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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

production regimes and dynamics), this body of work has been preoccupied since the 1980s with the
comparative analysis of "coordinated market economies," such as Germany and Japan, and "liberal market
economies," such as the United States and the United Kingdom. The superior economic performance of the
former, more coordinated systems galvanized much of this work during the 1980s (see Dore 1987; Albert 1993),
when a subtext was a shared antipathy to the ReaganThatcher experiments and a progressive preference for
more organized, deliberative, and welfare-oriented approaches to economic development. On the face of it, the
ascendancy of neoliberal regimes during the 1990s severely undermined this story, pointing as it apparently did
to the superiority of market-based approaches in this after-Fordist "war of the capitalisms."
In fact, these abrupt changes in national economic fortunes underline a deeper theoretical point: that the
appropriate basis for comparison between economic systems is qualitative difference, taking full account of
institutionalized specificities, not deference to some transcendental measure of "efficiency." So the relative
success of neoliberal regimes during the 1990s did not reflect an inevitable triumph of unfettered markets or
"purer" forms of capitalism, but could be traced, first, to a series of situated advantages and institutional
particularities of, say, the British and American models and second, to the tendency for "bad capitalisms to
undermine the good" in the context of liberalized financial and trading regimes (see Gray 1998; Block 2000).
This was not a simple story, then, of superior or inferior forms of capitalism (even though it was often told in this
way), but instead reflected the uneven (and dynamically interrelated) performance of qualitatively differentiated
institutional regimes. In early manifestations of the varieties-of-capitalism rubric, different "national capitalisms"
were taken to represent distinctively institutionalized pathways of political-economic development, not simply
variants or distortions of an otherwise normalized free-market model. On this basis, economic sociologists
subsequently responded to the debate on globalization by challenging notions of straightforward institutional
convergence around "scaled up" Anglo-American norms, insisting instead that national economies will continue
to respond to the pressures, opportunities, and constraints that are associated with globalization in ways that
reflect institutional legacies, cultural contingencies, and political strategies (see Berger and Dore 1996; Crouch
and Streeck 1997; Triglia 2002). Some have suggested that the appropriate theoretical challenge, in fact, is to
explain the ongoing divergence of national capitalisms, which continues to be demonstrable on many measures
(Hancke 1999; Whitley 1999; Soskice 1999). The adaptive capacity of some national regimes may be greater
than others, of course, since the coordinated market economies seem to have found themselves at a strategic
disadvantage in the face of neoliberal globalism, at least in the short run (see Crouch and Streeck 1997; Wade
and Veneroso 1998; Dore 200O).11 This said, even if the pressures emanating from a more price-competitive
and unstable global economy tend to induce "generic" responses like welfare-state downsizing and labor-
market flexibilization, it is certainly not the case that the institutional form of these responses is structurally
determined. Neoliberalization, in this context, need not and indeed does not lead to simple convergence, and,
by the same token, its manifestations are always hybrids, always couched within relations of uneven
development (see Peck and Tickell 2002; Peck 2004).
Path dependency is one of the central motifs of the varieties-of-capitalism school. Yet the concept of path-
dependent adjustment, within which social action is constrained and channeled by accumulated institutional
legacies, may be prone to Granovetter's (1985) original critique of "oversocialization." In practice, path-
dependency arguments tend to focus on situations in which decision making is "locked in," having less to say
about those path-altering moments when creative or revolutionary "breakouts" from institutionalized patterns of
social action may occur, either in principle or in practice (Crouch and Farrell 2002). Another consequence of the
somewhat introverted nature of these analyses is that they exhibit a pervasive "systemcentricity." And more
than this, national institutional systems are assumed to have a high level of internal integrity and congruence:
Hancké (1999) argued that the varieties-of-capitalism approach rests on a "supermodular" conception of
institutional systems, within which national institutional ensembles are seen to be associated with strong path
dependencies. This is not simply an article of faith, but follows from unique complementarities between

constituent elements of the system, say, between the labor-market regime and the structure of the financial
system.12 Although these arguments have been advanced empirically, there are still open theoretical questions
that are related to the internal coherence and complementarity of specifically national systems and around the
"tightness" (or necessity) of the fit between the different constituent elements of these systems (see Hall 1997;
Hancké 1999; Ebbinghaus and Manow 2001). Orthodox economists, of course, typically find these loose,
unsystematic, irregular, and contingent relationships extremely ad hoc (Richter 2001). Yet it is surely important
to acknowledge that institutional integrity, whether at the level of national "systems" or other scales, must be
demonstrated, not assumed. Correspondingly, the proposition that such post hoc functionalities necessarily or
even tendentially adhere to national-scale institutions, and therefore that "meaningful variety" is typically
anchored at this scale, must also be an open question, in light of recent arguments about regionalization,
"hollowing out," local capitalisms, transnationalization, and so forth.
In principle, the varieties-of-capitalism approach can be applied at the sectoral or regional level, though the
overwhelming majority of work in this area has focused fairly unproblematically on the national state as the
naturalized unit of analysis. As Hall and Soskice (2001, 4, 16) stated:
[W]e focus on variation among national political economies. Our premise is that many of the most important
institutional structures-notably systems of labor market regulation, of education and training, and of corporate
governance-depend on the presence of regulatory regimes that are the preserve of the nation-state [.. .] It is
possible to apply the general analytical framework ... to variations at the regional or sectoral level [which
provide] an additional layer of support for particular types of coordination [and which enhance] a nation's
capacity to support a range of corporate strategies and production regimes.
The scope effectively to "regionalize" the varieties of capitalism approach may be more restricted than Hall and
Soskice implied, however, since the general thrust of the research in this field seems to be to systematize
"variety" in relatively orthodox terms and in terms that merely reposition the Archimedean point of the market at
the end of a different axis (between coordinated and liberal market systems), rather than to unpack the sources
and consequences of this variety at other scales of analysis. Although in the earlier stages of the development
of the varieties-of-capitalism approach, common cause was being made with regulation theory and other more
structural-institutional traditions (see Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997), pointing to potential areas of contact with
economic geography, its more recent development has been more economistic and perhaps less
accommodating. Echoing the techniques of orthodox economics, the strategy has been to seek theoretical
clarity through the revelation of the microfoundations of institutional systems.
Apart from passing references to the Third Italy and Baden WOrttemberg, the thrust of more recent work has
been to integrate the analysis of institutions, suitably modified, into rational-choice microeconomics. So, the
search for a "general theory" of institutional complementarities led Hall and Gingerich (2001, 3) to assume that
"firms are the central actors in the economy," the behavior of which "aggregates to national economic
performance." The rational-choice tail here is clearly beginning to wag the institutional dog. Thus, emphasis is
duly placed on the capacity of institutions to "resolve coordination problems," contributing to "attaining the
relevant equilibrium in contexts of coordination," the tortuously logical conclusion of which is that "the
construction of coordinating institutions should be seen as a second-order coordination problem of considerable
magnitude" (Hall and Soskice 2001, 6,12,14). There is a fairly significant twist on the orthodox rational-choice
approach here, however, since it is argued that there are situations in which (corporate) strategy and decision
making follow (institutional) structure, rather than precede it. Using techniques like game theory, the objective of
this formalized strand of the varieties-of-capitalism approach is to resituate rational action in the context of
national institutional systems (or stylized readings of these systems), rather than to take on the concept of
rational action itself. Rationality is not presumed to be universal, but is effectively rescaled around national
institutional systems, each with their own coherent rationalities: "our approach predicts systematic differences in
corporate strategy across nations, and differences that parallel the overarching institutional structures of the

