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Document 1 of 1 Economic Sociologies in Space Author: Peck, Jamie ProQuest document link Abstract: How might economic geography (re)position itself within the interdisciplinary field of heterodoxeconomics? Reflecting on this question, this article offers a critical assessment of the "New EconomicSociology," making the case for moving beyond the limited confines of the networks-and-embeddednessparadigm. More specifically, it argues for a more broadly based and purposive conversation with variouscurrents within social-constructivist and macroeconomic sociology, which, in turn, calls for a more full-bloodedcritique of market relations and analytics and a more militant attitude toward economic orthodoxies. Thepromise of such a conversation, strategically focused on the simultaneously social and geographic constitutionof economic relations, is an emboldened economic geography with a more persuasive voice in the field ofheterodox economic studies. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT] Full text: Headnote Abstract: How might economic geography (re)position itself within the interdisciplinary field of heterodox economics?Reflecting on this question, this article offers a critical assessment of the "New Economic Sociology," makingthe case for moving beyond the limited confines of the networks-and-embeddedness paradigm. Morespecifically, it argues for a more broadly based and purposive conversation with various currents within social-constructivist and macroeconomic sociology, which, in turn, calls for a more full-blooded critique of marketrelations and analytics and a more militant attitude toward economic orthodoxies. The promise of such aconversation, strategically focused on the simultaneously social and geographic constitution of economicrelations, is an emboldened economic geography with a more persuasive voice in the field of heterodoxeconomic studies. Key words: economic sociology, economic geography, markets, embeddedness, social construction, varieties ofcapitalism. Many of the same things that make economic geography dynamic and creative as a subdiscipline also make itappear fickle, magpie-like, and sometimes collectively incoherent. Theoretical commitments are often relativelyshort-lived, dominant methodological conventions are rarely codified, and extradisciplinary "reading around" isnormal practice. On the positive side, though, these are also markers of a vibrant, unruly, and polycentricresearch field, in which no would-be orthodoxy goes unchallenged for long. Economic geography is moreheterodox and pluralist today than ever before, its practices and positions encompassing spatial science andnonrepresentational theory, neo-Marxism and new geographical economics, modeling and ethnography,feminism and poststructuralism, and just about everything in between. There are still those who lament thepassing of more "centered" forms of economic geography, in which neoclassical economics/regional scienceand then political economy/industrial restructuring dominated the subdiscipline in ways that now seem almostunthinkable, but in the wake of economic geography's cultural, relational, and institutional turns during the1990s, there has been an increasingly widespread acceptance of the merits of a more decentered andheterodox intellectual culture. The so-called new economic geographies are pluralized for more than merelypresentational reasons. They have become associated with a kind of post-programmatic research programwithin which virtue is made of active engagement on multiple theoretical, methodological, and substantivefronts. With this comes an explicit embrace of variegated conceptions of "the economic" and the multiplexcharacter of economic identities and relations (see Lee and Wills 1997; Barnes 2001b; Sheppard, Barnes, Peck,and Tickell 2003).

Yet there is an apparently growing sense of unease with some of the potential downsides of this self-administered decentering of economic geography. Some of the concerns may be strategic, since as just onepart of a relatively small discipline, economic geography may be spreading its resources too thinly. But moreseriously, economic geography may be losing its capacity to speak for itself or even about itself; it may besplintering into no more than the sum of its increasingly diverse parts. More seriously still, there are some whofear that these centrifugal tendencies may be undermining economic geography's theoretical andmethodological integrity, its social and political relevance, its collective spirit and purpose. Hence, the recentconcern with issues like the subdiscipline's prevailing methodological and conceptual practices (Markusen1999); with its social and policy relevance (Martin 2001); with its apparent estrangement from some "big picture"issues of political-economic restructuring (Wills 2002); with its Anglocentricity (Olds 200Ib); and, not the least,with its relationship to orthodox economics (Clark 1998; Martin 1999; Clark, Feldman, and Gertler 2000; Aminand Thrift 2000; "Debating Economic Geography" 2001; Agnew 2002). If economic geography is having somekind of anxiety attack, or if it is simply experiencing one of its sporadic-and often healthy-episodes of critical self-reflection, there are surely many underlying causes, just as there are a variety of symptoms. It is becomingincreasingly evident, though, that the contested nature of "the economic" in economic geography is one of thediagnostically critical issues in play at the present time, not the least because it opens up so many widerquestions that are related to theory, method, and practice. What, in other words, does the economic ineconomic geography stand for? The underlying challenge here was posed most pointedly by Amin and Thrift (2000, 5); sensing a kind ofmalaise in the subdiscipline, they argued that attempts to "revive economic geography as an imaginative,relevant and socially useful subject" will turn fundamentally on "the kind of economic theory that is practiced."Arguing against a rapprochement with orthodox economics, Amin and Thrift instead advocated playing toeconomic geography's newfound strengths in "the understanding of open systems, appreciation of context, andqualitative techniques," while developing a deeper engagement with various forms of heterodox economicthought, such as evolutionary political economy, organizational theory, feminist economics, and economicsociology. They urged economic geographers to think seriously about whom we ... want to play out with. We think we would be fooling ourselves if we believethat we can lie down with the lion [of orthodox economics] and become anything more than prey. Instead,.. . ourmain friends should be in the new areas of economic study that are currently both flourishing and providing agenuine ground for the kind of contributions we can make. . . . By standing on our own terms, out of the longshadow of economics, we may then draw young researchers back into economic geography, as they see theplace of a different kind of economic theory in a postdisciplinary social science. (Amin and Thrift 2000, 8) While aspects of Amin and Thrift's (2000) diagnosis have been contested ("Debating Economic Geography"2001), the basic question that they posed is a pertinent, timely, and awkward one, even if the answer cannot beconstructed in similarly pithy terms. For Barnes (2001a, 162), the answer calls for a thoroughgoingproblematization of "economic theory," as practiced both inside and outside economics departments, coupledwith a more searching interrogation of those various strands of what may be called extra-Economic economictheory, perceived by some to be the subdiscipline's "salvation." Taking Amin and Thrift's (2000) question and Barnes's (200Ia) advice seriously, this article examines one of themore important strands of heterodox economic theory-economic sociology-presenting a critical commentary onits recent evolution and an assessment of its potential role in economic geography (and vice versa). The articleexamines the rise of the "new economic sociology" (NES) to pose a set of questions about the development oftheory in the "new economic geographies"; about the methodological status of orthodox economics and theconceptual and political status of the market; and about the scope, costs, and benefits of different forms ofinterdisciplinary engagement. This choice of focus is not random, of course, because economic sociology isarguably one of the most energetic and influential of economic geography's proximate fields. Concepts that

have been drawn from economic sociology-most notably concerning "embeddedness" and "networks"-now haveextremely wide currency in economic geography. Indeed, if the new economic geography may make a claim toparadigmatic coherence, in no small measure it will have been due to the positive influence of economicsociology. A shared enthusiasm for network forms of analysis, in particular, has established a new bridgebetween the subdisciplines. Many of the most significant contributions in economic geography in recent years have drawn explicitly on somepart or another of economic sociology,1 while citations within economic geography of Granovetter's (1985) path-breaking article on the social embeddedness of economic relations now number in the hundreds. Taylor andAsheim (2001, 320) observed that the networks-and-embeddedness framework has had a "profound impact" oncontemporary economic geography (see also Markusen 2002; Park 1996; Boggs and Rantisi 2003; Yeung200Oa, 2003). Yet economic geographers have only recently begun to explore the theoretical antecedents ofthe network paradigm. What theories of social action and structure are presumed? What roles, if any, douneven development and scalar constitution play in network theories? How do networks mesh with markets andhierarchies? Why are network analytics so appealing? Despite the widespread invocation of network thinking ingeography, there have been surprisingly few sustained discussions of the lineage of economic-sociologicaltheories and methods or of the constitution of the NES as a subfield. Indeed, some have argued that economicgeography's engagement with such proximate fields and their associated master concepts and methodologicaltraditions is too shallow (Martin and Sunley 2001). The restless and fast-moving nature of economic geographymeans that the deeper antecedents of "imported" theories are often only fitfully explored. The subdisciplinepossesses a worldly skepticism with respect to these imported frameworks and concepts, which represents oneof its conspicuous strengths. But one of the downsides is that this skepticism can give license to faddishnessand superficiality, perhaps even a reluctance to sustain theoretical or methodological commitments. Although the recently established connections between economic geography and economic sociology havebeen productive, these two fields are only just getting to know one another. Beyond the initial attraction, itremains to be seen whether this relationship can, or should, blossom into a meaningful one. Here, it is importantto understand that economic sociology has its own issues, of organizational identity, of theoretical coherence,and of methodological integrity, not the least of which is the fact that the long shadow of economics falls acrosseconomic sociology, too. Indeed, this troubled relationship with economics may be jeopardizing parts of theproject itself, notwithstanding its apparently rude health. Even though most of the NES defines itself by way ofits differences with orthodox, neoclassical economics, this stance has distorted and constrained its theoreticalproject. While a far-reaching critique of orthodox economics is, in a sense, baked into the cake of economicsociology, the NES, qua explicit intellectual project, has fostered its own orthodoxy, whose relationship with theeconomic mainstream looks increasingly like constructive coexistence, rather than concerted contention.Orthodox economics, for its part, remains resolutely impervious to most outside influences, its machinicworldview and preference for deductive, anticontextual reasoning setting it apart from its heterodox cousins. It istelling, in this context, that some of the things that economic sociology, broadly conceived, shares witheconomic geography-a preference for socialized and plural conceptions of the economic; a commitment toprimary data collection and grounded theorizing; a focus on "real," situated economies; skepticism about thelogical and normative superiority of markets; and a healthy disregard for disciplinary boundaries-also tend toreinforce their joint incompatibility with orthodox economics. Although some economic geographers see in this shared estrangement from mainstream economics thepotential for a fruitful union with economic sociology, economic sociologists have thus far been receptive toeconomic-geographic ideas only in principle, not in practice. Although the potential for "spatializing" economicsociology is enormous, with the notable exception of Saxenian's (1994, 2001) work on industrial networks, therehas been little serious engagement with geographic issues in "mainstream" economic sociology in the UnitedStates, which constitutes the heartland of this revivalist project (see Swedberg and Granovetter 2001;

