources of economic or political change. But the
focus on proximate causes is intentional, for these broader questions cannot be satisfactorily addressed without
more detailed understanding of the mechanisms by which sweeping change has its effects. (Granovetter 1985,
506-7)
Having cut this intermediate path between under- and oversocialized conceptions of social action and having
focused on midlevel understandings of market structure, it is notable that much of the subsequent dialogue in
the NES has been unidirectional-it has been a dialogue with economics, a dialogue about how to embed homo
economicus, how to make him a somewhat more socially adept individual. This view was evident in
Granovetter's (1985,507, emphasis added) initial concern with "social structure in the market" and, in the
context of the subsequent theoretical research agenda, with "how the larger social setting determines the
parameters within which interest is defined" (Granovetter 2002, 38; see also Beckert 1996). This approach
unfreezes some, but not all, of the social context, and the outcome is correspondingly "slushy." In the
econocentric dialogue of much mainstream economic sociology, the scope for constructive engagement with
rational-choice theories is invariably left open (see Granovetter 1985, 2002; Fligstein and Mara-Drita 1996).
Within this conception, homo economicus has more of a social life, but he certainly has not been put to death on
the altar of feminist theory or class analysis.

Beyond Networks
In her commentary on the field of economic sociology, Zelizer (2002) tellingly identified three categories of work:
first, there is the extension of standard or modified forms of economic analysis to issues that are rendered
marginal in mainstream economics, such as household behavior; second, there are the various explorations of
the contexts of economic action, which, for the most part, are seen to be embedded in interpersonal networks,
organizational structures, or differentiated market forms; and third, there is an eclectic group of alternative
explanations of economic activities and structures, which, by definition, are inconsistent with neoclassical
economic principles and range far and wide in terms of subject matter and theoretical foundations. These
categories may be regarded as, respectively, one, two, and three steps away from orthodox economics. As
Zelizer (2002, 107) noted, the "first two approaches, extension and context, have predominated" in the NES.
For the most part, the field has therefore been one or two steps away from economic orthodoxy, and much of it
faces in that direction. The focus has been on those relatively plastic social networks that are located in and
around the market and are amenable to concrete analysis. As Granovetter (1985, 487) stated:
Actors do not behave as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them
by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy. Their attempts at purposive action
are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations. . . . [This] view of embeddedness alters
our theoretical and empirical approach to the study of economic behavior.
Capitalism and patriarchy, as historically constructed and geographically differentiated social systems, largely
fade into the background in this kind of analysis and indeed in much of the NES. Instead, the focus is resolutely
placed on the middle ground of networks and contingencies, the aim being to "produce a theoretical argument
[that is] consistent with the high level of contingency . . . operating in the actual construction of economic
institutions, but to do so without sliding down the slippery slope into historicism" (Granovetter 1990, 107).
Instead, Granovetter found himself on another slippery slope-this time toward a new kind of Parsonian
appeasement. Bernard Barber (1995, 406-7) contended that Granovetter "shows no understanding of the
importance of the larger social systems in which all economies are located.... Where have the social structures
of kinship, stratification, age, gender, the economy, the polity, organizations, education, and communications
disappeared to?" These social structures are typically collapsed into the proximate and overconcretized notion
of networks (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Ingham 1996a), which, in turn, are only contingently related to
concrete outcomes, just as they are only loosely connected to macrostructural forces. As Granovetter (1990,
106) conceded, this kind of analysis can often be "frustrating because it relies so heavily on contingencies," the
desire to avoid any sense of historical or structural determination exposing the NES to the risk of theoretical
voluntarism.
While much of the rhetoric of the NES is focused on the alleged misdeeds of orthodox economics, perhaps
more revealing is the silence about Marxism, with which there is a studied nonengagement. The Handbook
(Smelser and Swedberg 1994) is effectively indifferent both to regulation theories and to Marxian sociology
(Ingham 1996a), while the substantive concerns of class and inequality have little place in the wider project of
the NES, as Swedberg (2004) readily conceded. According to Bowles (1995, 306-7), "the new economic
sociology takes a more horizontal view: Class has been subsumed by networks, organizational ecology,
reciprocity, asset specificity, and other more benign concepts." And as Arrighi (2001,108) observed, this view is
connected to the project's microsociological inclinations:
By its own admission, what makes the New Economic Sociology "new" in relation to the old is its emphasis on
"networks" and "embeddedness." . . . The thesis that markets are embedded in social networks has been the
main weapon in the . . . critique of the economists' belief in self-regulating markets. .. . Less recognized but
more fundamental is another difference: the distinctly "micro," "social-interactionist" approach of the New
Economic Sociology in comparison with the distinctly "macro," "social-systemic" approach of the old economic
sociology. With rare exceptions, the networks that are investigated link individuals or small groups over

relatively short periods of time. In any event, any investigation of "big structures" and "large processes" . . . lies
almost completely outside the realm of the New Economic Sociology, and so does anything resembling
Braudel's long durée.
