The Idea of Embeddedness in Socio-Economic Discussion

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Sociology - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, University of Frankfurt (Main), course: The Theory of Economic Sociology, language: English, abstract: The concept of embeddedness has passed through many stages of socio-economic debate since its first significant use in Polanyi`s work 'The Great Transformation'. The term has been used in connection with old sociological questions such as the social order, but also in connection with newer topics such as network analysis. A central context here is the connection between non-economic and economic. The concept of embeddedness is thus something overarching between these fields and represents exchange in the form of mutual interpenetration. The term is used at various levels of abstraction, both at the system-structural level and at the level of the smallest social actor, the individual. In the following, an attempt will be made to understand the term more closely using the consideration of 3 economic sociologists and to identify commonalities as well as differences. To this end, the focus of this paper is primarily on the connection between non-economic and economic. In the next part, the theoretical concepts of Karl Polanyi, Talcott Parsons and Mark Granovetter are presented, considering comparable factors. It should be noted at this point that no term for embeddedness is presented for Parsons. Instead, the term interpenetration will be introduced. The reason is that Parsons does not use the term embeddedness literally, but in the literature embedding and interpenetration are put into relation (one example is Jens Beckert 2003). Because of this, this work deals with the concept of embedding, but also deals with comparable concepts. The quintessence lies in the theoretical concretization. Since Granovetter's concept of embeddedness has been discussed the most, in point 3 there is scientific reception of Granovetter's embeddedness in comparison with Parsons and Polanyi by Jens Beckert and Jan Sparsam.