political economy" (Hall and Soskice 2001, 15, emphasis added).
The varieties-of-capitalism approach is moving away from the close socioinstitutional analyses of "real" national
economies in favor of more abstract discussions of coordinated versus liberal systems, coupled with
gametheoretic experimentation and parsimonious theoretical analysis. National economies seem on the way to
becoming data units, rather than objects of empirical analysis in their own right, while the concept of modes of
coordination is abstracted away from the real economies that were the basis of the original generalization.
Compounding the commonplace economic-sociological fallacy of counterpoising more or less socioinstitutional
readings of the economy with an essentially neoclassical image of "the market," the varieties-of-capitalism
approach seems to be consigning itself to one end of a questionable theoretical continuum. Expressing a
perhaps surprising degree of deference to the methodological routines and theoretical priorities of orthodox
economics, Hall and Gingerich (2001, 3-4) constructed their case in the following way:
The varieties of capitalism approach draws a distinction between two modes of coordination. In one, firms
coordinate with other actors primarily through competitive markets, characterized by arms-length (sic) relations
and formal contracting. Here, equilibrium outcomes are dictated primarily by relative prices, market signals, and
familiar marginalist considerations. In the other modality, firms coordinate with other actors through processes
of strategic interaction of the kind [that is] typically modeled by game theory. Here, equilibrium outcomes
depend on the institutional support available for the formation of credible commitments, including support for
effective information-sharing, monitoring, sanctioning, and deliberation. ... At one end of the spectrum stand
liberal market economies . . . where relations between firms and other actors are coordinated primarily by
competitive markets. At the other end are coordinated market economies . . . where firms typically engage in
more strategic interaction with trade unions, suppliers of finance, and other actors. . . . Market coordination is a
familiar concept in neo-classical economics, and the United States is a typical liberal market economy.
So, in this orthodox form of reification, cases become types, and neoclassical textbook conditions prevail in the
United States! Hall and Gingerich went on to make the point that firms will (rationally) choose between market
and strategic coordination strategies on the basis of their assessment of the prevailing operating environment,
opting for the latter where markets are "fluid" and the former-which increasingly sounds like a suboptimal or
second-best choice-"[w]here markets are imperfect." The institutional landscape invoked here is a largely inert
one (Ebbinghaus and Manow 2001), since attention has been turned to the problematic of rational action in this
inherited environment. This form of reasoning is therefore increasingly incapable of surviving sociology's own
critique of orthodox economics, since surely all (actually existing) markets are imperfect and impure, in so far as
they are all embedded, albeit in contingent ways, in extra-economic institutions (see Barber 1995; Jessop
2002). In its efforts to overcome what Barber (1977) called the "absolutization of the market," this variant of
economic sociology may now be shoring up this very distinction, even going so far as to sequester different
"appropriate" analytical routines for the market and submarket systems, while implying that some varieties of
capitalism are purer than are others. The varieties-of-capitalism approach has become increasingly preoccupied
with the task of theorizing the market's "other," but in terms that circuitously secure a revisionist form of
economic imperialism. And while progressive and creative theoretical impulses can still be found in this
literature, the reliance on increasingly stylized national ideal types may be constraining and limiting the project.
The scope for building constructive connections between this literature and economic geography is likely to be
constricted if the trend toward orthodox formalization continues. In principle, economic geographers tend to be
more concerned with opening up sources of economic variety and diversity, rather than narrowing them down to
nationally based ideal types, or theorizing them around some privileged "center," like the idealized market, or
what some take to be its earthly surrogate, liberalized capitalism, U.S. style. But having said that economic
geographers may be inclined to search for more variety, not less, it must also be acknowledged that the
challenge of demonstrating variety-for example, between different "local capitalisms"-has only fitfully been taken
up. Economicgeographic contributions have barely penetrated the varieties-of-capitalism literature, despite the

scope for mutuallyinforming engagement.
Capitalisms: Under Construction
If the varieties-of-capitalism approach is succumbing to what McCloskey (n.d.) characterized as
"econowannabeism," an arguably more fruitful line of inquiry is being pursued by a variegated group of
neoPolanyians. In Krippner's (2001) terms, these neo-Polanyians have defined the analysis of concrete
economic forms as a positive analytical program, one that perforce must embrace the critical deconstruction of
what pass for "market" structures and relations (see also Mitchell 1998). The casual equation of markets,
neoclassical analysis, and American capitalism, Hall-andGingerich-style, has no place here. The starting point
for this kind of work is the explicit rejection of presocial conceptions of the market, coupled with an antipathy
towards assertions about the "natural" state of capitalist relations. Fred Block (2002,223) has sought to
characterize this approach as one based on the notion of capitalism as a constructed system:
[B]oth within societies and as an international system, capitalist arrangements are not natural but need to be
constantly constructed and reconstructed. Capitalism cannot rely on simple continuity over time because it is
continually generating new conflicts and contradictions that have to be resolved or contained through conscious
activity. .. . The market system is based on the illusion that factors of production-including land, labor, and
money-are commodities that are produced for sale on a market. This commodity status must be assumed
because otherwise there is no assurance that the price mechanism will equilibrate supply and demand.
However, land, labor, and money are not true commodities; they were not really produced for sale on the
market. The constant work of "constructing capitalism" is the effort needed to paper over this yawning gap
between reality and the market model.
Even as market discourses become increasingly pervasive, the prosaic reality is that capitalism requires
perpetual institutional reinvention. There is no Holy Grail in which neoclassical analysis, neoliberal dogma, and
actually existing American capitalism are conjoined in a final, contradictionfree synthesis. The work of
reconstructing capitalism is continuous and, despite some appearances to the contrary, there is no rule book.
In the face of neoliberal fatalism, this conception is potentially liberating in both theoretical and political terms,
since it draws explicit attention to some of the ways in which progressive reconstructions of this variegated
capitalism may be conceived-up to and including transformation of the system. Moreover, there is no need to
deny the less-than-accommodating realities of neoliberal geopolitics while doing so. As Block (2002, 224) noted:
[T]here are many varieties of capitalism and there are many different ways that these varieties can be
articulated together into a global system. Some systems of articulationlike the ones favored by neoliberals-
operate to reduce varieties of capitalism that are possible at the national or regional level; but other systems of
articulation are consistent with much greater variety at the national or regional level. It also follows that just as
different varieties of capitalism can have dramatically differing levels of inequality or of economic insecurity for
poor and working people, different systems of international articulation might be more or less consistent with
reforms favoring subordinate classes.
Although these observations provide an intriguing point of departure, Block (2002, 224, emphasis added) readily
concedes that "it is not enough to say that capitalism is a constructed system. The task is to illuminate how it is
constructed: to see how a diverse and often contradictory set of practices are welded together to produce
something that has the appearance of being a natural and unified entity." Fundamentally, this is a task for
theoretically informed concrete research, and it is one to which economic geography may make a positive
contribution, since it tends to privilege suggestive analyses of actually existing economies, fully and properly
situated in their historical-geographic context. In this respect, there are strong connections to be made with
recent work in economic anthropology, in which there has been a productive debate around cultural
constructions of capitalism and "local capitalisms." Here, the point is not to wallow in ethnographic diversity for
its own sake, proliferating variants of capitalism willy-nilly, but to develop causatively significant accounts of

