Generally the term is used in reference to Mark Granovetter's famous (and much cited) paper: Granovetter, M. 1985. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.” American Journal of Sociology 91(3):481.

IMHO (I can't recall if he references it) that use of the term in turn is based on Polanyi's term "disembedding" in Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.

I think most work on alternative economic networks (AFN's etc) has, explictity or impliciity, used the notion - at least in the sense of participants in those networks acting in accordance with social rather than strictly economic rationales.

I agree with Alan. More interesting insights related to short food supply chains (SFSCs) could be found in Chiffoleau Y. (2009), "From Politics to Co-operation: The Dynamics of Embeddedness in Alternative Food Supply Chains". Sociologia Ruralis, 49 (3): 218

https://www.researchgate.net/publicliterature.PublicLiterature.search.html?type=keyword&search-keyword=Yuna+Chiffoleau&search-abstract=&search-journal=&search=Search

Hi everyone,

this thread is very interesting to me as I would liek to keep on working on such issues in the future.

in 2012 I wrote a paper on Vietnam's agrarian transition using Social Network Analysis to map exchanges of resources such as rice, land and labour among households located in two communes of the south. My perspective was very critical of Granovetter approach. I believe networks explain social change much better when they trace economic exchanges rather than "social". I refereed a lot to brenner and polanyi. If you are interested I can send you the article that was published on the Journal of Agrarian Change.

Hi Laura, can you pls send your paper at [email protected]

Article Embeddedness and Local Food Systems: Notes on Two Types of D...

The embeddedness refers to both the extent of connectivity as well as the degree of social and economic exchanges that take place among the actors in a system. The extent of connectivity is related to both social and economic exchanges in differing degrees depending on the context, nation, and culture. But the connectivity is critical which is based on physical, infrastructural, and spatial, and communication factors. Assessing the embeddedness in all these dimensions can be helpful in studying various socio-economic and political outcomes.

I agree with Jutta, the term embeddedness is overused. Particularly, when it ends up meaning that individual people have a high number of connections. For Polanyi embeddedness implied social modes of coordination based on principles and patterns structurally different from market exchanges.

I think Granovetters' embeddedness can be measured at the level of the ego network (number of ties each one has). The Embeddedness by Polanyi is instead impis instead implyinglies different structural configurations and must be measured at the level of the entire network.

I enclose my paper that uses SNA to measure Polanyi's embeddedness in Vietnam.