An Economic Sociology of Law Reimagined

This book critically examines the concept of "embeddedness": the core concept of an economic sociology of law (ESL).
It suggests that our ways of doing, talking, and thinking about law, economy, and society, reproduce and re-entrench mainstream approaches, shaping our thoughts and actions such that we perform according to the model. Taking a deep dive into one example - the concept of embeddedness - this book combines insights from law, sociology, economics, and psychology to show that while we use metaphor to talk about law and economy, our metaphors in turn use us, moulding us into their fictionalized caricatures of homo juridicus and homo economicus. The result is a groundbreaking study into the prioritization throughout society of interests and voices that align with doctrinal understandings of law and neoclassical understandings of economics: approaches that led us into the dilemmas currently facing society. Zooming out from a detailed exploration of embeddedness in economic sociology and ESL literature, the book unpacks the fashionable post-2008 claim that the economy should be re-embedded in society and proposes two conceptual shifts in response. The book draws on personas and vignettes throughout, both to imagine and to realize shifting an ESL beyond embeddedness.
This timely engagement with the emerging field of economic sociology of law will appeal to socio-legal scholars and others with interests in the intersection of law, economics, and sociology.
The Open Access versions of Chapter 1 and Chapter 6, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Clare Williams is an ESRC-SeNSS funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK.

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