Swedberg 2004; cf. Triglia 2002). This situation throws into sharp relief questions that are related to how, andwith what consequences, economic geographers may "play out" in wider interdisciplinary fields and the extent towhich this can be done, as Amin and Thrift (2000, 8) pointedly put it, "on our own terms." The positive argument of this article is that economic geography has much to gain from a deeper-and, at thesame time, more critical-engagement with economic sociology. The two subfields share a lot, including anapproach to theorizing and researching "the economic" that is, for the most part, robustly distinct from that oforthodox economics. In contrast to the clean, abstract, and parsimonious modeling tradition of orthodoxeconomics, economic sociology and economic geography both have "dirty hands." They each produceempirically rich accounts of concrete and socially situated economic processes; they each emphasize theessential diversity of economic phenomena, favoring context-rich explanations in which history is takenseriously; they each attach greater significance to plausibility and explanatory power than to elegance andpredictive power; and they each strive to explain, and often improve, the characteristically messy economicworlds that they encounter. They share a similar language and, apparently, have things to talk about. Thisconversation, it is argued here, should be a wide-ranging one. Although it would surely be a mistake to becomeprogrammatically consumed with the limitations and flaws of orthodox economic theory, there is a needexplicitly to challenge the division of academic labor that concedes authority around issues that are related toeconomic "fundamentals" (aka "the market") to neoclassical economics, while disciplines like sociology andgeography get to deal only with supposedly deviant formations, local curiosities, and various institutionalleftovers. As David Stark (2000, 2) remarked in relation to the project of economic sociology, "we would bespinning our wheels if we leave the analysis of markets and economic relations to economists while focusingour efforts on the social relations in which they are embedded." Maybe it is also time for economic geography toget more "pushy," theoretically speaking, and to build new interdisciplinary alliances around such goals. Providing a deliberately provocative review of the (actual and potential) connections between economicgeography and economic sociology, this article makes the case for a deeper, more selective, and morepurposeful engagement with those strands of economic sociology that make the boldest claims on "theeconomic." Crucially, it means extending the dialogue beyond the confines of the NES and its networks-andembeddedness paradigm, on the grounds that the strategy of intellectual coexistence with orthodoxeconomics tends to produce decontextualized and depoliticized readings of the economic. This strategy isincreasingly at odds with prevailing practices and positions within economic geography, given the recentemphasis on the complex and constitutive roles of spatioinstitutional context. The argument of this article is thatsuch claims need to be pushed further and more aggressively, not as an act of disciplinary partisanship, but tomake a more productive contribution to the transdisciplinary cause of heterodox economics. The networksociologies of the NES have a role to play here, but in many ways there are more constructive connections tobe made with macroeconomic sociology and heterodox political economy-in which the concept of a sociallyconstructed and variegated economy has real purchase and where economic geography has serious, if as yetunrealized, contributions to make. The article is divided into two parts. Part 1 presents a critical commentary on the development of the NES,focusing on its origins, its relationship with economics, its self-constitution as a project, its contributions, and itslimits. Here, the article develops a somewhat sympathetic critique of the network sociologies that lie at the heartof the NES. This critique is followed, in Part 2, by a discussion of the scope of a different kind of conversationbetween economic geography and economic sociology, focused on overlapping issues of theoretical concernand the potential for mutually informing engagement. The tasks of economic geography, it is argued, mustextend beyond network cartography to embrace issues that are related to the social, spatial, and scalarconstitution of economic systems, identities, processes, and development paths. It means superseding the NESconvention of visualizing networks in the analytical foreground, while leaving only fuzzily defined andundertheorized "context" in the background. It means reconnecting with some of the long-standing concerns of

political economy-with uneven development, power relations, inequalities, the state, and exploitation-sincethese concerns provide meaning, shape, and dynamism to "context" and enable context to play a constitutiverole in economic-geographic accounts, rather than a merely supporting role. Geographers have a positive, ifchallenging, role to play in the interdisciplinary research program that is emerging around a radically differentform of economic analysis-rooted in neo-Polanyian and macrosociological traditions and in the attendantconception of a politically constructed and institutionally variegated economy. Here, the challenge is to makegeographic ideas count, not passively to wait for them to be (re)discovered. The promise of a broadenedconversation with economic sociology, then, is a bolder and more purposive economic geography. Part 1: Not Economics-The New Economic Sociology The term new economic sociology was coined by Mark Granovetter in 1985, the same year that his seminalarticle on the "problem of embeddedness" was published in the American Journal of Sociology. Granovetter'swork was distinctive in the explicit rhetorical challenge that it made to the accepted division of labor betweeneconomics and sociology. Since Talcott Parsons, this intellectual boundary had been effectivelyinstitutionalized. Parsonian sociology left the determination of economic rules to the economists, which itcombined with a certain deference to the methodology of neoclassical economics. Parsons (1935a, 1935b) hadinsisted on a clear division of labor between economics and sociology, with the former being the proper domainof abstract work on rational actors in market settings and the latter being concerned with cultural norms, socialvalues, and economic institutions. At the time, Parsons was especially critical of one of economic sociology'spotential allies in exile-institutional economics-for its disdain for analytical abstraction and its overconcretizedview of economic "reality" (Granovetter 1990; Velthuis 1999; Richter 2001). In fact, the next half century wouldsee both institutional economics and economic sociology recede into insignificance, while economics-havingbeen granted "the market"-bowled along its independent course. Against this background, Granovetter took issue with the marginal role that was assigned to sociology ineconomic analysis. He was not content to leave the big questions of economic rationality to the economists,while sociologists busied themselves with the secondary tasks of studying ostensibly irrational actions, culturaldeviations, and suboptimal institutions. The NES would no longer passively cohabitate with economics, so theargument went, but would instead seek to contest economic explanations: the defining difference between theold and the new economic sociology, in this respect, would be its relationship with economics. The task of theNES was to mount a challenge to the privileged claims of orthodox economics "by elaborating the sociologicalviewpoint as forcefully as possible" (Swedberg and Granovetter 1992, 7). In practice, the bite of the NES wouldturn out to be less than its bark, but rhetorically, at least, the project would seek to define itself in opposition to(orthodox) economics. And out of this opposition, the NES's programmatic purpose would be defined around avariegated set of ostensibly "extra-market" concerns: networks, institutions, organizations, and culture. When Sociologists Attack ... Granovetter revisited Polanyi to develop a set of arguments concerning the social embeddedness of economicaction. Granovetter's (1985, 504) insistence that economic behavior is inescapably "embedded in networks ofinterpersonal relations" represented something of a departure from Polanyi's original use of the term, whichreferred to the organic relationship between economy and society under different historical configurations (seeBlock 1991; Piore 1996; Swedberg 1997; Jessop 2002; Burawoy 2003; Krippner et al. 2004). In fact, newtheoretical constructions were being developed under loosely defined Polanyian labels. According toGranovetter (1990, 98, emphasis added), "[by] embeddedness I mean that economic actions, outcomes, andinstitutions are affected by actors' personal relations and by the structure of the overall network of relations."The pertinent contrast here is with that essentially antisocial character, homo economicus: "The model of therational calculating subject is the foundation stone of all economics and, at its narrowest, the neoclassical modelof the economising agent does not involve human interaction at all" (Ingham 1996b, 246). The marketplace, inthis sense, is a domain of instrumental transactions between strangers (Bourdieu 2000). In the NES, in contrast,