economic variety in space (and through time). "Speaking oi'guanxi' or 'predatory' or 'diaporic' capitalism," as
Blim (2000, 33) remarked, "is not to trade metaphors but to create a possible field and vocabulary for describing
variation in a constructive, causally interesting way." So it is clearly not enough simply to state that capitalism is
a locally constructed system. The task is to illuminate how these local constructions have evolved, how they
intersect, and how such a geographic sensibility makes a difference to the form and functioning of variegated
capitalist economies. Economic geographers, for their part, may have been more successful in convincing one
another of these arguments than they have in making their voices heard in the wider field of heterodox
economic studies.
Deconstructing markets, market relations, and market ideologies means confronting the messy reality of
economic behavior and economic structures, not assuming them away. "Market actors," as Fligstein (2002, 200)
noted, "live in murky worlds," in which information never flows freely, rules vary, actions are mutually
interdependent, and motivations are always mixed. And it follows, of course, that the notion of market purity,
which suggests that market relations reflect innate human urges, is an ideological construction, rather than an
approximation of reality. Explaining the production and utilization of different market scripts-from the new-
economy stories of the last American boom through post-Fordist discourses on the social-democratic Left to the
master narratives of neoliberal globalism, free trade, and free markets (see GibsonGraham 1996; Dicken, Peck,
and Tickell 1997; Kelly 1999; Thrift 2001; Sheppard 2002; Peck 2002a)-therefore has an important part to play
in the wider task of accounting for patterns of economic behavior and processes of economic restructuring. This
task will always be messier and more inconclusive than the clean models of orthodox economics would have us
believe, for it must confront the reality that all economies are hybrid, mongrel structures. This is what Hodgson
(1984) called the "impurity principle," that all economic systems blend and fuse "market" and "nonmarket"
elements, such that this binary distinction-which the NES may have inadvertently helped to sustain-is rendered
defunct. As Polanyi (1957, 250) famously put it:
The human economy ... is embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and noneconomic. The inclusion
of the noneconomic is vital. For religion or government may be as important for the structure and functioning of
the economy as monetary institutions or the availability of tool and machines themselves that lighten the toil of
labor. The study of the shifting place occupied by the economy in society is therefore no other than the study of
the manner in which the economic process is instituted at different times and places.
It makes no sense, in this context, to categorize economic formations in terms of their deviation from the
utilitarian abstraction that is the pure market economy, to construct a single axis running from the liberal to the
coordinated market, to represent networks as synonymous with or parallel to markets, or to base interpretations
of market behavior on the ideological fiction of homo economicus because continua that have been constructed
around these abstract positions rest on mystification. Polanyi's contributions can be criticized on this score, too,
for he also engaged in a discussion of degrees of embeddedness and disembeddedness, pointing to an
apparent historical tendency for market systems to become relatively disembedded from societal structures, in
contrast to the more deeply embedded alternative economies of redistribution and reciprocity. Those who would
otherwise seek to build on Polanyi's insights usually find it necessary to clarify, correct, or contextualize this
flawed historical-theoretical interpretation (see Block and Somers 1984; lie 1991; Swedberg and Granovetter
2001; Block 2003). Barber (1995,400) complained that doing so affords the market "a false kind of analytic as
well as concrete independence," which, in turn, tends to lead to "a further common error: that the market is not
only disembedded and independent but also that it is the part of society that determines all the rest." These
errors are compounded, of course, when the market is equated with American capitalism and when this, in turn,
is represented as the normative ideal against which "transitional," "unfree," "developing," or "sclerotic"
economies are judged. This is, of course, not just a neoclassical but a neoliberal conceit.
In contrast, a social-constructivist conception of the market draws attention to the ways in which markets, even
the celebrated American markets, operate in the context of, and are infused with, particular configurations of

cultural, legal, political, and institutional relations, not the least among which are shared understandings of the
"contractual" nature of market exchanges themselves. The market therefore ceases to be the privileged,
Archimedean point around which alternative, "more social" systems are arrayed; there is no Archimedean point.
It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this point for an economic geography that is even loosely wedded
to the concept of an uneven, variegated, hybrid economy (see Clark 1998). Although it may yet to have been
formalized as such, the spatially variegated economy is one of the fundamental constructions of heterodox,
postautistic, decentered economics. And even if they have yet to state it forcefully in this context, economic
geographers have had a great deal to say about this variegated economy, both theoretically and empirically
(see Massey 1984; Barnes 1996, 2003; Gibson-Graham 1996; Amin and Thrift 2003). The challenge is to make
sense of both the macro and the micro sources of variegation-or, as Massey put it, to hold on to the general as
well as the particular-without falling into the "thousand capitalisms" trap of indiscriminate cultural theorizing (too
messy) or the "two capitalisms" trap of sociological formalism (not messy enough). Theories of uneven capitalist
development and concepts of local institutional specificity should not be seen as irreconcilable alternatives, but
different sides of the same phenomenon-the variegated economy.
This said, the attendant methodological and theoretical challenges are anything but resolved, as some of the
debates around postsocialist economic transformations, for example, have clearly demonstrated. Stark and
Bruszt's (1998) analysis of the "recombination" of capitalisms in Eastern and Central Europe, and their
associated forms of path-dependent restructuring, provides a sharp critique both of "one best way"
neoliberalism and of "one inevitable way" structuralism. They have also connected a variety of institutional and
network forms to a series of relatively "structural" features of this variegated capitalist landscape by way of
comparative analyses of actually existing capitalisms. "As sociologists with a disciplinary disposition to exploit
variance," Stark and Bruszt (2001, 1131) stated, "we see real analytic leverage in taking the diversity of
capitalisms as an object of study and comparing capitalisms vis-à-vis each other." Since many economic
geographers may be said to have a parallel predisposition toward the suggestive exposure of spatial variability
in economic forms and relations, there is clearly scope to build up such comparative sociological approaches
(see Pickles and Smith 1998). Differences will no doubt remain, however, over the bases on which "variegation"
are being established: Burawoy (2001, 1114, 1116) criticized this work for privileging (superstructural)
institutional manifestations of capitalism while failing to delve into questions of diversity at the (base) level of
class relations and forms of production:
Even though capitalism may diverge in its expression from sector to sector, from country to country, from region
to region, these divergences are interconnected-the result of common underlying economic processes. To study
such sui generis economic processes, one must subordinate the study of historical paths and trajectories to
careful in situ analyses of actual social relations. ... It is difficult to talk independent national or regional
capitalisms-as is implied in "comparing capitalisms"-when the global order is so interconnected. We need to
understand how the global, whether through supranational institutions, transnational connections, or
postnational discourses, has mediated effects on what has come to be called the "local."
Burawoy would apparently wish to cut through many of the institutional layers that are so often afforded
explanatory weight by both economic sociologists and economic geographers, seeking to uncover the
generalized capitalist dynamics that lurk beneath the much-vaunted varieties. Although Burawoy's method also
calls attention to global-local articulations, these articulations are viewed from the other end of the telescope
from those that begin with variety. For their part, Stark and Bruszt (2001, 1131) were uncomfortable with what
they characterized as Burawoy's "unitary model of capitalism [and his analytical] standpoint outside capitalism."
At the same time, Burawoy's skepticism calls attention to the risks of a relativist analysis of capitalism, given
that different models or varieties of capitalism clearly exist within the context of both deep transnational
connections and combined and uneven development. Declarations of hybridity, after all, presuppose
interconnection and family resemblance, as well as local variation, the explication and theorization of which may

