Embeddedness

About: Embeddedness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4773 publications have been published within this topic receiving 229721 citations.

Regulationist and Autopoieticist Reflections on Polanyi's Account of Market Economies and the Market Society

Abstract: This article re-interprets and develops Polanyi�s substantive institutionalist analysis of capitalist market economies and the market society in the light of two more recent approaches to the same issues. These are the Parisian �regulation school� on contemporary capitalism and systems-theoretica l accounts of the modern economy. All three regard the capitalist economy (or, for autopoietic systems theory, the market economy) as an operationally autonomous systemthat is nonetheless socially embedded and needful of complex forms of social regulation. For each, an adequate account of economic activities should explore how they are related to the wider social environment; how they are embedded in a wider nexus of social institutions ; how the latter assist in reproducing the capitalist (or market) economy; and how their development is coupled to that of these and other environing institutions . There are also some important differences among these approaches, however, which enable an exploration of their respective limitations and also provide useful bases for further theoretical and empirical research. Thus, after presenting these three perspectives on the institutedness and embeddedness of economies. I consider some basic problems in analysing the improbable stability and reproducibility of the capitalist economy, paying particular attention to governance and meta governance.

Social context and social capital as enablers of knowledge integration

Abstract: This paper argues that social contexts and social capital enable knowledge integration; that different social contexts combined with different types of social capital enable different types of knowledge integration. Four types of social contexts are distinguished based on the extent of social embeddedness and closeness of interorganizational coupling; four types of social capital are also described. Based on the diversity of knowledge streams, the extent of tacitness of knowledge to be exchanged, and value created through such exchanges, four modes of knowledge integration are identified, namely frontier, incremental, combinative, and instrumental. This paper provides new insights about the processes of interorganizational transfer of knowledge: the unique combination of a specific social context with a specific type of social capital means firms can achieve equally effective yet highly differentiated approaches to different modes of knowledge integration.

Export upgrading and growth: the prerequisite of domestic embeddedness

Abstract: Our work contributes to the literature relating output structure and economic development by showing that growth gains from upgrading are not unconditional. Relying on data from a panel of Chinese cities, we show that the level of capabilities available to domestic firms operating in ordinary trade is an important driver of economic growth. However, no direct gains emanate from the complexity of goods produced by either processing-trade activities or foreign firms. This suggests that the sources of product upgrading matter, and that domestic embeddedness is key in order for capacity building and technology adoption to be growth enhancing.

Relational Work and Economic Sociology

Abstract: This paper attempts to clarify the concept of relational work for understanding economic life as proposed by Viviana Zelizer. To do so, it first compares the concept to similar notions used in othe...