social action is embedded in ongoing and multiplex networks of interpersonal relationships, rather than carriedout by narrowly rational, atomized actors. This amounts to a form of socioeconomic theory in which (relational)context matters, in contrast with the universal rationalism that is assumed in orthodox economics. An enduringconcern with networks represents one of the central threads of the NES qua project, if not its defining feature,even though it is often unclear whether networks represent a method, a metaphor, or a microsociological theory(see Powell and Smith-Doerr 1994). To the revived and reworked notion of embeddedness, Granovetter (1985) added the second "master concept"of the NES-the notion of the socially constructed economy. This notion refers to the process by which economicinstitutions are produced, how they "lock in" patterns of sedimented or habituated behavior, and how theybecome normalized (see Swedberg 1997). For Granovetter, network forms often represent proto-institutions, inthe sense that many will subsequently "congeal" into more stabilized and regularized configurations with thepassage of time. This, essentially, is how they become norm-making institutions. And again, the theoreticaldisjuncture with orthodox economics is critical: in contrast to the impersonal play of market forces, the NESdraws attention to the essentially social processes of norm making and institution building, which, in turn, areconnected in significant ways to the patterning of "economic" behavior (see Swedberg and Granovetter 2001).This line of analysis connects with one of the most important strands of contemporary economic-sociologicaltheory-the institutionalist tradition-which has close links with organization theory and Weberian sociology (seeDiMaggio and Powell 1983; Powell and DiMaggio 1991). These basic conceptualizations would be developed and refined as the project of the NES was consolidated. Akey moment came with the publication in 1994 of Smelser and Swedberg's The Handbook of EconomicSociology (hereafter the Handbook), which established a working definition of the NES, again largely in relationto mainstream economics; surveyed the terrain; and reached out in modest ways to institutional, evolutionary,and transactions-costs economics.2 Smelser and Swedberg (1994, 3) defined the project of economic sociologyas "the application of the frames of reference, variables, and explanatory models of sociology to that complex ofactivities concerned with the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of scarce goods andservices." This definition underlined the fairly explicit claim that was being laid upon the territory of economics.Economic sociologists would no longer be content with the "leftovers" after economists had finished theorizingrational, market behavior (see Zafirovski 1999), what Williamson (1994) characterized as the residual "tosh" ofunsystematic social and institutional phenomena. This said, in a more than trivial sense, the NES was definingitself in the mirror of economics, and it may be that, in this reflection, it looked its most coherent and distinctive.Certainly, the distinctions are sharp ones, to the point that many of economic sociology's defining features areantonyms of those of orthodox economics: inductive and grounded theory development is favored overdeductive and axiomatic model building; multiplex social groups, rather than narrowly rational individuals, tendto be the objects of analysis; contingency and specificity are taken seriously; there is skepticism about"universal" economic laws, while orthodox economics privileges abstracted forms of synchronie reasoning; theflesh and blood of economic life receives more attention than the bare bones of mechanistic relations; and soforth. In this context, the following critical distinctions stand out. First, whereas orthodox microeconomics assumesrational action by stylized, utility-maximizing individuals, economic sociology regards rationality as a variable,one of many forms of "economic" action (or, more accurately, social action in the economy). By the same token,the abstraction homo economicus, which Parsons enviously praised from the sidelines, is rejected in favor of aricher and more complex conception of the socially constructed individual, the actions of whom are profoundlyshaped by cultural norms, group relations, and the legacy of past interactions. second, the sociologicalconception of economic relations also places more emphasis on the role of power as a fact of economic life.Although the extent to which "power matters" varies widely in economicsociological explanations, at the least,power represents a legitimate analytical concern. Third, the frame of reference of economic sociology is wider:

in contrast to mainstream economies' restricted field of vision, which focuses narrowly on market relations while"freezing" the wider societal context (or, increasingly, by viewing wider social relations through the market optic,too), economic sociology explicitly seeks to locate "economic" relations within a much broader set of political,cultural, and legal parameters, the latter playing an active analytical role. Bringing this socioinstitutional contextto life, in explanatory terms, enables sociologists to show how the rational "core" of market transactions is not aseparate and superordinate sphere, but is itself socially structured and constituted. "For example, the long-standing assumption that economic analysis deals with peaceful and lawful transactions and does not deal withforce and fraud involves some important presuppositions about the legitimacy and stability of the state and legalsystem" (Smelser and Swedberg 1994, 7). Fourth, conventional forms of economic analysis (characteristicallyabstract, expressed in formal and mathematical principles, and organized around the controlled manipulation ofa priori assumptions in search of conclusions with predictive force) are rejected in favor of approaches that are,generally speaking, more interpretive, descriptive, concretely empirical, and (sometimes) more qualitative.Economic sociologists seek to develop post factum explanations of economic phenomena and behavior,situated in their historical and (more implicitly) geographic context, in contrast to the synchronie forms ofreasoning and universalist claims of orthodox economics (see Piore 1996). And while economists (artificially)analyze the economy as a closed system, economic sociologists accept its radical openness. According to Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer (2002), economic sociology is substantially defined by itsattempts to avoid three traps of conventional economic analysis. The first is the fallacious separation of theeconomic from the social. While this separation may facilitate the deployment of formal techniques of reasoning,it does so at the expense of a grounded, contextualized, and integral understanding of economic processes.Economic sociologists contend that all forms of economic behavior (including "market" behaviors) are sociallyconstructed, socially grounded, and socially enabled. The analytical privileging of the market, coupled with thereductionism that is implicit in assumptions of economically rational behavior and perfect knowledge, meansthat orthodox economics has a blinkered conception of the economic, dismissing social and institutionalrelations as marginal sources of "interference" in what would otherwise be smoothly functioning, orderly, andequilibrating markets. For their part, economic sociologists insist on widening the field of the visible in theanalysis of economic relations, not simply to produce more complex and contingent arguments, but as a meansof exposing and probing the fundamental motives and "ground rules" of economic behavior, many of which canbe traced to institutionally regularized modes of conduct and to constitutive social and legal norms. In otherwords, market actions are constituted and shaped by the social relations, institutional norms, and interpersonalnetworks in which they are embedded-which, among other things, provide the glue of "trust" and mutualunderstanding that, in the final analysis, makes many markets workable and sustainable. Social relations, in thissense, exist before the fact of markets; they do not merely disturb their operation ex post facto. This viewrepresents an inversion of Williamson's (1975, 20) vivid but historically incorrect assertion that "in the beginningthere were markets." One of the central tropes of economic sociology is the Polanyian insight that markets aremade; they do not spontaneously arise from some instinctive imperative to truck, barter, and exchange (seeBlock 1991; Fligstein 2001). In this sense, economic sociologists look down the opposite end of the telescopefrom orthodox economists-the all-encompassing gaze of the former locates market relations within the wideterrain of social relations, while the microscopic perspective of the latter concentrates on the up-closecharacteristics of markets, rendering the social context nothing more than a blur. Although Polanyi wasfrustratingly inconsistent on this point, one of his basic propositions was that no market fonctions in a context-free environment, that all markets are embedded in social relations and institutions (Barber 1977; Geertz 1963;lie 1991). The second mainstream economic fallacy to which economic sociology reacts is the related tendency to reducedecision-making behavior to the working out of a rational, utility-maximizing calculus, shaped by exogenouslydetermined preferences. Economic sociologists insist, in contrast, that "preferences and actions [are]