If the NES is fundamentally concerned with contextualizing economic behavior, then in its Granovetterian form,
it means the relatively shallow context of proximate networks. And as they are invoked here, networks tend to
"float," metaphorically speaking, between voluntaristic-individual action and relatively enduring social structures,
which are typically investigated in "localized" contexts. Correspondingly, the manner in which institutions are
conceptualized in much of this work, certainly in its Granovetterian strand, strongly reflects this general
orientation-as configurations of network ties or as congealed networks (Krippner 2001).
Although Polanyi's name is often invoked in this context, the analytical procedures of mainstream economic
sociology sit somewhat uneasily with Polanyi's project (see Krippner et al. 2004). Polanyi's approach was not
confined to the intramarket configuration of institutional relations, but began from the conception of markets as
political constructions, requiring significant and continuing state intervention (see Polanyi 1944; Block
1991,1994, 2003; Jessop 2002). Moreover, Polanyi regarded stylized conceptions of institutional effects as
inherently suspicious, advocating instead the careful historical analysis of institutions in their concrete
complexity: "Let us beware of the abstract generalizations in things economic that tend to obscure and
oversimplify the intricacies of actual situations, for these actualities alone are our concern. Our task is to divest
them of generalities and grasp them in their concrete aspect" (Polanyi 1977; quoted in Krippner 2001, 780).
Even though Granovetter (2002, 54) declared his intention to move away from a "focus on the mechanics of
networks alone," his embrace of a more abstract and synthetic notion of relational sociology seems oblivious to
Polanyi's cautions. On the contrary, Granovetter (2002, 54, emphasis added), contended that his approach is
"coterminous with the central concerns of any institutional analysis," despite the fact that the kind of holistic
institutional analysis proposed by Polanyi entailed a far more thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the
economic (see Block and Somers 1984).5 Granovetter's project, in contrast, is being (re)defined as one of
synthetic unification, based on a form of theoretical coexistence with orthodox economics:
If the comparative advantage of relational analysis is its indispensability for understanding trust, solidarity,
cooperation, power, domination, compliance, norms, and identity, it does not follow that we should abandon the
sophisticated analysis of how individuals pursue incentives in well-defined social spaces. This set of arguments,
pursued for generations by . . . many of the best and brightest social scientists, has reached a high level of
refinement. The most daunting agenda for a unified social science is to integrate such analyses with the more
contextually complex arguments of structural sociology. It is a rather special case where context stands still and
is decoupled from rational action in a clearly identified social space, yet this special case has commanded the
vast majority of intellectual resources poured into understanding the economy. The challenge ... is to build
theory for the more general case where contexts, structures, and individual actions interact and change
together. (Granovetter 2002, 54)
In pursuit of a "unified," "integrated," and "refined" social science, involving some land of rapprochement with
economics, the NES would apparently wish to offer up a relatively benign, stylized, sparse (and therefore
relatively easily "digestible") conception of the role of social context in economic action. The danger is that both
the market and the associated apparatus of neoclassical theory are left intact through such an analytical
maneuver. Sociological concepts are being mobilized within the context of the market, less as a transcendent
metacritique of the market. Network sociology therefore seems to be becoming less, not more, disruptive of the
analytical routines of orthodox economics, rather than moving to the logical conclusion of developing alternative
visions and practices of economic analysis. Much that is sociological about economic sociology is therefore
undermined for the sake of a narrowly constructed engagement with mainstream economics.6
Sociology Goes to Market
The traction of mainstream economic sociology has been severely undermined by a pervasive tendency to

conceptualize the market as somehow outside, beyond, or external to the various "more embedded," "more
social," or "more institutionalized" spheres of economic life that represent the substantive concerns of the
subfield (lie 1991; Krippner 2001). The NES has yet to make a sufficiently strong claim on the market itself as a
fundamentally political construction, too often making do with a series of suggestive, though partial,
contextualizations of market behavior. In some form or another, the "pure" market, and the instrumentalist
behaviors with which it is associated, continues to provide the more or less explicit foil against which
contemporary accounts of the networked or embedded economy have been developed. Recall that Granovetter
(2002, 54) later argued against the abandonment of "sophisticated analysis of how individuals pursue incentives
in welldefined social spaces," the bread and butter of orthodox economics, since this endeavor is apparently
viewed as a complementary one.