be viewed as a particularly economicgeographic task (Peck 2004). As Burawoy (2001, 1118) rhetorically asked,
"how many advanced capitalisms can there be in the world?"
Making sense of the uneven terrains of capitalism means taking "embeddedness" seriously in a
macrosociological sense. Social constructivists insist that economic relations must not be reduced to market
relations, that the two are not coterminous. Even the most "marketized" transactional environments fuse what
may be conventionally understood as market and nonmarket elements, just as they often imply extensive-not to
say deepening-roles for the state. The projects of state building and market building are continuous ones, and
they are deeply interpenetrated (Block 1994, 2003; O'Neill 1997; Fligstein 2001). Especially vivid contemporary
illustrations of this situation can be found in the extensive market-building projects that are under way in Eastern
Europe, the former Soviet Union, China, and the European Union (see Fligstein and Mara-Drita 1996; Grabber
and Stark 1997; Gerber and Hout 1998; Fligstein and Sweet 2002), while neoliberalism can also be understood
as fundamentally a state project (Birchfield 1999; Lamer 2000; Tickell and Peck 2003). Yet, of course, this
situation is anything but new. After all, the vision of the free market itself began life as a Utopian construct, as
Polanyi powerfully argued; its transformation into a prevailing ideology and an associated set of institutional
technologies involved decades of concerted political action. In this sense, as Polanyi (1944, 140-41) ironically
observed, "The road to a free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous,
centrally organized and controlled interventionism.... While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate
state action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way." Moreover, this road is still
being traveled, in that the process of installing and maintaining markets is a continuous one, beset by failures of
governance and unforeseen perturbations, rather than one that is focused on a predetermined and realistically
attainable destination. Even the fabled economic theorists of the nineteenth century, of course, lacked a fully
formed and coherent
vision of the market system that was gradually coming into being. ... It was not for them the explicit, full-blown
"utopia" that Polanyi called it. ... Since the socio-historical process created what we now know as the market
system in a bits-and-pieces, incremental, unintended way, the theorists and ideologists who were among the
significant actors in that process likewise created only theoretical bits-and-pieces of what gradually coalesced
into a highly structured intellectual creation that still has its scientific and ideological functions. . . . Structural
changes in society and vast new ideological tides were in favor of the economists, of course, but the history of
the times shows how slow and hard social and scientific changes are. (Barber 1995, 394-5)
The rule book for liberal capitalism was not completed in the nineteenth century. In fact, the principal
contemporary manifestation of this project-that of neoliberal globalism-could be described in almost precisely
the same way: it has its recent origins in a disparate set of "bits-and-pieces" influences, including the
ascendancy of Chicago School economics, the rise to power of conviction politicians like Reagan and Thatcher,
the various experiments with "shock therapy" in Chile and elsewhere, the reconstruction of cold war geopolitics,
the imposition of structural adjustment programming, the "transition" projects in Central and Eastern Europe, the
ideological realignment of the various multilateral institutions, and the increased reach of think-tank networks
(see Larner 2000; Dezalay and Garth 2002; Sheppard 2002; Tickell and Peck 2003). The point is that neoliberal
ideology was not simply "out there," waiting to be invoked, but instead had to be constructed, and its rise to
contemporary dominance was not preordained, but has involved incrementalism, trial-and-error
experimentation, and encounters with a series of fortuitous or path-altering conjunctures. It is a measure of the
relative success of this concerted ideological and institutional project, of course, that neoliberalism has the
appearance of a monolithic, omnipresent, and inevitable "force of nature." Under the surface, neoliberalism is a
more fragile creation than these appearances suggest: its politicaleconomic narrative has been stitched
together from a series of partially overlapping fragments, and there has been a need for several midcourse
adjustments. In fact, the project of neoliberalism seems increasingly to be preoccupied by, if not mired in, the
management of its "own" contradictions, since institutional flanking mechanisms are repeatedly invoked as a

