Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Embeddedness

Embeddedness contributes to explanations of network dynamics and the actions of network actors. It is the extent to which individual actors and their actions, most often framed in terms of economic action, are enmeshed within structures of social relations. Embeddedness requires a multiple-level perspective, given its assumption that exchange relationships have an ongoing social structure that creates both opportunities and constraints on individual action. Network relationships, and structures and the actions they shape, are also in turn embedded within, influenced, and constrained by their cognitive, cultural, geographical, political, and institutional contexts.

Mark Granovetter's 1985 seminal paper Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness laid the groundwork for economic sociology. He theoretically conceptualized the relationship between the economic and the social, explaining that economic relations between individuals or firms are embedded in social or interpersonal networks. Exchange relations between socially embedded actors combine both economic and social concerns such that social relations shape economic outcomes. At the confluence of social embeddedness and network theory, embeddedness provides rich explanations of individual action and social capital within many disciplines, including economic sociology, organization theory, strategic management, economic geography, political science, and international relations. These disciplinary perspectives have identified different types of embeddedness, stemming from their differential contexts and levels of analysis, seeking to identify socially embedded actors, in what social structures they are embedded, and how social embeddedness influences action.

Relational, Structural, and Cognitive

At the dyadic level of analysis, relational embeddedness represents a core dimension of social embeddedness and seeks to explain when and how an individual actor is embedded within a social relationship as well as the outcomes of this embeddedness. Key features of social relationships that are strong or relationally embedded include affect, reciprocity, intimacy (confiding in), trust, fine-grained information transfer, joint problem solving, frequency, and duration (amount). Different combinations of these features of social relationships can result in different types of relational embeddedness. The typology of relational embeddedness identifies seven types built upon the extent of three different components within the social relationship: personal relationship (affect, knowing well, sociality); dyadic interaction (extent, effort, ease, value); and social capital at the dyadic and network levels (obligation, resource access, structural embeddedness, brokering). Thus, relational embeddedness as a multifaceted, rather than dichotomous, concept provides a foundation for addressing how relationally embedded ties evolve over time as well as explaining variation in outcomes.

While specific outcomes may depend upon the type of relationship embeddedness, a core outcome of relational embeddedness is that a tie's social relationship influences and shapes the economic decision making of an actor. Positive outcomes may include actors being better able to shape and access otherwise unattainable opportunities, resources, and legitimacy; enhanced knowledge transfer, learning processes, cooperation, coordination, and trust; and more effective governance through mechanisms of trust. Negative outcomes may occur when the maintenance of the social relationship takes priority over maximizing the economic interaction. This, in turn, generates bounded agency that constrains and reduces the economic efficiency of decision making. Thus, relational embeddedness has implications for the development and function of dyadic relations across many disciplines.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution