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network-centric thinking have nonetheless anticipated a certain method of analysis in
which
social institutions-customs and conventions-provide models for economic
behavior and carry ideas of causality. In each case, new economic
conventions spread through networks, and networks serve as bases of power
for transforming institutions. In each case, power is shaped by network
position, and power is used to influence the new economic institutions that
emerge. And in each case, institutions, network position, and power shape the
cognitive orientations of individuals and thereby influence how they will act
back on the economic world they encounter(Dobbin 2001:5)
In these terms, network-centric analyses in all their tentativeness are a form of
microeconomic sociology. However beneath this ostensibly radical excursus in the
form of a study of social networking and institutional forms of economic causality,
new economic sociology contrasts not only with neoclassical mainstream through its
reformist prospicience qua methodological relationalism but also with political
economy and most of macroeconomic sociology through its analytical qui vive about
more horizontal as opposed to vertical social relations. Granovetter’s more general
argument for networks-and-social embeddedness is concordant with this sociology of
the horizontal/nonhierarchical relations since the former is basically a disclaimer for
those thoroughly and excessively socialised explanans about socioeconomic verities
as well as poorly socialised explanans. Since both concomitantly abet a mechanistic
understanding of otherwise social prevarications, the ongoingness of social relations
and immediate milieux(and even the staccato circumstances) of social phenomena
bounce off from the reseau of this flat analytical thinking(Granovetter 1985:485).
Contrarily economic sociology would consider the more intermediating and/or the
social embedding mechanisms in all their processually contingent facets and more
close-at-hand causalities as its theoretical niche. Big structures(capitalism, partriarchy
etc.) or broad historical/macrostructural circumstances together with large-scale
political and economic changes(the longue durée in Annales School) are, needless to
say, outside this pre-designated scope(Arrighi 2001:108). Thus this microsociology,
more substantialy, caters towards a further analysis of those quodlibets hitherto
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