The tendency to defer to an idealized market, to place the market at the other end of the spectrum of more
socialized versions of the economy, or to rely in other ways on the abstract market as an analytical foil is
widespread, even in ostensibly heterodox economics (lie 1991; Barber 1995; Krippner 2001). The implications
of this tendency are more than semantic, for they imply a continuing naturalization of some presocial market,
even as they ostensibly seek to deconstruct this very formulation. This kind of slippage is clearly evident in
network sociology, just as it is in Williamsonian economics and the associated strands of economic governance
theory; it even appears in some neoPolanyian work, in which various degrees of "marketness" or
disembeddedness are countenanced, and in approaches that sequester networks as a third, distinctive form of
economic organization (see Powell 1990; Williamson 1994). The argument that begins by asserting that
markets are socially constructed and then goes on to discuss the manner in which "more" or "less" socialized
economic forms exist alongside the forces of supply and demand has apparently become as commonplace as it
is logically incoherent. It rests on what Ingham (1996a, 555) appropriately characterized as an "extraordinary
contradiction." Are all economic phenomena socially constructed and embedded, or are some markets more
embedded than others? If all economies are social economies of one sort or another, then the utilitarian
abstraction of the "pure" market is decidedly unhelpful, even as an (imagined) point from which to theorize
supposed deviations. The statement that markets are embedded is surely a qualitative one, not a matter of
degrees. Krippner et al. (2004, 112) insisted that
every transaction, no matter how instantaneous, is social in the broader sense of the term: congealed into every
market exchange is a history of struggle and contestation that has produced actors with certain understandings
of themselves and the world which predispose them to exchange under a certain set of rules and not another. In
this sense, the state, culture and politics are contained in every market act; they do not variably exert their
influence on some kinds of markets more than others.
Social-economic theorizing, properly speaking, cannot start with the idealized market and then work outward to
progressively "less marketlike" variants of the same; neither should it meekly accept that contextfree economic
action is simply a "rather special case" (Granovetter 2002, 54). This is what Williamson (1994) did by visualizing
markets in an axial relationship with certain hierarchical forms and the immediate "institutional environment"
within which the economy operates, beyond which there is only "tosh." And while tosh may indeed be a "source
of interesting variety [which] adds spice to life," he insisted that it must not be confused with the "core features
of institutional environment," like legal rules and market regulations (Williamson 1994, 98). Granovetter drew
these lines differently, using different terminology, but drew them he did. For Krippner (2001, 799-800),
the embeddedness concept has led scholars to layer a social economy on top of a pre-social and untheorized
market. In contrast, network theorists explicitly examine the market, but the social content is distilled away from
social structure. ... It is both telling and troubling that, given the way in which the paradigm of economic
sociology has been formulated, sociologists have only been able to study markets by stripping them of the
features that most make them social. The concept of embeddedness posits that the world of the market exists
apart from society even as it attempts to overcome that divide. . . . [A]s long as the market is treated as alien to

social, political, and cultural forms, it will be in a position to pre-empt more tenuous understandings of social
practices.
Paradoxically, the NES project may have contributed to the very naturalization of markets that it set out to
transcend, theorizing context and embeddedness in such a way that it has proved relatively easy to decant
them off from an ostensibly presocial market. Of course, not all of economic sociology proper is vulnerable to
this critique (ironically, its own critique). Important exceptions include Block's (1994, 1996) contributions on the
political economy of state intervention, the historical analyses of the politics of market making in Dobbin (1994)
and Fligstein (2001), certain strands within the "varieties of capitalism" school (see Hollingsworth and Boyer
1997), lie's (1991, 1993, 1997) post-Polanyian sociologies of the market, and Zelizer's (1994) work on economic
culture. But the positive theoretical program that engages frontally with markets has progressed only in fits and
starts. As Fligstein (2001, 8) argued, much of the recent literature on the sociology of markets is concerned with
markets largely as empirical objects, with any conceptual unity stemming from a shared rejection of neoclassical
theory: "sociological approaches lack a broader, organizing frame to understand economic processes as
generic social processes operating in a particular institutional situation."
