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Introduction
This account of the career of the concept of embeddedness in economic sociology has two interrelated purposes. The first is to make a contribution to the sociology of social science by presenting a history of this concept that suggests(1) some of the several cultural and social structural elements of the social system that have influenced that history. The second theme, interwoven with the first throughout the text, is to make a contribution to the theory of economic sociology, and sociology more generally, by using this history to advance toward a better definition of what embeddedness should mean. We shall see that the concept of embeddedness is now much used even beyond economic sociology. To take only four of many available examples from quite different areas of sociology, it has been used just recently, first, in regard to the explanation of immigration processes in the United States; second, in regard to the problems of social change and the life course; third, in connection with the analysis of networks and social movements; and fourth, in an illuminating study of the emergence of civil society in recent Spanish history.(2)
Thus, a better general theoretical understanding of embeddedness should be of wide usefulness in contemporary sociological analysis. To anticipate our main proposition, such a better theoretical understanding requires having a social system model such as is spelled out below.
Embeddedness and the Market
It follows from the fact that embeddedness can be, and has been, used to explain a considerable variety of social and cultural phenomena that the idea of embeddedness itself is embedded in a context or system of cultural and social structures. The central cultural concept with which that of embeddedness is interrelated is the concept of "the market." Indeed, the career of the concept of embeddedness can be seen as one long struggle to overcome, to correct, the common tendency among economists and others to what I have called "the absolutization of the market" (Barber, 1977).(3) This tendency to absolutization occurs in two interacting cultural contexts, the intellectual and the ideological.(4) Together, these two contexts give the concept of the market an intellectual force and polemic urgency that maintain it still as the prime explanatory economic concept, even in a modern world where, until recently...