fundamentally connected to and affected by cognitive biases, limited powers of reasoning, nonconscious andambivalent feelings, role expectations, norms, and cultural frames, schemata, classifications, and myths," thecumulative consequences of which are that "social forces affect reasoning in ways that defy a strict rationalityassumption" (Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer 2002, 7). Homo economicus, in the context of this moresocialized view, exhibits the characteristics of a "reckless selfish monad" (Frank 1996, 117), the Pavlovianactions of which bear little resemblance to "normal" human behavior, even in markets. It is important toacknowledge that there is, however, a rational-choice strand in contemporary economic sociology (seeColeman 1990, 1994), although there are some who regard it as antithetical to the project qua sociologicalproject (see Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman 1987; Zafirovski 1999). Sociologists are generally uncomfortablewith atomistic conceptions of individual action, just as there is resistance to any privileging of Hobbesian marketrelations. Yet the presence of rational-choice impulses in the NES underlines the fact that, in some respects, therelationship with orthodox economic practice is less antagonistic than the rhetoric suggests. For much of theNES, orthodox economic practices and positions represent more of a foil than a foe. The third point of difference is economic sociology's qualified rejection of methodological individualism. Eventhough a great deal of the NES, including the work of Granovetter, has microsociological roots, there iswidespread acceptance of the view that explanations of economic phenomena that are constructed by"aggregating up" individual behaviors are at least problematic, if not fundamentally flawed. Economicsociologists typically invoke a range of structural, or at least mediating, factors in discussing the relationshipbetween individual actions and "aggregate" or systemlevel outcomes, paying more attention to class, race, andgender relations (Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer 2002). Not even instrumentalist behaviors arecontextfree. Self-interest is typically defined, economic sociologists insist, within the parameters of largercontexts of social action, while relations like trust, cooperation, power, and compliance act to drive a wedgebetween individual action and the overall configuration of the social networks in which they are embedded(Granovetter 2002). Their skepticism about methodological individualism leads economic sociologists to bemore careful about theorizing the connections between economic action at different scales or at different levelsof abstraction, yet they lack any consensus on how context matters. Although conceptions of networks andembeddedness invoke these contextual relations in a stylized and nonspecific way, economic sociologistsrealize that the ambiguity here may be a necessary form of ambiguity, since adequate explanations mayactually need to be situation specific. The way that context matters, in other words, is itself contextual."Although the concept of embeddedness is useful in understanding the sociological failings of standardneoclassical economics," Brian Uzzi (1996, 674) commented that "it does not explain concretely how social tiesaffect economic outcomes." Although there have been continuing attempts to systematize and "clean up" sociological explanation, one of itsdefining features remains a (perhaps necessary) level of complexity and indeterminacy. Dominant approachesto theory building are certainly different: Economics, at least in its neoclassical micro variants, relies on a highly simplified model of individual action(rational choice) and a simple mechanism (market equilibrium) to aggregate individual actions to derive system-level implications. Most sociology uses complicated models of individual behavior (including effects of values,prior experience, commitments, location in social networks, and context), and complicated mechanisms toaggregate interests and actions. (Baron and Hannan 1994, 1114) Yet while economic sociology has substantially defined its project in relation to that of orthodox economics, it isnot blindly staking out diametrically opposed stances on every issue. Instead, a generalized skepticism aboutconventional forms of economic reasoning, coupled with a growing unease with the imperialist claims thatorthodox economics has been staking on institutions, has helped economic sociology to construct a sense ofitself. An important expositional fact of life is that the alternative positions that economic sociology hasestablished are never going to be as singular and coherent as those that are defined by neoclassical economic

theory. Economic sociology does not have the luxury of such absolutist, reductionist, and essentialist forms oftheory construction, which contribute so much to the aesthetic force of blackboard proofs and the austereelegance of economic reasoning. While the economists have their "clean models," the economic sociologistsseem destined always to have "dirty hands" (Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman 1987; Smelser and Swedberg1994). Dirty Theory? Beneath the surface of economic sociology's loosely constructed theoreticalmethodological consensus,however, lies a much more profound set of ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions. Economic sociologylabors with a persistent theoretical identity crisis, reflecting the fact that it "lacks one dominating tradition"(Smelser and Swedberg 1994,4; see also Swedberg 1991). It counts among its founding figures Weber,Durkheim, Polanyi, Parsons, Schumpeter, and Marx. It will be a surprise to no one that the tensions,inconsistencies, and flat-out contradictions among these theoretical traditions have been impossible to reconcilewithin the NES. Smelser and Swedberg's (1994, 18) exploration of the theoretical lineages led them to concludethat this is a "fundamentally eclectic and pluralistic" field of inquiry: while "the influence of Weber and Parsonscan be seen," Polanyi represents little more than a "presence," as Marx, Schumpeter, and, to a lesser extent,Durkheim fade into the background. Significantly, Granovetter's (1990, 94) account of this intellectual movementdoes not refer to Polanyi (although in Polanyi's stead there is a stylized discussion of embeddedness), whilesociological work that is conducted in a "Marxist key" (such as industrial sociology, before and after Braverman)is characterized as effectively outside the NES project.3 Swedberg's (2004, 4) recent overview of the project,even while it radically understated the heterodox nature of the field more generally, concluded that "economicsociology is currently characterized by several theoretical approaches [but] a firm theoretical core is missing."Although in theoretical terms this may look like a pig's breakfast, in practice the eclecticism is distinctivelypatterned: the center of gravity of the project of NES is probably best characterized as neo-Weberian. Critical ofits neglect of structural factors, Bourdieu (2000, 39) portrayed the NES as a "reappropriation of Polanyi andWeber in U.S. sociology [along with] the development of 'network' analyses designed to move away from anatomized conception of economic agents." Michael Piore (1996, 742), a heterodox economist who may otherwise be expected to be sympathetic to theproject of economic sociology, was highly critical of Smelser and Swedberg's (1994) Handbook on the groundsof its inconsistency and incoherence: Economies, whatever its other characteristics, has intellectual coherence. .. . Against this background,economic sociology . . . comes across as completely eclectic, a enormous hodge-podge of ideas and insights,existing at all sorts of different levels of abstraction, possibly in contradiction with each other, possibly justincommensurate, without a basic theory or structure to sort them out, to order them, or to serve as a guide forresearch. In the face of this intellectual anarchy-the more generous term is Catholicism-what structure there ismust come per force from economics defined in the narrow sense. ... This makes economic sociology seemlargely derivative of economics, and a lot of it simplistic or quarrelsome. Of course, economic sociologists are far from oblivious to these difficulties. Smelser and Swedberg (1994,20)noted the tendency of the field to "sprawl," seeing the solution to this problem in terms of more concerted effortsto "sharpen the theoretical focus of economic sociology and to work toward synthetic interpretations of itsfindings." This view tends to produce a yearning for methodological integrity and theoretical synthesis-whichare, of course, conspicuous strategic strengths of orthodox economics, for all its other limitations. In substantiveterms, the search for a rigorous and distinctive center leads to a "tendency to see network patterns as adistinctive organizing motif of economic life" (Powell and Smith-Doerr 1994, 369). There could be a perverseecho of orthodox economic practice here, though, the pristine models and market essentialism of which help tomake the same regularized world that they seek to "explain" (see Gallon 1998; Mirowski 2002). Perhaps theNES runs a parallel risk of network essentialism?

While Granovetter (2002, 36) and others continue their search for a "unified theory" of economic sociology,there is unease in other quarters about whether the project should, or even could, define itself in such a way. AsRandall Collins (n.d., 3) editorialized, "there is no prospect in the near future for theoretical closure in economicsociology around a grand synthetic model." These awkward but fundamental questions continue to dog the fieldof economic sociology, contributing to a sense of continuing theoretical insecurity. They may also explain theNES's apparent preoccupation with renarrating its own history (see, especially, Swedberg 1990, 1997, 2004;Biggart 2002; Swedberg, Himmelstrand, and Brulin 1987; Guillén, Collins, England, and Meyer 2002), whichcan be read as a series of attempts to fix discursively the essence of the subfield, its common purpose, and itsboundaries.4 Yet for all these efforts, the intellectual project of the NES exists in an oddly symbiotic relationshipwith mainstream economics, continuing to react to orthodox economic precepts, rather than to transcend them,or adopting an entirely independent point of departure. The project has been defined and shaped by itsantipathies to mainstream economic practice, but this also means, ironically, that the shadow of economicscontinues to fall across much of this work. How, though, has economics responded? The Emperor Has No Ears An important precursor to the rise of the NES was the reawakening of interest in economic institutions withinmainstream economics. Beginning in the 1970s, but gathering momentum since the 1980s, neoclassicaleconomists have become increasingly concerned with applications of conventional economic reasoning toostensibly "noneconomic" spheres of social life, such as religion, crime, and marriage. Many have traced theorigins of this movement to Gary Becker's (1976) audacious treatise, The Economie Approach to HumanBehavior, in which Becker claimed that, "the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to allhuman behavior [which] can be viewed as involving participants who maximize their utility from a stable set ofpreferences and accumulate an optimal amount of information" (p. 14), and his advocacy of a framework thatwould be based squarely on "the combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stablepreferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly" (p. 5). This work effectively marked the end of the"gentleman's agreement" struck by Talcott Parsons and Lionel Robbins in the 1930s, which had demarcated theterritory of economics in terms of the rational choices of means in the service of given (and narrowly defined)ends and that of sociology in terms of institutional and cultural explanations of these ends (Ingham 1996b;Velthuis 1999; Hodgson n.d.). The behavior of contemporary economics has been imperialistic in the sense thatit has represented a form of intellectual colonization: there has been virtually no attempt to respond to, or learnfrom, the other intellectual cultures that have been encountered (see Michie, Oughton, and Willdnson 2002)."Economics," it has been immodestly claimed, "really does constitute the universal grammar of social science"(Hirshleifer 1985, 53). This ungentlemanly behavior by some economists and the "territorial overconfidence" that it reflected certainlyhelped to galvanize the revival of economic sociology (Smelser and Swedberg 1994, 18). The notion that theexistence of institutions can be put down to the need to find "efficient" solutions to market problems was one ofthe issues that led Granovetter (1985) to reclaim the space for more sociological accounts of institutionalproduction. Yet while the rhetoric of the NES may have been confrontational, its practice has been moreconciliatory. "Network sociology," in particular, seems to have been predicated on a reworked accommodationwith orthodox economics. Often microsociological in orientation, the NES sometimes sees itself in a kind ofcomplementary (if not complimentary) and reformist relationship with economics. As Granovetter (1990,95)noted: Many such [social network] analysts are mathematically inclined and thus not scared off by the techniques ofmicroeconomics; and since network analysis often takes the individual as a fundamental unit of analysis, it ismethodologically more individualist than some other sociological traditions. But the underlying conception ofnetwork arguments lends itself to a fundamental critique of the atomized conception of action in neoclassicaltheory. Thus, this group, close enough to appreciate economic arguments but different enough to offer a basic