means of supplementing and sustaining flawed programs of marketization and "deregulation" (see Nairn 2000;
Peck and Tickell 2002).
Polanyi (1944, 139, 140-41) may have been describing contemporary processes of neoliberalization when he
commented on the discordance between free-market rhetoric and proactive statecraft in nineteenth-century
England:
There was nothing natural about laissezfaire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing
things to take their course.... To the typical utilitarian, economic liberalism was a social project which should be
put into effect for the greatest happiness of the greatest number; laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a
thing, it was the thing to be achieved. ... Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free
working of the system. Thus even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties,
and those whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the self-
same state with the new powers, organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissezfaire.
If the ideological project of neoliberal globalism rests on a (powerful yet misleading) vision of a flat-earth
economy, comprised of free-trading, flexible agents, then a critical economic-geographic counterproject would
seek strategically to survey the uneven landscape, to expose the cracks and fissures-what Block (2000) called
"welds"-in this supposedly unitary system. It would draw attention to the ways in which uneven spatial and
social development disrupt this universalist narrative; it would map out the command centers and constitutive
networks of the project; and it would explore its vulnerable flanks, its fissures of stress and contradiction, its
sites of localized failure and frontiers of active extension, and the alternative economic geographies that are
being made both in its wake and in its stead. Indeed, there are signs that some movement in this direction is
occurring (see Mitchell 1995, 2001; O'Neill 1997; Kodras 2001; Olds 2001a; Sheppard 2002; Brenner and
Theodore 2002), although progress has been fitful so far. This is one of the many areas in which economic
geography may make common cause with the socialconstructivist wing of economic sociology (and related
areas of economic anthropology), a common cause that need not be established in the relatively shallow terms
of overlapping substantive interests, but, more fundamentally, may also reflect an emergent sense of mutual
theoretical conviction around the concept of the variegated economy and around the historical geographies of
market making.
Variegated Economies, Variegated Economics
This mutual conviction is emergent in the sense that the connections between the respective strands of
economic sociology and economic geography-neither of which, of course, are unitary projects-are only tentative
at present. On the positive side, however, they are suggestive of potentially creative cross-disciplinary synergies
in theory development and, perhaps, even in concrete research programs. And while socialconstructivist
economic sociology may not be listening to economic geography at the moment, the potential for an
engagement certainly exists. Moreover, there are things that economic geographers and economic sociologists
might be usefully saying to one another, not the least of which concern the theoretical fundamentals around
which there is some basis for broad agreement. In principle, this conversation might begin around any of a
number of shared concerns, challenges, and causes, some of which are well established and others of which
may only now be coming into focus. Among the many potential points of engagement, the following are
intended to be suggestive and illustrative, rather than prescriptive.
First, there is a quite widely shared skepticism in the two subfields about the theoretical worldview of orthodox
economics, which, in practical terms, may be considered to locate both in the broad field of heterodox economic
studies. In this context, one need not be a card-carrying member of the postautistic economics movement to
agree with key elements of its alternative program for the progressive opening up of economic analysis,
involving inter alia a commitment (both theoretical and political) to engage with economies and economic
problems in all their concrete and "real-world" complexity, the privileging of social-scientific rigor over scientism,
an embrace of analytical pluralism, and an appropriate degree of humility in confronting intractable challenges

of economic theory and practice, the restoration of historical-institutional analysis-together, it should be added,
with economicgeographic analysis-as cornerstones of a more heterodox economics, and an enhanced
commitment to social responsibility and social justice (see Fullbrook 2003). Clearly, this stance must amount to
more than oppositionalism because a position on economic theory that is staked out primarily in terms of a
reaction to, or an inversion of, neoclassical economics is likely to be distorted and partial. As the experience of
network sociology shows, the result can be that the endeavor remains in the shadows of orthodox economics,
skirting the problem of market essentialism, instead of developing an independent dynamic as a positive
program. Establishing a deeper engagement with social-constructivist economic sociology, on the other hand,
would seem to work with the grain of a great deal of contemporary practice in economic geography and might
enable the subdiscipline to reclaim something approaching a collective research agenda-social-constructivist
economic geography?-and perhaps even a shared theoretical object-the spatially variegated economy? If
economies are embedded in qualitatively different ways not only "always" but "everywhere," then there is a
massively challenging task at hand for economic geography, that of mapping the hybrid formations of real
economies in movement. At present, it is probably fair to say that such arguments are not being forcefully
articulated in the postdisciplinary field of heterodox economics.
second, economic geography and socialconstructivist economic sociology share a concern with problematizing
"context" and conjuncture in a more far-reaching fashion than in neoclassical economics or, for that matter, in
network sociology. In positive terms, this concern reflects a mutual interest in various forms of "integral"
economic analysis, in which markets, in particular, and economies, in general, are confronted as institutional
phenomena, as political constructions, as historically and geographically specific formations, and so forth (see
Sunley 1996; Clark 1998; Peck 2000; Walker 2001; Jessop 2002). In arguing for a more vigorously institutional
treatment of "context," for example, Gertler (2002, 95) made the case for an explanation of "distinctive and
uneven, though systematic, economic geography of context." It is a more than merely semantic point that
context must be pulled out of the shadows and theorized more explicitly because the backgrounding of context
simultaneously implies the backgrounding of issues that are related to the spatial constitution of economies. So
making a strong case for context is not just an empirical position; it is a theoretical and methodological stance.
One of the striking features of the various ways in which network sociologists and institutional economists have
sought to unfreeze the noneconomic parameters of the economy, to highlight the social and institutional
embeddedness of "market" processes, is that they have done so, for the most part, without theorizing the
simultaneously spatial constitution of these phenomena.13 The typically undertheorized ways in which labels
like "regional," "local," and "national" are casually applied to phenomena, such as industrial districts, modes of
regulation, learning systems, governance regimes, systems of innovation, varieties of capitalism, and so forth,
has prompted criticism from geographers. Yet, realistically speaking, there is still much to do to convert this
skepticism into a positive theoretical research program and to convince economic sociologists and heterodox
economists that these concerns are substantive, rather than secondary or, worse still, merely semantic
distinctions or articles of (geographic) faith. In some respects, this represents both the most significant
challenge, and the greatest opportunity, for economic geographers to make a mark in heterodox economics.
Fundamentally, it is the challenge of explaining economic variety, including where it comes from and why it
matters, rather than taking this as a pregiven and unquestioned point of departure. Macroeconomic sociologists
are largely convinced that history matters in this respect; they have barely engaged with the question of how
geography may matter (although see Arrighi 1994). Demonstrating how geographic context matters, of course,
involves dispensing with the notion that the effects of, say, gender regimes, production cultures, or governance
systems are merely "contextual" in the first place. Instead, their constitutive effects must be demonstrated, not
merely asserted or assumed.
Third, a parallel set of arguments can be constructed about (the social construction of) scale, which has been a
significant focus of theoretical endeavor in economic geography in recent years and has enabled geographers

