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tangential to mainstream economics(e.g. householding) in terms of standard or
slightly adulterated forms of economic theory, myriad models of explorotary study on
the milieux of economic routines(i.e. their embeddedness in interpersonal networks,
organisational structures, or motleyed markets), and eclectic amalgam of explanatory
models for economic phenomena and structures which are nevertheless
methodologically froward against neoclassical paradigm(Zelizer 2002). Alas all this
mid-level understandings of market structure, stylised injunctions on institutional
effects, much ado about ‘high level of contingency’ in the design of economic
institutions(Granovetter 1990:107), despite its heavily Polanyian infrastructure,
merely afford a theory of ‘socialization lite’ mostly because economic sociology’s
concept of economy as a modality of network-esque relations a la Granovetter is
infinitely ‘thin’ without a concomitant and thorough analysis of otherwise structural
circumstances/causalities(Peck 2005).
Furthermore, the network paradigm still tendencially expatiates on the market as
quizzically a presocial outremer around(or as external to) other more
institutionalised/embedded/social segments of the economy. This is particularly so for
those network sociologies, Williamsonian economics, and certain theories of
governance that analyse social economy in terms of its manifold ‘degrees of
marketness’; or for those heuristics which consider networks as a third form of
economic organisational design next to market and hierarchy. This is an ineluctable
contradiction of the sociology of markets-as-networks that would cussedly argue for
more-or-less socialised economic forms alongside the price mechanism. Meanwhile
the proviso that economy(/market) is intrinsically a social structure stagnates into an
empirical comeuppance. Once more the market taboo withstands a thorough
contumely and this time it even patrols the heights of sociological thinking. On the
other hand, it is not exactly an arcanum that conceptual category of network is itself
often a very marketised shorthand for market; economic sociologists in fact liberally
equivocate about the nuances between networks and markets as abstractions.
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