critique, has been in a structurally strategic position.... [Neoclassical theory [is] flawed in [a way] that asociological perspective can highlight and help remedy. The brilliant achievements of neoclassical arguments inilluminating the efficient pursuit of welldefined preferences must be accompanied by an appreciation of theextent to which such pursuit is intertwined with noneconomic goals, and deeply embedded in structures of socialinteraction that extend backward in time and outward in space. Granovetter (1990, 98, 106) expressed a desire to see orthodox economic theory "strengthened," rather thanoverthrown, emphasizing that "I share with its proponents the positivist quest for general, universalexplanations." Speaking for the project as a whole, Smelser and Swedberg (1994, 20) optimistically hoped thatthe zone that is defined by "economic institutions" might be one of interdisciplinary engagement, echoingParsons in their desire to see the disciplines "cooperatfing] and coexist[ing]." While there may have been coexistence, there has been precious little cooperation, since mainstreameconomics has remained largely oblivious to these sociological attentions. Citation studies have revealed thatthe traffic has largely been in one direction, with economic sociologists engaging selectively with the economicsliterature, while mainstream economists have largely remained in their own world (Baron and Hannan 1994;Davern and Eitzen 1995; cf. Swedberg 1990; Krippner et al. 2004). Perhaps it is the case that, as Keen (2003,74) caustically observed, "economists have no ears." Although parts of the NES have sought to initiate areformist dialogue with economics, the influence on orthodox economic practice has been negligible. As Ingham(1996b, 244) argued in his assessment of the two fields, "economists and sociologists are largely ignorant ofeach others' work and intellectual inheritance and, despite significant encroachments from each side into theother's territory, the cores of the two subjects are probably moving further apart." It is important to recognize that neoclassical economics is not a singular enterprise (Tabb 1999; Mayhew n.d.),but at least in comparison with most of the alternative worldviews it confronts, it places a strong premium onintegrity and coherence. A side effect of this drive for essentialized coherence is that alternative ways of readingthe economic world are typically rendered, in comparison, as decentered, disorganized, undisciplined, messy,ad hoc, and opportunistic. Economic sociology shares this tactical disadvantage, the variegated researchprograms and disconnected thematic concerns of which "have just enough overlap or family resemblance to belumped together [though] its component strands vary a good deal in their militancy vis-à-vis neoclassicaleconomics and their drive to replace it with a new paradigm" (Collins n.d., 1). Ironically perhaps, given itslocation in the vanguard of the NES, network sociology has just about the least-militant attitude toward theeconomic mainstream. Networking Sociologists A key objective of network sociology has been to insist upon the existence of and then document the effects of"the mixture of economic and social purposes that motivate people while they are engaged in production,consumption, and distribution" (Granovetter 2002, 37). This microsociological perspective is typicallycomplemented with a searching set of questions concerning the nature of the various contexts that shape"economic" behavior. If action frameworks are not reducible to the aggregated outcomes of individual actions,as the critique of methodological individualism would suggest, then "the problem of how contexts of action ariseremains unresolved" (Granovetter 2002, 38; see also Uzzi 1996). And not only is the question an open one, it isone that is considerably beyond the reach of conventional economic theory, the central postulates of whichpresume the deep-freezing of such contextual factors. Once thawed, so the economic-sociological argument goes, these contextual factors meld with ostensibly"economic" relations in a way that makes it impossible to parse out rational-instrumentalist motivations fromthose that are related to, say, sociability or trust. In this context, Granovetter (2002) drew a telling distinctionbetween "horizontal" and "vertical" social relations-in which the former are largely nonhierarchical and concernissues like trust, cooperation, and solidarity, while the latter relate to hierarchical issues like power, domination,and compliance. He went on to concede that the NES has, in practice, been preoccupied with horizontal or

nonhierarchical relations, although in principle (need it really be said?), vertical or power relations are no lesssignificant in shaping socioeconomic behavior and economic institutions. The horizontal inclination of much ofthe NES is hardly accidental, however, since it reflects a fairly systematic tilt against the underlying principles ofpolitical economy and a great deal of macroeconomic sociology. Randall Collins (1995, 302) pointedly characterized Smelser and Swedberg's (1994) Handbook as a "triumphfor network sociology," while Samuel Bowles (1995, 306) contrasted its indebtedness to Williamsoniantransaction-costs economics with an apparent indifference to the question of class-"once the organizingprinciple of much work on economy and society," class and class analysis had become "virtually absent."Viviana Zelizer (2002, 109) made a parallel point about gender relations, which when they emerge at all in theNES tend to be read through the lens of network relations: "The result is to treat gender as one more attribute ofsingle, decisionmaking economic actors instead of an organizing principle of economic life." In networksociology, networks become (relatively concretized) condensates of both social agency and social structures:social agents act in the context of network relations, and the same relations mediate-albeit in a displaced andmuted way-structural forces (see Alexander 1992; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994). In other words, networksociology has its own way of freezing contextual relations, even as it insists on thawing out more of them thandoes orthodox economics. Granovetter's (1985) original formulation of the networks-and-embeddedness argument sought to tread a newpath between "oversocialized" conceptions of human action, which reduced the individual to a bearer of deeplyinternalized social relations, and the "undersocialized" actor that is homo economicus, an atomized individualwho has been stripped of all motives except utilitarian self-interest. He argued, in fact, that atomization is aconsequence of both underand oversocialized conceptions of human action: each interpret action in relativelymechanistic terms (say, through reduction to instrumental self-interest or recourse to relatively fixed socialidentities), while neither take much account of "ongoing social relations" or of the "immediate social context"(Granovetter 1985, 485, emphasis added). In the Granovetterian conception, necessarily fluid networks becomethe indirect carriers of social relations, and it is they that become the focal point for analysis, not the bigstructures (say, of patriarchy) that sit behind them. While Granovetter did not deny the causal significance ofthese deeper social structures, he declared that he was more concerned with the intermediating mechanisms ofthe social embedding process and their associated "proximate" sources of causality: I have had little to say about what broad historical or macrostructural circumstances have led Systems todisplay the social-structural characteristics they have, so I make no claims for this analysis to answer large-scale questions about the nature of modern society or the sources of economic or political change. But thefocus on proximate causes is intentional, for these broader questions cannot be satisfactorily addressed withoutmore detailed understanding of the mechanisms by which sweeping change has its effects. (Granovetter 1985,506-7) Having cut this intermediate path between under- and oversocialized conceptions of social action and havingfocused on midlevel understandings of market structure, it is notable that much of the subsequent dialogue inthe NES has been unidirectional-it has been a dialogue with economics, a dialogue about how to embed homoeconomicus, how to make him a somewhat more socially adept individual. This view was evident inGranovetter's (1985,507, emphasis added) initial concern with "social structure in the market" and, in thecontext of the subsequent theoretical research agenda, with "how the larger social setting determines theparameters within which interest is defined" (Granovetter 2002, 38; see also Beckert 1996). This approachunfreezes some, but not all, of the social context, and the outcome is correspondingly "slushy." In theeconocentric dialogue of much mainstream economic sociology, the scope for constructive engagement withrational-choice theories is invariably left open (see Granovetter 1985, 2002; Fligstein and Mara-Drita 1996).Within this conception, homo economicus has more of a social life, but he certainly has not been put to death onthe altar of feminist theory or class analysis.

Beyond Networks In her commentary on the field of economic sociology, Zelizer (2002) tellingly identified three categories of work:first, there is the extension of standard or modified forms of economic analysis to issues that are renderedmarginal in mainstream economics, such as household behavior; second, there are the various explorations ofthe contexts of economic action, which, for the most part, are seen to be embedded in interpersonal networks,organizational structures, or differentiated market forms; and third, there is an eclectic group of alternativeexplanations of economic activities and structures, which, by definition, are inconsistent with neoclassicaleconomic principles and range far and wide in terms of subject matter and theoretical foundations. Thesecategories may be regarded as, respectively, one, two, and three steps away from orthodox economics. AsZelizer (2002, 107) noted, the "first two approaches, extension and context, have predominated" in the NES.For the most part, the field has therefore been one or two steps away from economic orthodoxy, and much of itfaces in that direction. The focus has been on those relatively plastic social networks that are located in andaround the market and are amenable to concrete analysis. As Granovetter (1985, 487) stated: Actors do not behave as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for themby the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy. Their attempts at purposive actionare instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations. . . . [This] view of embeddedness altersour theoretical and empirical approach to the study of economic behavior. Capitalism and patriarchy, as historically constructed and geographically differentiated social systems, largelyfade into the background in this kind of analysis and indeed in much of the NES. Instead, the focus is resolutelyplaced on the middle ground of networks and contingencies, the aim being to "produce a theoretical argument[that is] consistent with the high level of contingency . . . operating in the actual construction of economicinstitutions, but to do so without sliding down the slippery slope into historicism" (Granovetter 1990, 107).Instead, Granovetter found himself on another slippery slope-this time toward a new kind of Parsonianappeasement. Bernard Barber (1995, 406-7) contended that Granovetter "shows no understanding of theimportance of the larger social systems in which all economies are located.... Where have the social structuresof kinship, stratification, age, gender, the economy, the polity, organizations, education, and communicationsdisappeared to?" These social structures are typically collapsed into the proximate and overconcretized notionof networks (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Ingham 1996a), which, in turn, are only contingently related toconcrete outcomes, just as they are only loosely connected to macrostructural forces. As Granovetter (1990,106) conceded, this kind of analysis can often be "frustrating because it relies so heavily on contingencies," thedesire to avoid any sense of historical or structural determination exposing the NES to the risk of theoreticalvoluntarism. While much of the rhetoric of the NES is focused on the alleged misdeeds of orthodox economics, perhapsmore revealing is the silence about Marxism, with which there is a studied nonengagement. The Handbook(Smelser and Swedberg 1994) is effectively indifferent both to regulation theories and to Marxian sociology(Ingham 1996a), while the substantive concerns of class and inequality have little place in the wider project ofthe NES, as Swedberg (2004) readily conceded. According to Bowles (1995, 306-7), "the new economicsociology takes a more horizontal view: Class has been subsumed by networks, organizational ecology,reciprocity, asset specificity, and other more benign concepts." And as Arrighi (2001,108) observed, this view isconnected to the project's microsociological inclinations: By its own admission, what makes the New Economic Sociology "new" in relation to the old is its emphasis on"networks" and "embeddedness." . . . The thesis that markets are embedded in social networks has been themain weapon in the . . . critique of the economists' belief in self-regulating markets. .. . Less recognized butmore fundamental is another difference: the distinctly "micro," "social-interactionist" approach of the NewEconomic Sociology in comparison with the distinctly "macro," "social-systemic" approach of the old economicsociology. With rare exceptions, the networks that are investigated link individuals or small groups over

relatively short periods of time. In any event, any investigation of "big structures" and "large processes" . . . liesalmost completely outside the realm of the New Economic Sociology, and so does anything resemblingBraudel's long durée. If the NES is fundamentally concerned with contextualizing economic behavior, then in its Granovetterian form,it means the relatively shallow context of proximate networks. And as they are invoked here, networks tend to"float," metaphorically speaking, between voluntaristic-individual action and relatively enduring social structures,which are typically investigated in "localized" contexts. Correspondingly, the manner in which institutions areconceptualized in much of this work, certainly in its Granovetterian strand, strongly reflects this generalorientation-as configurations of network ties or as congealed networks (Krippner 2001). Although Polanyi's name is often invoked in this context, the analytical procedures of mainstream economicsociology sit somewhat uneasily with Polanyi's project (see Krippner et al. 2004). Polanyi's approach was notconfined to the intramarket configuration of institutional relations, but began from the conception of markets aspolitical constructions, requiring significant and continuing state intervention (see Polanyi 1944; Block1991,1994, 2003; Jessop 2002). Moreover, Polanyi regarded stylized conceptions of institutional effects asinherently suspicious, advocating instead the careful historical analysis of institutions in their concretecomplexity: "Let us beware of the abstract generalizations in things economic that tend to obscure andoversimplify the intricacies of actual situations, for these actualities alone are our concern. Our task is to divestthem of generalities and grasp them in their concrete aspect" (Polanyi 1977; quoted in Krippner 2001, 780).Even though Granovetter (2002, 54) declared his intention to move away from a "focus on the mechanics ofnetworks alone," his embrace of a more abstract and synthetic notion of relational sociology seems oblivious toPolanyi's cautions. On the contrary, Granovetter (2002, 54, emphasis added), contended that his approach is"coterminous with the central concerns of any institutional analysis," despite the fact that the kind of holisticinstitutional analysis proposed by Polanyi entailed a far more thoroughgoing reconceptualization of theeconomic (see Block and Somers 1984).5 Granovetter's project, in contrast, is being (re)defined as one ofsynthetic unification, based on a form of theoretical coexistence with orthodox economics: If the comparative advantage of relational analysis is its indispensability for understanding trust, solidarity,cooperation, power, domination, compliance, norms, and identity, it does not follow that we should abandon thesophisticated analysis of how individuals pursue incentives in well-defined social spaces. This set of arguments,pursued for generations by . . . many of the best and brightest social scientists, has reached a high level ofrefinement. The most daunting agenda for a unified social science is to integrate such analyses with the morecontextually complex arguments of structural sociology. It is a rather special case where context stands still andis decoupled from rational action in a clearly identified social space, yet this special case has commanded thevast majority of intellectual resources poured into understanding the economy. The challenge ... is to buildtheory for the more general case where contexts, structures, and individual actions interact and changetogether. (Granovetter 2002, 54) In pursuit of a "unified," "integrated," and "refined" social science, involving some land of rapprochement witheconomics, the NES would apparently wish to offer up a relatively benign, stylized, sparse (and thereforerelatively easily "digestible") conception of the role of social context in economic action. The danger is that boththe market and the associated apparatus of neoclassical theory are left intact through such an analyticalmaneuver. Sociological concepts are being mobilized within the context of the market, less as a transcendentmetacritique of the market. Network sociology therefore seems to be becoming less, not more, disruptive of theanalytical routines of orthodox economics, rather than moving to the logical conclusion of developing alternativevisions and practices of economic analysis. Much that is sociological about economic sociology is thereforeundermined for the sake of a narrowly constructed engagement with mainstream economics.6 Sociology Goes to Market The traction of mainstream economic sociology has been severely undermined by a pervasive tendency to