to speak in distinctive ways in debates on globalization (see Swyngedouw 2000; Brenner 2001), but has barely
penetrated the wider discussion surrounding the social construction of economic processes. There is a telling
resonance between geographic critiques of conventional globalization narratives-which take issue with the
frequent invocation of an ostensibly "out there" zone of unregulated, universal, and unmediated market forces-
and sociological critiques of orthodox economic narratives-which take issue with the idea of an ostensibly
separate sphere of undifferentiated and purely rational action. As the critiques have revealed, both these
orthodox constructions recycle the myth of a disembedded, placeless economy (Peck 2002b). These orthodox
tropes have even found their way into robustly heterodox analyses. Jessop (2002, 212), for example, stated that
"we are witnessing a new round of disembedding associated with globalisation-a complex, multi-scalar, multi-
faceted process which is reinforcing the abstract-formal moment of exchange value ... at the expense of the
substantive-material moment of use value," although he went on to observe that these apparently free-floating
processes of disembedding also seem, paradoxically, to have been constructed on particular spatiotemporal
foundations. If, as Barber (1995) and others have insisted, all economies are embedded, then the global
economy is no exception, but there is much work yet to be done convincingly to pull apart the orthodox
binarisms of global/abstract/ disembedded market versus local/ concrete/embedded market, on which so much
contemporary commentary rests (Escobar 2001). Strategically useful in this respect is work that sets out to
uncover the local and sociospatial constitution of ostensibly "global" processes (see, e.g., Olds 2001b;
Sheppard 2002) or that problematizes explicitly transnational and extralocal forms of economic embedding and
institutionalization (see, e.g., Wright 1999; Mitchell 2001). There is also important work to be done in
denaturalizing received terms like national economy or local production system (see Radice 1984; Mitchell
1998; Jessop 1999), to reveal the constructed (and repeatedly reconstructed) nature of such categories.
Fourth, in terms of the substantive content of work that may facilitate a widened interdisciplinary dialogue, much
more may be done to explore the historical geographies of market making and state building, at a variety of
scales and in a variety of (comparative) spatial contexts and to examine the social (re)construction of economic
institutions more generally. Geographic work in this vein could usefully contribute to the wider project of
denaturalizing economic phenomena, at the same time as deepening the theoretical and empirical content of
often-casual economic-sociological claims about the role of "context" in economic behavior. Economic
sociologists have produced many of the seminal contributions on market making (see Smith 1989; Block 1990;
Evans 1995; Abolafia 1996; Fligstein 2001), although issues that are related to the spatial and scalar
constitution of these market-building projects play no more than trivial roles in these accounts, most of which
are aspatial or implicitly nationcentric. Here, geographic phenomena are reduced, for the most part, to data
units or case-study sites, rather than being considered loci for theorizing (although see Somers 2001),
suggesting that there is creative conceptual and concrete work still to be done at this interface. But the silences
are not only on the side of economic sociology: strangely, markets-even socially constructed oneshave not
received a significant amount of attention in contemporary economic geography (see Sheppard 2000). If this
silence means that the big questions about markets and their theorization are being handled elsewhere, then it
is troubling. If the market is largely ignored, if it is an absentee concept in economic geography, then its
orthodox reproduction is being sanctioned through nonengagement.
Fifth and finally, an enlivened conversation on the socially constructed, variegated economy need not (and
should not) be a solely intellectual exercise, but must be articulated in such a way as to open up political as well
as theoretical possibilities. As Block (2000) insisted, the task of deconstructing the edifice of neoliberal
globalism is at the same time one of envisioning its progressive and continuous reconstruction. Such a stance
may be compatible with many kinds of political programs, from the reformist to the radical, although Block's
approach is especially suggestive, since it conjoins the processes of theoretical and political reconstruction:
[S]ocial democracy and the more left visions of New Deal liberalism were based on the premise that capitalism
was a natural system whose logic could be controlled by the countervailing pressures of a strong state. It is as

though capitalism was like a river system expected to flood every spring, so that reformers set out to build a
complex system of levees and canals to prevent the floodwaters from doing damage. . .. The deconstructive
politics I am envisioning is not antistate: it continues to rely on the state's strength in a variety of ways [for
example] to place controls on international capital mobility and to enforce progressive taxation. . . .
Nevertheless, deconstructive politics is able to imagine far more decentralized mechanisms for providing social
services, building infrastructure, assuring adequate employment creation, and so on, because it is no longer
necessary to build up the central state as the only countervailing power to a capitalism that operates with the
force of nature. [Wjhile social democratic reform strategies have seen the state as a necessary counterforce to
the power of capitalism as a natural system, the deconstructive politics makes greater use of a "jujitsu" strategy
in which the opponent's own weight and strength become sources of weakness. (Block 2000, 96-97)
One need not agree with the particularities of such political programs to acknowledge the creative possibilities
that could be opened up by likewise denaturalixing neoliberal globalism and free-market fundamentalism.
Challenging economic orthodoxies is an important component of this wider task, not the least because it
represents one of the constitutive elements of contemporary economic hegemony. And short of merely
continuing to anticipate the long-delayed terminal crisis, it can assist in transformative and liberatory thinking
when it is connected to purposive attempts to think outside the neoliberal box. "Since capitalism is not a
coherent social system with a logic of its own," Block (2000, 97)
emphasized, "but rather, a contradictory set of practices given artificial unity and coherence by market
ideologies, it is impossible to know in advance when we will have left the terrain of capitalism behind." This,
then, may be a (relatively concrete) place to start. And while the seeds of such a purposefully deconstructive
project have been planted in economic geography, their potential has yet to be fully realized (Larner and Le
Heron 2002). Economic geography, in this respect, needs (shared) purpose as well as pluralism. As Barnes
(2002, 11) argued, the task for a critical economic geography must extend beyond the "explanatory-diagnostic"
to embrace the "anticipatory-utopian." The approach advocated here is compatible with such a vision but, at the
same time, somewhat distinctive-it may be characterized as explanatory-transformative.
Conclusion: Talking Dirty
There is no single or conclusive answer to the question of whom economic geography should "play out with,"
and perhaps it does not matter, in this increasingly pluralistic and decentered subdiscipline, that economic
geographers are playing out all over the place. It will certainly matter, however, if economic geography becomes
splintered, if the collective whole becomes less than the sum of the atomized parts, if there is a slide into
relativism. In retrospect, some of the subdiscipline's most creative moments in recent years have occurred
when a degree of collective momentum was generated around a shared project-think, for example, of the early
1980s work on industrial restructuring (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Massey and Meegan 1982; Scott and
Storper 1986), or the early 1990s contributions on post-Fordism (Storper and Scott 1992; Amin 1994). Neither
of these episodes was exclusively anchored in economic geography, but instead drew upon, as well as
contributed to, the energy of what were interdisciplinary endeavors. During the past two decades, these
endeavors have had relatively little to do with orthodox economics and much more do to with the unruly and
varied band of small-"e" economists who variously describe themselves as industrial sociologists, political
economists, regulation theorists, evolutionary economists, or economic sociologists.
Sociology has clearly not been the only influence here, and it may not even have been the primary influence,
but the engagements with sociology have certainly been productive. So, in the mid-1980s there was what might
be styled a Lancastrian moment, focused largely on British sociology, an encounter that, among other things,
was associated with the localities debate, the "gendering" of economic geography, and a series of advances in
thinking about the relationship between "social relations and spatial structures" (see Gregory and Urry 1985;
Cooke 1989; Bagguley et al. 1990). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, attention moved to Italian and French
sociology, as the debates about flexible specialization and industrial districts moved to center stagetrie neo-

