In his seminal article Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness Granovetter argued that economic action is embedded in social relations and structures that affect its functioning, and that economic action should be analyzed as such. In theories of the business firm the idea that firms are socially embedded is widely acknowledged, but social context is typically understood as an exogenous force. When embeddedness is actually accounted for in theories of the business firm it is mostly as independent variable highlighting the structural aspects of embeddedness at the expense of more relational aspects. This short paper traces the origin and branching of embeddedness in business studies. It asserts that the concept of embeddedness is recurrently used as a concept symbol to reclassify aspects of social context, but not in a way that gives credit to the endogeneity of social context to the actions of the business firm. Finally, it is suggested that the notions of evolution and mutualism are fruitful for understanding how and why firms are embedded in different ways and to different degrees.
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Paper provided by Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School in its series IVS/CBS Working Papers with number
98-13.
Find related papers by JEL classification: B2 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 B4 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior M1 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Business Administration
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