An Economic Sociology of Law Reimagined

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