"Social embeddedness": how new economic sociology goes into the offensive and meets the own roots

Abstract

The argument of social embeddedness has become one of the most celebrated metaphors in economic sociology. The attempt connected to that term is the elaboration of a solid basis for economic sociology as discipline within the concert of economics and further social sciences. The paper argues that the embeddedness argument is strategically on a necessary way to highlight the academic importance of institutional and sociological thought for debating phenomena of economic life since, as it is argued within the paper, such ambitions meet also very clearly with recent tendencies within economics which are commonly considered to be tendencies towards heterodox economics. Aim of the paper is to embed such discussion within a broader history of economic and sociological thought in order to demonstrate that recent developments meet with elements of discussion which were already used by classical authors at the beginning of the 20 th century. In this respect a lot of the recent offensive of economic sociology meets with classical bases of its own academic development which seems to have become hidden or partly forgotten.