Embeddedness, in social science, the dependence of a phenomenon—be it a sphere of activity such as the economy or the market, a set of relationships, an organization, or an individual—on its environment, which may be defined alternatively in institutional, social, cognitive, or cultural terms. In short, analyses using the concept of embeddedness focus on the different conditions within which various modes of social action take place and upon which they depend.
Most prominently, the economic historian Karl Polanyi argued that the functioning of an economy could not be understood disassociated from the social world in which it was embedded. Specific organizations and institutions, and ultimately the economy as a whole, need to be understood as parts of larger, historically derived, institutional, or social structures.
More generally, the concept of embeddedness helps describe and explain how, although they each seemingly follow their own distinct logics and rules, different surrounding institutions and contexts interact and may complement or conflict with each other. This has been further developed particularly within the field of new economic sociology, which has investigated the linkages and interdependencies of economic phenomena and organizations and other social structures.
The interest in embeddedness is sometimes criticized as a mere restatement of truisms recognized in many classical works of the social sciences. Yet, embeddedness approaches can typically be sharply distinguished from both under- and over-socialized accounts of economic life. Embeddedness entails that actors’ preferences can only be understood and interpreted within relational, institutional, and cultural contexts. This is in direct contrast to the basic assumptions that inform neoclassical economic analysis, rational choice theory, and important strands of new institutional economics. These are based on the notion of under-socialized, atomized decision makers who aim to maximize their own predetermined utilities. Specifically, embeddedness does not merely regulate behaviour by shaping the way in which actors pursue their self-interest but constitutes these interests.
On the other end of the spectrum, strong structural positions, where social conditions exist a priori to behaviours, are equally challenged. Instead, relationships between the embedded unit and its contextual world are neither fixed nor determinate or directly causal.
Researchers who emphasize the utility of the concept of embeddedness tend to agree that various phenomena—be they individual preferences or organizational behaviour—may be better understood when analyzed in relation to their social, institutional, or cognitive environment. Where analysts may differ is on the specific forms and effects of embeddedness—that is, relative to what is embedded in what and to what consequence.
The concept of embeddedness was pioneered by Polanyi, whose lifelong study of the interlinkage between economy and society ranged from anthropological studies of small communities in the South Pacific to the political economy of the institutions regulating the global economy in the 19th century.
Polanyi argued that because individuals were always primarily social beings, rather than economic ones, embeddedness is a necessary and basic condition of the economy. In The Great Transformation (1944) he analyzed the consequences of the 18th- and 19th-century expansion of capitalism—namely, the effort to create an economic sphere increasingly separate from noneconomic institutions that would function only to maximize profit. Polanyi argued that before the 19th century the economic system had been conceived of as a part of the broader society governed by social customs and norms as much as by market principles of profit and exchange. The rise of capitalism, however, involved political efforts to de-link the economy from this social environment. However, this disembedding of the economy necessarily meant changing its social environment and, thus, society. In a market society, basic aspects of social life would be treated as pure market commodities (the fictitious commodities) and humans redefined as purely economically rational (i.e., profit-maximizing) actors. Polanyi argued that these efforts of embedding society in the market, instead of the market in society, were ultimately bound to fail, bringing in their wake dangerous societal reactions of different magnitude and character, most prominent among them fascism. More abstractly, he named the attempted transformation and its eventual backlash the double movement, defining a continuing and semiautomatic process of embedding and disembedding. Polanyi thus posed the question of how to reconcile the expansion of the market with a social order that can sustain it.
This early treatment of embeddedness sees the social sphere as necessarily primary to the economic sphere. This view is echoed in the notion of the lifeworld, introduced by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas defined the lifeworld as the shared understandings and values that are established by face-to-face contacts over time and that form the basis for identity, values, and beliefs that may be tacit, or taken for granted, rather than explicitly reasoned. For Habermas, the legitimacy of both the official economy and the administrative state are threatened by the colonization of the lifeworld through materially based relationships. This happens, for instance, when the objective of education shifts from fostering culture and knowledge to maximizing profit. To be clear, the colonization of the lifeworld is not limited to profit maximization but encompasses a more general process by which the areas of life aimed at the reproduction of knowledge, culture, and social integration are increasingly influenced by money, power, and, more generally, instrumental rationality.
The notion of embeddedness as both an ever-existing condition and a matter of degree and variation was taken up by the influential work of the French-based regulation school. Here the basic assumption that economies are embedded in social relations identifies the task of economic analysis as to uncover and compare both explicit and implicit types of regulation and their social and economic repercussions. For example, Fordism is analyzed as a mode of social reproduction based on conventions in which constantly increasing output makes it possible to pay increasing wages for jobs that are guaranteed over the long term. In exchange, class conflict is subdued and organized labour weakened.
Applications: embedded liberalism and globalization
On a global level, Polanyi’s theory led scholars to argue for an embedded form of economic liberalism. Here a compromise between a commitment to liberal economic policies internationally (free trade, economic openness) and a commitment to the necessity of domestic social embeddedness was expressed via the welfare state and the principle that governments would cushion their publics from the harmful effects of economic openness through Keynesian fiscal policy. Through this compromise, social purpose controlled economic rules, not vice versa. New forms of economic protectionism should be seen in this continuity—namely, as new efforts of embedding under the constraints of globalization. The main threat to economic liberalism here is not protectionism but rather the risk that the global economy may become disembedded through the dismantling of social safety nets and the welfare state, creating the potential for an international backlash against economic liberalism.