1st Edition
An Economic Sociology of Law Reimagined Beyond Embeddedness
Preface
Acknowledgements and return journeys
Visualizing socio-legal frames, concepts, and methods
1 Doing, talking, and thinking (and why we’re not getting it right)
Crashes, crises, catastrophes
Doing, talking, and thinking
The law and the economy don’t really exist
PS: Nor does society
How metaphors use us
Constructing reality
Introducing homo juridicus and homo economicus
An ongoing conceptual commitment to embeddedness
Introducing an economic sociology of law (ESL): the home of embeddedness
The career of embeddedness in ESL and two conceptual conundrums
Embeddedness in academic literature: drawing parallels and drawing conclusions
Introducing our “guide” personas: Ann, Polly, and Lillian
Bibliography
2 Introducing an economic sociology of law
What is an economic sociology of law (ESL)?
The role of economic sociology of law: responding to disciplinarity
The intellectual heritage of ESL: economic sociology and socio-legal scholarship
Socio-legal heritage
Economic sociology heritage
“Black boxes” and taxonomies
Text; subtext; context
Empirical; conceptual; normative
Econo-socio-legal
Instrumental; affective; belief-based; traditional
Micro; meso; macro; meta
Writing the rules of the game: indicators as technologies of governance
ESL is (currently) a pseudo-constructivist lens: boundaries and borderlands
Bibliography
3 Embeddedness: A biography of a concept
Embeddedness: the origins
Talking about embeddedness
Karl Polanyi’s always (or never) embedded market
The “accidental” revival of embeddedness
Critiques of embeddedness
Critiques of macro-level embeddedness
Critiques of micro-level embeddedness
Reconciling macro- and micro-level embeddedness?
Reconciling the implications: cognitive and normative embeddedness
How might we make embeddedness more consistent?
Embedded liberalism
Embedded autonomy
Reconciling the insights?
The embeddedness conundrum is reinvented
Bibliography
4 Embeddedness: The internal inconsistencies
The internal inconsistency of embeddedness: “what are we talking about?”
Block’s interpretation of Polanyian embeddedness
Dale’s interpretation of Polanyian embeddedness
Doughnut Economics versus The Econocracy
Doughnut Economics
The Econocracy
Emblematic of a wider approach
What is embedded? And in what?
Bibliography
5 Embeddedness: The external conceptual incompatibilities
How we tend to think (our default conceptual tools)
How we might think differently (challenging default conceptual tools)
Thinking about embeddedness as a black box
Proposing an alternative ESL lens: beyond embeddedness
Shift 1: from the actor to their interaction
Trust is important in understanding interactions
Shift 2: embeddedness to feedback loops
Understanding feedback loops through performativity
Exploring the performativity of law and economics with a thought experiment
Beyond homo economicus-juridicus?
Bibliography
6 Beyond embeddedness: The next steps
What remains of ESL without its core concept of embeddedness?
Lingering questions about an ESL lens
What, where, or who is “the social”?
But “how much?”: the “sociological fallacy”
Removing the core concept: what is left?
What’s in a name? Linguistic limitations
Clean models or dirty hands?
ESL, politics, and power: can an ESL lens ever be apolitical?
Responding to crashes, crises, catastrophes
Our conceptual commitment to embeddedness continues
Shoehorning concepts into categories: Happy the Elephant, Chucho the Bear, and their friends
Shoehorning concepts into categories: COVID versus the economy?
Rebalancing voices and values: becoming ‘homo sociologicus’?
“Happy” Bhutan
“Sustainable” Oslo
Framing the future? Rebalancing voices and values
Moving beyond embeddedness?
Bibliography
Epilogue: Notes about the characters
Index
Biography
Clare Williams is an ESRC‒SeNSS funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK.