conceptualize the market as somehow outside, beyond, or external to the various "more embedded," "moresocial," or "more institutionalized" spheres of economic life that represent the substantive concerns of thesubfield (lie 1991; Krippner 2001). The NES has yet to make a sufficiently strong claim on the market itself as afundamentally political construction, too often making do with a series of suggestive, though partial,contextualizations of market behavior. In some form or another, the "pure" market, and the instrumentalistbehaviors with which it is associated, continues to provide the more or less explicit foil against whichcontemporary accounts of the networked or embedded economy have been developed. Recall that Granovetter(2002, 54) later argued against the abandonment of "sophisticated analysis of how individuals pursue incentivesin welldefined social spaces," the bread and butter of orthodox economics, since this endeavor is apparentlyviewed as a complementary one. The tendency to defer to an idealized market, to place the market at the other end of the spectrum of moresocialized versions of the economy, or to rely in other ways on the abstract market as an analytical foil iswidespread, even in ostensibly heterodox economics (lie 1991; Barber 1995; Krippner 2001). The implicationsof this tendency are more than semantic, for they imply a continuing naturalization of some presocial market,even as they ostensibly seek to deconstruct this very formulation. This kind of slippage is clearly evident innetwork sociology, just as it is in Williamsonian economics and the associated strands of economic governancetheory; it even appears in some neoPolanyian work, in which various degrees of "marketness" ordisembeddedness are countenanced, and in approaches that sequester networks as a third, distinctive form ofeconomic organization (see Powell 1990; Williamson 1994). The argument that begins by asserting thatmarkets are socially constructed and then goes on to discuss the manner in which "more" or "less" socializedeconomic forms exist alongside the forces of supply and demand has apparently become as commonplace as itis logically incoherent. It rests on what Ingham (1996a, 555) appropriately characterized as an "extraordinarycontradiction." Are all economic phenomena socially constructed and embedded, or are some markets moreembedded than others? If all economies are social economies of one sort or another, then the utilitarianabstraction of the "pure" market is decidedly unhelpful, even as an (imagined) point from which to theorizesupposed deviations. The statement that markets are embedded is surely a qualitative one, not a matter ofdegrees. Krippner et al. (2004, 112) insisted that every transaction, no matter how instantaneous, is social in the broader sense of the term: congealed into everymarket exchange is a history of struggle and contestation that has produced actors with certain understandingsof themselves and the world which predispose them to exchange under a certain set of rules and not another. Inthis sense, the state, culture and politics are contained in every market act; they do not variably exert theirinfluence on some kinds of markets more than others. Social-economic theorizing, properly speaking, cannot start with the idealized market and then work outward toprogressively "less marketlike" variants of the same; neither should it meekly accept that contextfree economicaction is simply a "rather special case" (Granovetter 2002, 54). This is what Williamson (1994) did by visualizingmarkets in an axial relationship with certain hierarchical forms and the immediate "institutional environment"within which the economy operates, beyond which there is only "tosh." And while tosh may indeed be a "sourceof interesting variety [which] adds spice to life," he insisted that it must not be confused with the "core featuresof institutional environment," like legal rules and market regulations (Williamson 1994, 98). Granovetter drewthese lines differently, using different terminology, but drew them he did. For Krippner (2001, 799-800), the embeddedness concept has led scholars to layer a social economy on top of a pre-social and untheorizedmarket. In contrast, network theorists explicitly examine the market, but the social content is distilled away fromsocial structure. ... It is both telling and troubling that, given the way in which the paradigm of economicsociology has been formulated, sociologists have only been able to study markets by stripping them of thefeatures that most make them social. The concept of embeddedness posits that the world of the market existsapart from society even as it attempts to overcome that divide. . . . [A]s long as the market is treated as alien to

social, political, and cultural forms, it will be in a position to pre-empt more tenuous understandings of socialpractices. Paradoxically, the NES project may have contributed to the very naturalization of markets that it set out totranscend, theorizing context and embeddedness in such a way that it has proved relatively easy to decantthem off from an ostensibly presocial market. Of course, not all of economic sociology proper is vulnerable tothis critique (ironically, its own critique). Important exceptions include Block's (1994, 1996) contributions on thepolitical economy of state intervention, the historical analyses of the politics of market making in Dobbin (1994)and Fligstein (2001), certain strands within the "varieties of capitalism" school (see Hollingsworth and Boyer1997), lie's (1991, 1993, 1997) post-Polanyian sociologies of the market, and Zelizer's (1994) work on economicculture. But the positive theoretical program that engages frontally with markets has progressed only in fits andstarts. As Fligstein (2001, 8) argued, much of the recent literature on the sociology of markets is concerned withmarkets largely as empirical objects, with any conceptual unity stemming from a shared rejection of neoclassicaltheory: "sociological approaches lack a broader, organizing frame to understand economic processes asgeneric social processes operating in a particular institutional situation." "The major downfall of the network approaches," Fligstein and Mara-Drita (1992,20, quoted in Swedberg 1997)argued, "is that they are such sparse structures that it is difficult to see how they can account for what weobserve. . . . [T]hey contain no model of politics [and] no social preconditions for market exchanges." Within theNES, networks are often placed in some parallel conceptual universe, sequestered both from markets, on theone hand, and power relations, on the other hand. Ironically, this process confers on networks some decidedly"marketlike" properties-floating, decentered, spontaneous, self-organizing, objects of analytical deference.7Network-centric analyses therefore share certain features with the market-centric analyses they purport totranscend: politics and power are rendered contingent and contextual, and, as a result, they are onlyhaphazardly theorized; the bloodless, overendowed, and underspecified concept of the market is replaced with,or complemented by, the anemic, overendowed, and underspecified concept of the network. Zelizer (2002, 117) maintained that economic sociology must commit more fully to the "theoretical challenge"that, implicitly at least, lies at the heart of the project: "Instead of huddling in the corner designated for them byconventional economic analysis, economic sociologists should move freely through the whole range ofeconomic life." Fundamentally, this statement surely means taking on the market and its theorization, not ekingout strategies for respectful coexistence. It means once and for all rejecting the Parsonian pact that hasimplicitly shaped the parameters of the NES (Stark 2000). This is where economic geography has a potentiallypositive role to play, at least if it can be rooted in some way in a principled rejection of market essentialism anduniversal rationality. If the promise of a more robust economic sociology entails embracing the concept of the"always embedded economy" (Block 2003), then a complementary task in economic geography may involveexplorations of the everywhere embedded economy. If the first tends to privilege the historical contextualizationof actually existing economies, the latter would take it one step further-analyzing the historical geographies ofvariegated, hybridized, and unevenly developed economies. Part 2: Not (Just) Networks-Spatializing Economic Sociology Understandably, the project of economic sociology, qua project, has been substantially preoccupied with issuesthat it may potentially make its own: embedded networks. Increasingly, though, the limitations of "pure" networkapproaches are becoming evident (Podolny and Page 1998; Krippner 2001; Granovetter 2002). The networkoptic has shed new light on variegated forms of social relations beyond markets and hierarchies, although itmust be acknowledged that these are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive spheres of economic life.The logical implication of this position is an antagonistic attitude toward orthodox economic theory, yet thereformist wing of the NES seems, in practice, reluctant to acknowledge this implication, focused as it remains onthe (distant) project of a rapprochement with the neoclassical mainstream. Against this strategy, this sectionargues the case for moving beyond networks, which necessarily entails transcending the restrictive axes and

narrow register of the dialogue between network sociology and orthodox economics. It does so not simply out ofcontrariness, but to explore a different kind of (largely unexplored) common ground between economicgeography and economic sociology-characterized here as social-constructionist macroeconomic sociology-inwhich the potential for genuinely productive exchange would appear to be considerable, if as yet unrealized. In some respects, the ground has already been prepared for such an exchange. On the economic geographyside, much of the recent theoretical discussion of networks has been pushing in a similar (critical) direction:making the case for providing more political-economic "content" within network analyses, for taking(asymmetrical) power relations more seriously, and for locating networks within their macroeconomic andmacroinstitutional contexts (see Amin and Hausner 1997; Olds and Yeung 1999; Leitner, Pavlik, and Sheppard2002; Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001; Henderson et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2003; Gertler 2002; Yeung2003). Among other things, it involves moving beyond the micro- and mesoanalytical scales that tend to beprivileged in network theories; it also means unfreezing much more of the social and spatial context within whichnetwork relations operate, and it demands that the theoretical and methodological implications ofnonessentialist forms of economic analysis are embraced. Meanwhile, on the economic sociology side, variousstrands of macroeconomic sociology have, for some time, been associated with arguments regarding thediversity of capitalist systems, the politics of market making, the local specificities of economic institutions, andthe social construction of economic formations, all of which have the potential to connect in fertile ways withcontemporary currents in economic geography (see Burawoy 1985; Stark 1996; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997;Block 2000; Jessop 2002; Sayer 2002). Here, there is also a concern to take power and politics much moreseriously, although the engagement with issues around space, place, and uneven development remains, at thispoint, a second- or third-order concern. Despite this potential, only occasionally has economic geography appeared on the radar screen of economicsociology, broadly defined. Its European strand has a continuing interest in industrial districts and regionaldevelopment, which has led to some communication between the disciplines (see Beckert and Swedberg 2001;Triglia 2002), but the NES in the United States has remained largely impervious. The exception that proves thisrule is Saxenian's (1994) work on regional industrial networks, although the manner in which this work is read isrevealing. While Saxenian's comparative analyses of Route 128 and Silicon Valley have delved deeply into theregional roots of industrial practices, new economic sociologists have tended to boil down such effects tonetwork contexts. So, the Californian case speaks to Granovetter (2002, 35) as an account of "an extraordinaryamount of trust among companies and individuals who are nominally in competition with one another." TheBoston case, in contrast, is interpreted as a representation of the other in network relations: here, the absenceof trust is associated with regional economic malaise. While there was an extensive discussion of networks inSaxenian's (1994) Regional Advantage, the account did not rest on such narrow foundations-it is a "thicker"economic geography than Granovetter's reading would suggest. Saxenian's multifaceted interrogation ofregional production cultures drew attention to what Michael Storper called their "superadditive" properties, thesocial "glue" that holds together these mesoinstitutional systems beyond the bare bones of transactionalrelationships and network architectures (see "Discussion of Regional Advantage" 1995, 204). There is perhaps an echo here of economic sociology's own failure to convince mainstream economics of thesignificance of context: the relatively spaceless field of economic sociology, which, like orthodox economics,also has its synchronie impulses, has yet to appreciate the significance of geographic context and spatialembeddedness, tending to reduce place and space to stylized, categorical-taxonomic or system-likecharacteristics, while paying practically no attention to uneven geographic development, place making, or scalarconstitution. What matters for the NES is the immediate social context, viewed through the lens of networks,and the way in which these contexts matter is typically much more stylized than one would find in economic-geographic discussions of place and locality (after Massey 1984). The NES hankers for "rigorous" andparsimonious forms of analysis in which the messy specificities of place are leached out.8 The failure to