"The major downfall of the network approaches," Fligstein and Mara-Drita (1992,20, quoted in Swedberg 1997)
argued, "is that they are such sparse structures that it is difficult to see how they can account for what we
observe. . . . [T]hey contain no model of politics [and] no social preconditions for market exchanges." Within the
NES, networks are often placed in some parallel conceptual universe, sequestered both from markets, on the
one hand, and power relations, on the other hand. Ironically, this process confers on networks some decidedly
"marketlike" properties-floating, decentered, spontaneous, self-organizing, objects of analytical deference.7
Network-centric analyses therefore share certain features with the market-centric analyses they purport to
transcend: politics and power are rendered contingent and contextual, and, as a result, they are only
haphazardly theorized; the bloodless, overendowed, and underspecified concept of the market is replaced with,
or complemented by, the anemic, overendowed, and underspecified concept of the network.
Zelizer (2002, 117) maintained that economic sociology must commit more fully to the "theoretical challenge"
that, implicitly at least, lies at the heart of the project: "Instead of huddling in the corner designated for them by
conventional economic analysis, economic sociologists should move freely through the whole range of
economic life." Fundamentally, this statement surely means taking on the market and its theorization, not eking
out strategies for respectful coexistence. It means once and for all rejecting the Parsonian pact that has
implicitly shaped the parameters of the NES (Stark 2000). This is where economic geography has a potentially
positive role to play, at least if it can be rooted in some way in a principled rejection of market essentialism and
universal rationality. If the promise of a more robust economic sociology entails embracing the concept of the
"always embedded economy" (Block 2003), then a complementary task in economic geography may involve
explorations of the everywhere embedded economy. If the first tends to privilege the historical contextualization
of actually existing economies, the latter would take it one step further-analyzing the historical geographies of
variegated, hybridized, and unevenly developed economies.
Part 2: Not (Just) Networks-Spatializing Economic Sociology
Understandably, the project of economic sociology, qua project, has been substantially preoccupied with issues
that it may potentially make its own: embedded networks. Increasingly, though, the limitations of "pure" network
approaches are becoming evident (Podolny and Page 1998; Krippner 2001; Granovetter 2002). The network
optic has shed new light on variegated forms of social relations beyond markets and hierarchies, although it
must be acknowledged that these are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive spheres of economic life.
The logical implication of this position is an antagonistic attitude toward orthodox economic theory, yet the
reformist wing of the NES seems, in practice, reluctant to acknowledge this implication, focused as it remains on
the (distant) project of a rapprochement with the neoclassical mainstream. Against this strategy, this section
argues the case for moving beyond networks, which necessarily entails transcending the restrictive axes and

narrow register of the dialogue between network sociology and orthodox economics. It does so not simply out of
contrariness, but to explore a different kind of (largely unexplored) common ground between economic
geography and economic sociology-characterized here as social-constructionist macroeconomic sociology-in
which the potential for genuinely productive exchange would appear to be considerable, if as yet unrealized.
In some respects, the ground has already been prepared for such an exchange. On the economic geography
side, much of the recent theoretical discussion of networks has been pushing in a similar (critical) direction:
making the case for providing more political-economic "content" within network analyses, for taking
(asymmetrical) power relations more seriously, and for locating networks within their macroeconomic and
macroinstitutional contexts (see Amin and Hausner 1997; Olds and Yeung 1999; Leitner, Pavlik, and Sheppard
2002; Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001; Henderson et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2003; Gertler 2002; Yeung
2003). Among other things, it involves moving beyond the micro- and mesoanalytical scales that tend to be
privileged in network theories; it also means unfreezing much more of the social and spatial context within which
network relations operate, and it demands that the theoretical and methodological implications of
nonessentialist forms of economic analysis are embraced. Meanwhile, on the economic sociology side, various
strands of macroeconomic sociology have, for some time, been associated with arguments regarding the
diversity of capitalist systems, the politics of market making, the local specificities of economic institutions, and
the social construction of economic formations, all of which have the potential to connect in fertile ways with
contemporary currents in economic geography (see Burawoy 1985; Stark 1996; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997;
Block 2000; Jessop 2002; Sayer 2002). Here, there is also a concern to take power and politics much more
seriously, although the engagement with issues around space, place, and uneven development remains, at this
point, a second- or third-order concern.
