Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness

Abstract

It is sometimes further argued that the traditional situation is reversed: instead of economic life being submerged in social relations, these relations become an epi phenomenon of the market. The embeddedness position is associated with the “substantivist” school in anthropology, identified especially with Karl Polanyi (1944; Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957) and with the idea of “moral economy” in history and political science (Thompson 1971; Scott 1976). It has also some obvious relation to Marxist thought.