Marshallian moment (see Pyke, Becattini, and Sengenberger 1990; Storper and Scott 1992; Barbera 2002;
Whitford 2001). And, the subsequent period, what may be characterized as economic geography's
Granovetterian moment, focused on American sociology, has been associated with an outpouring of work on
embeddedness, institutions, and networks (see Grabher 1993; Amin and Thrift 1994; Lee and Wills 1997;
Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001). All these moments of engagement, in other words, have left important
traces, and they have been associated with variegated bodies of work in economic geography that have been
creative, not derivative. But economic geography's success in "talking back" to sociology, in its various guises,
has been more variable. Although the engagements of the 1980s and early 1990s were genuine dialogues in
many respects, the relationship with network sociology has been more distant and more asymmetrical. Maybe
economic geographers have had less of substance to contribute to the project of network sociology, but it must
also be recognized that this project has itself been much more absorbed, first, with its largely unrequited
relationship with economics, and second, with internal questions of academic institution building. More
fundamentally, the controlled and limited fashion in which network sociology sought to "bring in the social-
contextual" has seriously narrowed the terrain upon which geographic contributions might have been made.
Economic geography, too, is located at the blurred edges of the network optic.
But just like economic geography, economic sociology is far from a monological endeavor. While network
sociology constitutes the contested core of the latter, the nascent forms of network geography have not (yet?)
cohered into a consolidated theoretical project. In some respects, the Granovetterian moment may be already
giving way to a Latourian moment, as garden-variety network analysis is displaced by actor-network theory and
as ANT colonies proliferate in the subdiscipline. While many of these lines of inquiry have been fruitful, there is
a growing recognition of the need to refocus beyond the network optics, even while building on some of these
insights (Henderson et al. 2001; Sayer 2002; Smith et al. 2003). It has been suggested here that one way to do
so-to move beyond the study of embedded, networklike relations in markets-is to engage more seriously with
theoretical and substantive issues around the social construction of markets and of economies more generally.
We should be wary of academic divisions of labor that place markets beyond reach. Heterodox economies'
recognition of the "impurity principle" (Hodgson 1984), on the other hand, opens up significant terrains of
potential engagement for economic geography. Mongrel economies are also (necessarily?) spatially variegated
economies. If market relations really are embeddeded, in a more than trivial sense, then explorations of
instituted, unevenly developed, and hybrid economic phenomena-what may be termed the "thick geographies"
of spatially constituted economic formations, conjunctures, and landscapes-have both an analytical and a
political role to play. Here, common cause may be made with those heterodox economic sociologists who have
been seeking to "thicken" and retheorize Polanyian concepts like embeddedness from a range of theoretical
perspectives (see Burawoy 2003; Silver and Arrighi 2003; Krippner et al. 2004). This means doing more than
picking up the crumbs from the table of orthodox economics, but using the ingredients of heterodox economic
studies in a radically different way. As lie (1991, 227, 230) stated:
What have been regarded as "frictional" variables in the neoclassical framework-social relations and groups,
norms and rules, alliances and conflicts, power and control-all become the objects of analysis [in economic
sociology]. ... By taking the embeddedness thesis seriously, we can penetrate the ideological veil of the market
to reveal the distinct social organizations of commodity exchange. Why should we conflate the exchange
between individuals in weekend flea markets with the transaction between transnational corporations and
analyze them under a single conceptual rubric? Rather than assuming the invisible hand, we should investigate
the concrete social relations of those who buy and sell: the visible hand of the market.
A number of poststructuralist contributions to economic geography have begun to pose these kinds of questions
in their own ways (see Barnes 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996; Pickles and Smith 1998; Amin and Thrift 2003), but
there is scope to broaden this effort. Political economy-not the clunky stereotype that often circulates in the
literature, but dynamic, heterodox political economy-should be seen as an ally in this endeavor, not as the

enemy. If there is a foe out there, it surely takes a different formin the fateful nexus of neoclassical economics
and neoliberal politics. If economic geography is to play a part in challenging these entrenched orthodoxies,
then it will need to find and make common causes, even as it remains a pluralist project. As a gesture in this
direction, it has been argued here that there is much to still to be learned-both negatively and positively-from
economic sociology. An enriched appreciation of the busy frontiers and dead ends of the NES can be useful not
just for its own sake, but as a way for economic geography to get a better sense of itself and of some of its
possible futures. Crucially, it should involve making a careful assessment of the ideas, frameworks,
constructions, and sensibilities that may be usefully "imported" into the subdiscipline of economic geography,
but it must also involve more than this. It must involve finding the most suitable terrain across which to have
constructive and critical dialogues. It must involve developing our own traveling concepts, framed in the context
of a range o/transdisciplinary theoretical projects and shared problematics. As economic geography continues
to search for a voice in the interdisciplinary conversation, it could do worse than to focus on some of the ways
that we may talk back to different parts of economic sociology and heterodox economics. Perhaps these would-
be fellow travelers are not listening all that much at the moment, but at least they have ears.
In contrast, economic geography's stilted conversation with economics seems destined to remain a "dialogue of
the deaf (Agnew 2002, 585). Even the most constructive attempts to initiate this conversation, like the Journal of
Economic Geography, seem only to be confirming this underlying irreconcilability. The editors of this journal
recently concluded, rather soberly, that the message from the pattern of manuscript submissions was that "[t]he
gulf between the two groups remains wide," since the contributions from geographic economists "tend to reflect
the worldview of neoclassical economics"; meanwhile those from economic geographers "are more eclectic in
approach, more willing to entertain alternative conceptualizations that provide new insight, but less willing to
sacrifice empirical realism for abstract universalism" (Arnott and Wrigley 2003, 2). At the very least, this means
that the disciplines are talking past one another; more pessimistically, it may mean that there is little prospect of
a meaningful relationship. Serial failures of communication between orthodox economics and economic
geography reflect fundamental differences of methodology and theoretical practice, that may border on flat-out
incompatibility. Economics, for its part, seeks to make a virtue of its conservatism and exclusivity, its central
institutions being dedicated to the preservation of a well-insulated intellectual monoculture (see Mirowski 1990,
2002). In a sense, the study of economics has become disembedded from the rest of the social sciences in a
way that echoes the orthodox conception of the disembedded market (lie 1991; Peck 2002b). Apparently mired
in context, with dirt on their hands, it is no wonder that economic geographers are not being heard in economics
departments. They are not even speaking the same language.
For his part, Agnew (2002, 584) anticipated that a union with the dismal science would be an "unhappy
marriage." It would also be a profoundly asymmetrical relationship, in which one partner did most of the talking
and not much listening. Perhaps it is time to recognize that there are limited prospects here, and that this is not
simply a matter of superficial appearances but of underlying character. Earning the respect, even the attention,
of orthodox economics would not only involve learning to speak its language; much more seriously, it would
mean surrendering the nearest thing there is to a basic, economic-geographic "fact"the recognition of an
institutionally cluttered and spatially variegated economic landscape. Other than in a fractional sense, this is not
part of the orthodox worldview, which amounts to a flat-earth theory of a unified market economy. The
fundamentally ageographic conceit of orthodox economics, as Marshall Sahlins (1972, 127) once put it, is to
"detach the principle of individual maximization from its bourgeois context and spread it around the world."
Certainly, there will be a high price to pay if the only way to engage with orthodox economics is on its own
terms, since it would imply jettisoning much of what the critical and diachronic social sciences stand for.
Moreover, the argument that space and place are associated with constitutive consequences for the functioning
of economies flatly contradicts the economists' anticontextualist reductionism to abstract "location" and its
predisposition toward universalism. It represents a denial of the variegated economic landscape across which