Despite this potential, only occasionally has economic geography appeared on the radar screen of economic
sociology, broadly defined. Its European strand has a continuing interest in industrial districts and regional
development, which has led to some communication between the disciplines (see Beckert and Swedberg 2001;
Triglia 2002), but the NES in the United States has remained largely impervious. The exception that proves this
rule is Saxenian's (1994) work on regional industrial networks, although the manner in which this work is read is
revealing. While Saxenian's comparative analyses of Route 128 and Silicon Valley have delved deeply into the
regional roots of industrial practices, new economic sociologists have tended to boil down such effects to
network contexts. So, the Californian case speaks to Granovetter (2002, 35) as an account of "an extraordinary
amount of trust among companies and individuals who are nominally in competition with one another." The
Boston case, in contrast, is interpreted as a representation of the other in network relations: here, the absence
of trust is associated with regional economic malaise. While there was an extensive discussion of networks in
Saxenian's (1994) Regional Advantage, the account did not rest on such narrow foundations-it is a "thicker"
economic geography than Granovetter's reading would suggest. Saxenian's multifaceted interrogation of
regional production cultures drew attention to what Michael Storper called their "superadditive" properties, the
social "glue" that holds together these mesoinstitutional systems beyond the bare bones of transactional
relationships and network architectures (see "Discussion of Regional Advantage" 1995, 204).
There is perhaps an echo here of economic sociology's own failure to convince mainstream economics of the
significance of context: the relatively spaceless field of economic sociology, which, like orthodox economics,
also has its synchronie impulses, has yet to appreciate the significance of geographic context and spatial
embeddedness, tending to reduce place and space to stylized, categorical-taxonomic or system-like
characteristics, while paying practically no attention to uneven geographic development, place making, or scalar
constitution. What matters for the NES is the immediate social context, viewed through the lens of networks,
and the way in which these contexts matter is typically much more stylized than one would find in economic-
geographic discussions of place and locality (after Massey 1984). The NES hankers for "rigorous" and
parsimonious forms of analysis in which the messy specificities of place are leached out.8 The failure to

excavate "context" more deeply in the NES-bringing in more history as well as more geography-does not
represent a mere oversight. In network sociology, in particular, the leaning toward synchronie and synthetic
theorizing reflects the wider ambition of getting in synch with orthodox economics. Invoking what Williamson
(1994) would call "tosh" would be decidedly unhelpful to this cause.
Out of Synch
In contrast with the NES, macroeconomic sociology generally favors more radical, heterodox readings of the
economy, readings that are more disruptive of orthodox conceptions and analytical routines. It shares with
radical political economy, feminist economics, more robust forms of institutional economics, and the postautistic
economics movement, in general (see Fullbrook 2003), a desire to develop alternative forms of (institutional and
political) economic analysis, one component of which involves the simultaneous deconstruction of the market
and neoclassical economics. From this perspective, then, comes a simple answer to the nagging question, in
both the NES and (the new) economic geography, concerning if and how to fashion a constructive dialogue with
orthodox economics: don't. More than a petulant stance, this represents an acknowledgment of distortions and
limitations that tend to accompany attempts to communicate with orthodox economics. The dividing line
between those who see this uncompromising position as unnecessarily confrontational and those who regard it
as both politically and theoretically essential is the defining feature of the accommodationalist/militant tension in
economic sociology (see Collins n.d.; Zelizer 2002), just as it seems to be assuming increasing importance in
economic geography (see Clark 1998; Martin 1999; "Debating Economic Geography" 2001).
It would be an exaggeration to say that this division is an acrimonious or polarizing one, either in geography or
sociology, but as a line of diagnostic demarcation, it certainly has salience. Although explicit accommodation
with orthodox economics is a minority pursuit in both disciplines, where the prevailing sentiment probably falls
somewhere between indifference, skepticism, and militancy, weighing the issue is not simply a matter of
counting heads in the various "camps." Rather, it is the qualitative character of the respective intellectual
programs that varies, and in a potentially significant way. The accommodationalist tendency tends to be
somewhat more organized, disciplined, and coherent, since its rules of engagement are, for the most part,
exogenously determined: to get the ear of economics, first use the language of economics-formal methods,
clean models, and mechanical reasoning. As Williamson (1994, 77), who has attempted this feat with some
success from a different structural position, put it, "Tell economists something that they did not previously know
about phenomena of interest to them, display the logic, and demonstrate that the data line up: that will get their
attention." Since almost nothing else will, this amounts to a fairly unambiguous, if still massively difficult, task.
