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Certain sociologists have been increasingly recalcitrant about this Parsonian
appeasement of the economic theory from mid-1980s onwards. The terms of their
contumacy was particularly succinct in Mark Granovetter(1985)’s prolusion for a
‘New Economic Sociology’ in the American Journal of Sociology. He explicitly
argued that market structures as such should not be outside the analytical/theoretical
scope of sociology. This economic sociology would then resort to Polanyi and his
heuristic concepts for the study of the social structure of economic relations, and
would touch upon the social embeddedness of economic routines. However though
the concept of embeddedness in Polanyi had circumscribed an organicist
understanding of the historical ‘configurations’ of the economy and society, it, under
Granovetter’s New Economic Sociology, strayed from this tentative weak
relationalism and polemicised the methodological individualism of mainstream
economic mindset more forwardly. Granovetter further excogitated the concept of
social economy. This concept(economy as socially constructed) is about the always
already (‘scaled down’-)institutedness of the economy, the social patterns and
procedures through which prolusory efforts towards the design of economic
institutions are always frontally afoot(albeit certain ‘lock in’ effects which are
themselves instutional) and the collectivisation of these very economic institutions
with the passage of time. For economic sociologists, network forms are often proto-
institutions in that many would indeed linger on as more socially trenchant
‘configurations’ as in Polanyi’s explanatory model.
Contrary to the market essentialism of standard theory, ‘sociologists trace behavior to
institutions, or conventions that constrain what we can do and what we can imagine
doing; networks, or social groups and their roles in creating identities as well as
behavioral norms and contraints; power, or the use of position and coercion to
determine how people can behave and how they see their own interests; and cognition,
or how people’s perception of the world shape their behavior in it’(Peck 2005).
Despite the fact that network analysts have not yet agreed on the exact terms in which
these four elements (institutions, networks, power, cognition) would at least
descriptively circumscribe a veritable paradigm of network sociology, the hitherto
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