Lineages of Embeddedness: On the Antecedents and Successors of a Polanyian Concept

Since the 1980s, much debate has revolved around Karl Polanyi's concept of the 'dis/embedded economy,' generating some light and not a little heat. This paper looks at three reasons that account for part of the 'heat.' It begins by tracing the sources upon which Polanyi drew. They include Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber, along with anthropology of the inter-war period, and German and American Institutionalist economics. After exploring the differing ways in which these varying currents conceptualize the relationship between economy and society, I explore the different interpretations of what Polanyi means by embeddedness, and the different purposes to which contemporary economic sociologists have put the term. For some, he is held up as the originator of a line of sociological analysis that treats 'the economy' as a subsystem 'embedded in' a social system. In this reading the emphasis is upon the moral underpinnings of market behavior, in contrast to the naturalism of Ricardo, Malthus and their heirs. For others, his 'disembedding' thesis contains a more radical tale: of the market economy coming to dominate 'society,' bringing forth a sorcerer's apprentice world of untrammeled market forces that, although human creations, lie beyond conscious human control.