Meanwhile, there are no such preordained rules of engagement in the large, residual elements of both
economic sociology and economic geography that are disinclined to communicate with economics in such
constraining, pregiven terms. Here, amid the generally tolerant heterodoxy, pluralism and eclecticism tend to
hold sway; only occasionally are there common causes or even widely shared concerns. Hirsch, Michaels, and
Friedman (1987, 320) might just as easily have been describing the general climate in economic geography, for
example, when they observed that "in comparison [with economics], sociology seems proudly diverse, even if
almost adolescent and continually suffering mini-identity crises." In fact, the intellectual cultures in economic
geography and economic sociology are similar in many respects, particularly when viewed in relation to
economics. In contrast to the high-church culture of orthodox economics-with its absolutist belief system, pious
practices, and preference for monastic introspection-economic sociology and economic geography both exhibit
a loosely defined and worldly agnosticism. In more concrete terms, Baron and Hannan's (1999, 1118) depiction
of conventions of graduate training in sociology strongly echo those of geography, and in both cases the
contrast with economics is telling:
Since the demise of functionalist theory in the 1960s, sociology has lacked a dominant paradigm; courses in
sociological theory expose students to a panoply of (partly competing) theoretical approaches. Students usually
are encouraged to regard the set of perspectives as comprising a "toolkit" that any good sociologist ought to

have at hand in analyzing social phenomena. This encourages sociologists to develop arguments "horizontally"
(bringing more kinds of arguments to bear on a problem). In contrast, economists are taught to operate
"vertically," taking a single line of argument and pushing its implications as far as possible. ... Sociological work
that uses much of the toolkit generally receives a broad positive reaction; work that pursues a single line of
argument is often derogated as "narrow."
This is not just a matter of disciplinary cultures, however. At a theoretical level, economic geography and
economic sociology share an antipathy-sometimes instinctive, sometimes formal-to rational-choice modeling
and methodological individualism (see Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman 1987; Barnes and Sheppard 1992).
Methodological individualism rests on the contention that "the elementary unit of social life is the individual
human action," so that to "explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of
the action and interaction of individuals" (Elster 1989, 13). The concept of rational choice builds on this
framework by proposing that the cumulative consequences of rationally chosen individual actions tend to be
optimally efficient for society and that rational action should be the benchmark against which all social action is
evaluated. After Durkheim, it has been argued that sociological arguments are those that, by definition, are not
reducible to such individualistic bases, since they relate to those "social facts" that necessarily adhere to
collective, group, or associational entities. The domain of sociological inquiry is correspondingly defined as
those "ways of acting, thinking, and feeling" that are social in the sense that "their source is not in the individual,
their substratum can be no other than society" (Durkheim 1938, 3).
The NES seeks to split the difference between what are portrayed as over- and undersocialized conceptions of
human action. It is this theoretical third way that produces the exaggerated emphasis on networks as a distinct
mode of economic organization and as a framework for interpreting economic action that is both "more social"
than methodological individualism and "less deterministic" than the sociological mainstream. While this kind of
compromise may be appealing to some in economic geography, it is surely not without significance that the
reformulation of network approaches that has occurred in the subdiscipline has been associated, more often
than not, with a push toward more seriously socialized and more deeply contextualized treatments (see Dicken,
Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001). Not all the frailties of Granovetterian sociology have been imported uncritically
into economic geography, although in practice, it remains to be seen whether the deployment of a "network
optic" will tend to throw some socioinstitutional relations out of focus, just as it privileges others. Implicitly or
explicitly, macroinstitutional factors, structural inequalities, and competitive dynamics all tend to receive less
attention in analyses that focus on the middle ground of proximate, horizontal networks (see Sayer 2002).
In the economic sociology literature, this is one of the primary reasons for the disconnect between network
microsociology and the evolving bodies of work around comparative political economy, the varieties-of-
capitalism school, and extensions of Polanyian analysis (see Evans 1995; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997; Hall
and Soskice 2001; Block 2002; Burawoy 2003; Silver and Arrighi 2003), all of which have, relatively speaking, a
more macroinstitutional and structural orientation and take arguments about the sociopolitical construction of
economies more seriously. It is interesting that this work has also received less attention in economic
geography, in contrast to the recent preoccupation with networks and embeddedness.9 Although economic
geography certainly shares with sociology a strong sense of skepticism about the "market optic" of orthodox
economics-within which a narrow range of exchange relations is imposed on the entire system of economic
organization, markets being presented as both normatively and logically superior (Sayer 2002)-the positive
theoretical and methodological program that may follow from this skepticism has yet to be defined in economic
geography. As Gordon Clark (1998, 83) cautioned, the embrace of empirical diversity and theoretical pluralism
may be enervating, but it is not likely to be enough: "Resuscitating commitment to collective intellectual enquiry
is an essential task for economic geography." Likewise, Martin and Sunley (2001,153) observed that
we are far from convinced that many of today's "new" (cultural) economic geographers have a detailed
understanding of institutional economics, evolutionary economics, social economics, economic sociology, or

any of the other of the heterodox fields of economic theory. . . . The subject is becoming littered with terms and
notions "cherry-picked" from this or that branch of heterodox economics or social or cultural theory, which then
rapidly become accepted and assigned an unquestioned profundity before they have been adequately defined
and conceptualised. Indeed, the majority of new concepts now go uncontested. The term "embeddedness,"
taken from economic sociology, typifies this trend. Nowhere has this term been properly defined or theorised by
the new economic geographers, yet it is now firmly established as part of economic geography's conceptual
vocabulary.
In some respects, the networks-andembeddedness paradigm seems to lend itself to soft-focus treatments of
capitalism, in which the roles of power and inequality are not so much denied but gently sidelined through the
privileging of the horizontal relations of trust, reciprocity, and associativity. So, as Sayer (2002, 49-50) observed,
the "metaphor of embeddedness sounds soft and comforting, and possibly sends our critical faculties to sleep,
but what it describes can, on occasion, be harsh and oppressive.... [A]t the same time as it highlights apparently
softer versions of capitalism, it has little or nothing to say about issues of distribution and inequality." Economic
geographers have certainly not been oblivious to the limitations of benign forms of network analysis (see Amin
and Hausner 1997; Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001), but, at the same time, some of its suggestive
metaphors and stylized arguments have passed into the literature in ways that often neutralize or obfuscate
relations of power, domination, exploitation, and inequality while demoting structural forces and conjunctural
contexts to the sidelines. In as far as economic geography is a critical project, these are serious silences.
Addressing them need not imply ending the fledgling conversation with economic sociology, but it surely must
entail selectively broadening and deepening this conversation. And this may mean spending less time talking
networks and more time engaging with macroeconomic sociology and with heterodox economics more
generally. The problem, from an economicgeographic perspective, is that unsituated network approaches are
only "weakly contextual" (Gertler 2002, 89).10 The NES's continuing attempts to get in synch with orthodox
economics mean that the role of context must be weak or, at least, highly stylized. The economic geography of
this world is banal and cartoonlike (regions with trust and regions without, networked spaces and hierarchical
places, cities with buzz and cities without, learning regions and dumb regions, and so forth). History, geography,
and social relations are stripped out or stripped down in such treatments; "context" and conjuncture are reduced
to background scenery, sketched out only in the broadest of strokes. It need not be like this, though. There are
parts of economic sociology that do take historical conjunctures and institutional contexts seriously, even if they
have yet to take geography seriously. In contradistinction to the NES, these currents may be characterized as
forms of macroeconomic sociology.
In contrast to the self-consciously organized advance of network sociology, the various strands of
macroinstitutional work in economic sociology do not have such an easily defined center. Instead, there are at
least two contemporary currents of macroeconomic sociology-one that is organized around the varieties-of-
capitalism rubric and the other that may be described as social constructivist or generically neo-Polanyian. One
reason, perhaps, why there is less of a sense of shared endeavor here than in the parallel strand of network
sociology is that the connections between these two more macro approaches seem, if anything, to be
loosening. They may even be headed in different directions. Potential affinities with economic-geographic work
are evident in both lines of work, although in neither case have the links been firmly established. Both are
arguably deserving of more serious attention within economic geography, although again the appropriate
questions concern which economic sociologies to engage with and around which issues.
Capitalism, Now in Two Varieties?
Hall and Soskice (2001, 6) characterized the varieties-of-capitalism approach as a form of "firm-centered
political economy," the focus of which has been on the comparative analysis of developed capitalist economies.
With origins in modernization theory (which was always state centric in orientation), neocorporatism (which
placed analytical priority on the role of unions), and the social-systems-of-production approach (which privileged

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