economic geographers ply their trade.
Beyond measuring the distance between economically significant points on the map and weighing the terms of
trade, then, there may be few tasks for economic geographers on the featureless plain invoked by orthodox
economics. Laboring in this inhospitable environment consigns economic geographers-along with economic
historians, economic anthropologists, and economic sociologists-to an intellectually deskilled role, prisoners in
what Polanyi (1977, xl) characterized as the "rubber cell of self-defeating notions." Although this regimen may
be attractive to some, the currently constituted practices of economic geography seem more attuned with the
more prosaic process of grappling with economic "realities." An economic-sociological sensibility seems to be
fundamentally more compatible with these practices, one that permits the (theoretically informed and informing)
comparison of "the economic institutions of different periods and regions without running the danger of foisting
upon the bare facts the market shape of things" (Polanyi 1977, xl). It has been suggested here that economic
geographers have much to gain from initiating conversations with those in fields, like macroeconomic sociology,
that have unambiguously rejected market essentialism, in all its guises. Yet, in as far as the comparative
dynamics of institutionally situated economies represents a serious concern in contemporary economic
geography, it is probably fair to say that the attendant theoretical commitments have been embraced only in an
ambiguous and partial manner. Maybe the time has come to commit?
Sidebar
With all the usual disclaimers, this article benefited from discussions at the "Economic Geography Meets
Economic Sociology" sessions at the Philadelphia meeting of the Association of American Geographers and
with John Alien, Ash Amin, David Angel, Trevor Barnes, Fred Block, Neil Brenner, Gernot Grabher, Martin
Hess, Ray Hudson, Bob Jessop, Greta Krippner, Wendy Lamer, Roger Lee, Andy Leyshon, Linda McDowell,
Phil O'Neill, César Rodríguez, Mike Savage, Andrew Sayer, Gay Seidman, Nik Theodore, Eric Sheppard, Adam
Tickell, Matt Vidal, Josh Whitford, Erik Olin Wright, Neil Wrigley, and Henry Yeung. I am also grateful to Brenda
Parker for her assistance.
Footnote
1 Among a vast number of contributions over the past decade, see especially Amin and Thrift (1992,1995),
Dicken and Thrift (1992), Grabher (1993), Saxenian (1994), Harrison (1997), Leyshon and Thrift (1997),
McDowell (1997), Schoenberger (1997), Storper (1997), Cooke and Morgan (1998), and Gertler and Wolfe
(2002).
2 The Handbook contained chapters written by leading contributors to these latter fields-Geoffrey Hodgson,
Richard Nelson, and Oliver Williamson.
3 Swedberg (2004, 3) observed that the disdain for Marxian insights within the NES reflects the fact that "the
days of radical sociology [are] over."
4 Not without significance in this regard have been the parallel attempts to institutionalize the project of
economic sociology, particularly in the United States, through initiatives like the establishment of an Economic
Sociology section of the American Sociological Association in 2000 and the activities of explicitly heterodox
organizations like the Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics, which was formed in 1989. U.S. News
and World Report's ranking of graduate programs now includes an economic sociology section.
5 Polanyi, in fact, was skeptical of both economic and institutional essentialism, his argument being that "since
actually existing market economies are dependent upon the state to manage the supply and demand for the
fictitious commodities [of land, labor, and money], there can be no analytically autonomous economy" (Block
2003, 8).
6 Dierdre McCloskey (n.d., 3), for one, has pleaded with economic sociology not to take this course, which she
regards as a scientific cul-de-sac in which formalistic rigor is substituted for social-scientific significance: "A
scientist must of course think and watch, theorize and observe. Real and progressive sciences, like social
history and geomorphology, do both. But the trouble with blackboard proof and statistical significance is that

though they look like thinking and watching, they are actually not. ... I regret to say that blackboard theorizing
without empirical purchase and statistical significance without practical significance constitutes a cargo cult in
modern economics. . . . Please, please, let's get back to the sort of real science that social historians and
particle physicists do, where we deal as scientists do with the one thing needful in science, oomph. And shun
the cargo cult, oh ye econowannabes."
7 Granovetter (quoted in Swedberg 1990,104), for his part, stated, "It would be to go too far to replace the
market with network analysis . .. one should rather try to combine them."
8 "I am all for parsimony," Granovetter (quoted in Swedberg 1990,106) explained, and while this statement
need not imply an embrace of rationalchoice reductionism, it does reflect an underlying predilection for relatively
sparse, austere, and quasi-formal methods.
9 Significant and suggestive exceptions, which have treated "context" in a more than merely contextual manner,
have included Christopherson (2002) and Gertler (2002, 2004). The varietiesof-capitalism approach has also
been invoked in studies of the geographies of business systems (see Dicken 1998; Yeung 200Ob; Dicken,
Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001).
10 This orientation is echoed in economic geography itself. Dick Walker (2001, 171) remarked that "the New
Regionalists have been preoccupied with industrial clusters, network analysis, and local institutions of
governance . . . while skirting the larger questions raised by classical political economy . . . about classes,
distribution, political conflict, and state action."
11 These contemporary analyses of a neoliberalizing international economy echo Polanyi's work on the
responses of different (national) market societies to the pressure of the Gold Standard regime (see Block 2003;
Burawoy 2003).
12 From this perspective, the effectiveness of the German training system, for example, is not derived simply
from an "internal" institutional functionality, but from the larger context in which this system is embedded-
industry-level pay bargaining limits wage competition among firms, the financial regime delivers patient capital
and supports long-term planning horizons, industrial relations conventions provide for the negotiation of
agreements around skills and training, and so forth.
13 And when spatial variegation is recognized, it is often reduced to noise, to stylized, binary categories, or
worse still, to frictional imperfection. In DiMaggio and Powell's (1983, 148) analysis of institutional isomorphism,
for example, the concern is with the destruction of variety, with the "inexorable push towards homogenization."
Economic geography needs to confront these (formidable) arguments, not assume that unevenness and
variegation are self-evidently fundamental features of economic life. We must convince others of this point, not
just ourselves.
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AuthorAffiliation
Jamie Peck
Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706
japeck@wisc.edu
Subject: Geography; Sociology; Economic theory; Capitalism;
Publication title: Economic Geography
Volume: 81
Issue: 2
Pages: 129-175
Number of pages: 47
Publication year: 2005
Publication date: Apr 2005
Year: 2005
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Place of publication: Oxford
Country of publication: United Kingdom
Publication subject: Geography, Business And Economics
ISSN: 00130095
CODEN: ECGEAY
Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English
Document type: Commentary
Document feature: References
ProQuest document ID: 235572365
Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/235572365?accountid=25704
Copyright: Copyright Economic Geography Apr 2005
Last updated: 2011-10-05
Database: Arts & Humanities Full Text,ProQuest Entrepreneurship,ProQuest Social Science Journals
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