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Network sociology therefore is very close to a network economics. Market-centrism
of Granovetterian sociology, despite its social constructivist foundation and
indebtedness to Polanyi, bizarrely lingers on because of a certain theoretical default.
Since Parsonian sociology not only planned for a disciplinary captivity of sociology
but for a lingering theoretical captivity of sociological research as well, the said
default is foremostly a Parsonian default. More plainly, even though Parsons argued
that any phenomenon is not strictly economic or social in concrete terms, he
particularly disagreed with the understanding of social science as an empiricist effort
that can be unequivocally and wholly explanatory of a certain sector of real
phenomena. For Parsons, the latter is instrinsically a disorderly amalgam of concrete
forms, and as such sectoral analysis of these forms as either concretely social or
economic would perforce stir up an atheoretical institutionalism. In contrast,
Parsonian sociology would consider economic and the social as analytical categories.
Sociology then would not be a study of empirical structures but the study of those
‘aspects’ of real phenomena which are under the analytical category of social.
Despite the fact that Parsons himself later on infracted from this strategy for a strictly
sociological science of analytically social categories and considered variables of the
social system in a fourfold schema of analytical sub-systems so that researchers can
study each as functionally economic or else(because all variables would have
economic or otherwise consequences as opposed to instrinsically economic/social
‘aspects’), post-Parsonian sociologists frequently trivialised this epistemological
strategy into an abstruse ontological proviso. Although for Granovetter, economics
and sociology are no longer totemic disciplinary blocks in themselves as in immediate
Parsonian sociology, he a la Parsons nevertheless champions network paradigm still
as ‘an exercise in abstraction’ since economic sociology is basically research on a
monadic analytical ‘aspect’ of concrete structures –ongoing and networked social
relations or ‘configuration of network ties’(Krippner 2001:791,777)- as opposed to
research on the disorderly concrete forms themselves.
Overall Greta Krippner argues that in both social network analysis as ultimately a
neoParsonian sociology and neoPolanyian theories of social embeddedness, the
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