Table Of ContentAn Economic Sociology of
Law Reimagined
This book critically examines the concept of “embeddedness”: the core
concept of an economic sociology of law (ESL).
It suggests that our ways of doing, talking, and thinking about law,
economy, and society, reproduce and re-entrench mainstream approaches,
shaping our thoughts and actions such that we perform according to the
model. Taking a deep dive into one example – the concept of embeddedness
– this book combines insights from law, sociology, economics, and psychology
to show that while we use metaphor to talk about law and economy, our
metaphors in turn use us, moulding us into their fictionalized caricatures of
homo juridicus and homo economicus. The result is a groundbreaking study into
the prioritization throughout society of interests and voices that align with
doctrinal understandings of law and neoclassical understandings of economics:
approaches that led us into the dilemmas currently facing society. Zooming
out from a detailed exploration of embeddedness in economic sociology and
ESL literature, the book unpacks the fashionable post-2008 claim that the
economy should be re-embedded in society and proposes two conceptual shifts
in response. The book draws on personas and vignettes throughout, both to
imagine and to realize shifting an ESL beyond embeddedness.
This timely engagement with the emerging field of economic sociology
of law will appeal to socio-legal scholars and others with interests in the
intersection of law, economics, and sociology.
Clare Williams is an ESRC‒SeNSS funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at
Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK.
An Economic Sociology of
Law Reimagined
Beyond Embeddedness
Clare Williams
Designed cover image: Orbon Alija
First published 2023
by Routledge
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A Glasshouse book
© 2023 Clare Williams
The right of Clare Williams to be identified as author of this work has
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With the exception of Chapter 1 and Chapter 6, no part of this book
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Chapter 1 and Chapter 6 of this book are available for free in PDF format
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They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-76144-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-42022-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-35481-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003354819
Typeset in Bembo
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
For Oakley, who is crushed velvet and love.
And who is a constant reminder of what is important, and what is not.
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgements and return journeys xiii
Visualizing socio-legal frames, concepts, and methods xvi
1 Doing, talking, and thinking (and why we’re not
getting it right) 1
Crashes, crises, catastrophes 1
Doing, talking, and thinking 2
The law and the economy don’t really exist 4
PS: Nor does society 6
How metaphors use us 7
Constructing reality 10
Introducing homo juridicus and homo economicus 11
An ongoing conceptual commitment to embeddedness 14
Introducing an economic sociology of law (ESL): the home of
embeddedness 16
The career of embeddedness in ESL and two conceptual conundrums 19
Embeddedness in academic literature: drawing
parallels and drawing conclusions 20
Introducing our “guide” personas: Ann, Polly, and Lillian 23
Bibliography 27
2 Introducing an economic sociology of law 33
What is an economic sociology of law (ESL)? 33
The role of economic sociology of law: responding to disciplinarity 36
viii C ontents
The intellectual heritage of ESL: economic sociology and
socio-legal scholarship 40
Socio-legal heritage 40
Economic sociology heritage 42
“Black boxes” and taxonomies 43
Text; subtext; context 46
Empirical; conceptual; normative 47
Econo-socio-legal 48
Instrumental; affective; belief-based; traditional 51
Micro; meso; macro; meta 52
Writing the rules of the game: indicators as technologies of governance 57
ESL is (currently) a pseudo-constructivist lens: boundaries and
borderlands 60
Bibliography 62
3 Embeddedness: A biography of a concept 67
Embeddedness: the origins 67
Talking about embeddedness 68
Karl Polanyi’s always (or never) embedded market 69
The “accidental” revival of embeddedness 73
Critiques of embeddedness 76
Critiques of macro-level embeddedness 77
Critiques of micro-level embeddedness 78
Reconciling macro- and micro-level embeddedness? 78
Reconciling the implications: cognitive and normative embeddedness 79
How might we make embeddedness more consistent? 84
Embedded liberalism 84
Embedded autonomy 86
Reconciling the insights? 87
The embeddedness conundrum is reinvented 88
Bibliography 90
4 Embeddedness: The internal inconsistencies 93
The internal inconsistency of embeddedness: “what are we
talking about?” 93
Block’s interpretation of Polanyian embeddedness 95
Dale’s interpretation of Polanyian embeddedness 101
Doughnut Economics versus The Econocracy 105
Contents ix
Doughnut Economics 106
The Econocracy 107
Emblematic of a wider approach 108
What is embedded? And in what? 111
Bibliography 112
5 Embeddedness: The external conceptual incompatibilities 116
How we tend to think (our default conceptual tools) 116
How we might think differently (challenging default conceptual
tools) 118
Thinking about embeddedness as a black box 120
Proposing an alternative ESL lens: beyond
embeddedness 123
Shift 1: from the actor to their interaction 128
Trust is important in understanding interactions 131
Shift 2: embeddedness to feedback loops 133
Understanding feedback loops through performativity 133
Exploring the performativity of law and economics
with a thought experiment 136
Beyond homo economicus-juridicus? 140
Bibliography 143
6 Beyond embeddedness: The next steps 147
What remains of ESL without its core concept of embeddedness? 147
Lingering questions about an ESL lens 152
What, where, or who is “the social”? 152
But “how much?”: the “sociological fallacy” 153
Removing the core concept: what is left? 155
What’s in a name? Linguistic limitations 156
Clean models or dirty hands? 157
ESL, politics, and power: can an ESL lens ever be apolitical? 158
Responding to crashes, crises, catastrophes 160
Our conceptual commitment to embeddedness continues 161
Shoehorning concepts into categories: Happy the Elephant, Chucho the
Bear, and their friends 162
Shoehorning concepts into categories: COVID versus the
economy? 164