excavate "context" more deeply in the NES-bringing in more history as well as more geography-does notrepresent a mere oversight. In network sociology, in particular, the leaning toward synchronie and synthetictheorizing reflects the wider ambition of getting in synch with orthodox economics. Invoking what Williamson(1994) would call "tosh" would be decidedly unhelpful to this cause. Out of Synch In contrast with the NES, macroeconomic sociology generally favors more radical, heterodox readings of theeconomy, readings that are more disruptive of orthodox conceptions and analytical routines. It shares withradical political economy, feminist economics, more robust forms of institutional economics, and the postautisticeconomics movement, in general (see Fullbrook 2003), a desire to develop alternative forms of (institutional andpolitical) economic analysis, one component of which involves the simultaneous deconstruction of the marketand neoclassical economics. From this perspective, then, comes a simple answer to the nagging question, inboth the NES and (the new) economic geography, concerning if and how to fashion a constructive dialogue withorthodox economics: don't. More than a petulant stance, this represents an acknowledgment of distortions andlimitations that tend to accompany attempts to communicate with orthodox economics. The dividing linebetween those who see this uncompromising position as unnecessarily confrontational and those who regard itas both politically and theoretically essential is the defining feature of the accommodationalist/militant tension ineconomic sociology (see Collins n.d.; Zelizer 2002), just as it seems to be assuming increasing importance ineconomic geography (see Clark 1998; Martin 1999; "Debating Economic Geography" 2001). It would be an exaggeration to say that this division is an acrimonious or polarizing one, either in geography orsociology, but as a line of diagnostic demarcation, it certainly has salience. Although explicit accommodationwith orthodox economics is a minority pursuit in both disciplines, where the prevailing sentiment probably fallssomewhere between indifference, skepticism, and militancy, weighing the issue is not simply a matter ofcounting heads in the various "camps." Rather, it is the qualitative character of the respective intellectualprograms that varies, and in a potentially significant way. The accommodationalist tendency tends to besomewhat more organized, disciplined, and coherent, since its rules of engagement are, for the most part,exogenously determined: to get the ear of economics, first use the language of economics-formal methods,clean models, and mechanical reasoning. As Williamson (1994, 77), who has attempted this feat with somesuccess from a different structural position, put it, "Tell economists something that they did not previously knowabout phenomena of interest to them, display the logic, and demonstrate that the data line up: that will get theirattention." Since almost nothing else will, this amounts to a fairly unambiguous, if still massively difficult, task.Meanwhile, there are no such preordained rules of engagement in the large, residual elements of botheconomic sociology and economic geography that are disinclined to communicate with economics in suchconstraining, pregiven terms. Here, amid the generally tolerant heterodoxy, pluralism and eclecticism tend tohold sway; only occasionally are there common causes or even widely shared concerns. Hirsch, Michaels, andFriedman (1987, 320) might just as easily have been describing the general climate in economic geography, forexample, when they observed that "in comparison [with economics], sociology seems proudly diverse, even ifalmost adolescent and continually suffering mini-identity crises." In fact, the intellectual cultures in economicgeography and economic sociology are similar in many respects, particularly when viewed in relation toeconomics. In contrast to the high-church culture of orthodox economics-with its absolutist belief system, piouspractices, and preference for monastic introspection-economic sociology and economic geography both exhibita loosely defined and worldly agnosticism. In more concrete terms, Baron and Hannan's (1999, 1118) depictionof conventions of graduate training in sociology strongly echo those of geography, and in both cases thecontrast with economics is telling: Since the demise of functionalist theory in the 1960s, sociology has lacked a dominant paradigm; courses insociological theory expose students to a panoply of (partly competing) theoretical approaches. Students usuallyare encouraged to regard the set of perspectives as comprising a "toolkit" that any good sociologist ought to

have at hand in analyzing social phenomena. This encourages sociologists to develop arguments "horizontally"(bringing more kinds of arguments to bear on a problem). In contrast, economists are taught to operate"vertically," taking a single line of argument and pushing its implications as far as possible. ... Sociological workthat uses much of the toolkit generally receives a broad positive reaction; work that pursues a single line ofargument is often derogated as "narrow." This is not just a matter of disciplinary cultures, however. At a theoretical level, economic geography andeconomic sociology share an antipathy-sometimes instinctive, sometimes formal-to rational-choice modelingand methodological individualism (see Hirsch, Michaels, and Friedman 1987; Barnes and Sheppard 1992).Methodological individualism rests on the contention that "the elementary unit of social life is the individualhuman action," so that to "explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result ofthe action and interaction of individuals" (Elster 1989, 13). The concept of rational choice builds on thisframework by proposing that the cumulative consequences of rationally chosen individual actions tend to beoptimally efficient for society and that rational action should be the benchmark against which all social action isevaluated. After Durkheim, it has been argued that sociological arguments are those that, by definition, are notreducible to such individualistic bases, since they relate to those "social facts" that necessarily adhere tocollective, group, or associational entities. The domain of sociological inquiry is correspondingly defined asthose "ways of acting, thinking, and feeling" that are social in the sense that "their source is not in the individual,their substratum can be no other than society" (Durkheim 1938, 3). The NES seeks to split the difference between what are portrayed as over- and undersocialized conceptions ofhuman action. It is this theoretical third way that produces the exaggerated emphasis on networks as a distinctmode of economic organization and as a framework for interpreting economic action that is both "more social"than methodological individualism and "less deterministic" than the sociological mainstream. While this kind ofcompromise may be appealing to some in economic geography, it is surely not without significance that thereformulation of network approaches that has occurred in the subdiscipline has been associated, more oftenthan not, with a push toward more seriously socialized and more deeply contextualized treatments (see Dicken,Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001). Not all the frailties of Granovetterian sociology have been imported uncriticallyinto economic geography, although in practice, it remains to be seen whether the deployment of a "networkoptic" will tend to throw some socioinstitutional relations out of focus, just as it privileges others. Implicitly orexplicitly, macroinstitutional factors, structural inequalities, and competitive dynamics all tend to receive lessattention in analyses that focus on the middle ground of proximate, horizontal networks (see Sayer 2002). In the economic sociology literature, this is one of the primary reasons for the disconnect between networkmicrosociology and the evolving bodies of work around comparative political economy, the varieties-of-capitalism school, and extensions of Polanyian analysis (see Evans 1995; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997; Halland Soskice 2001; Block 2002; Burawoy 2003; Silver and Arrighi 2003), all of which have, relatively speaking, amore macroinstitutional and structural orientation and take arguments about the sociopolitical construction ofeconomies more seriously. It is interesting that this work has also received less attention in economicgeography, in contrast to the recent preoccupation with networks and embeddedness.9 Although economicgeography certainly shares with sociology a strong sense of skepticism about the "market optic" of orthodoxeconomics-within which a narrow range of exchange relations is imposed on the entire system of economicorganization, markets being presented as both normatively and logically superior (Sayer 2002)-the positivetheoretical and methodological program that may follow from this skepticism has yet to be defined in economicgeography. As Gordon Clark (1998, 83) cautioned, the embrace of empirical diversity and theoretical pluralismmay be enervating, but it is not likely to be enough: "Resuscitating commitment to collective intellectual enquiryis an essential task for economic geography." Likewise, Martin and Sunley (2001,153) observed that we are far from convinced that many of today's "new" (cultural) economic geographers have a detailedunderstanding of institutional economics, evolutionary economics, social economics, economic sociology, or

any of the other of the heterodox fields of economic theory. . . . The subject is becoming littered with terms andnotions "cherry-picked" from this or that branch of heterodox economics or social or cultural theory, which thenrapidly become accepted and assigned an unquestioned profundity before they have been adequately definedand conceptualised. Indeed, the majority of new concepts now go uncontested. The term "embeddedness,"taken from economic sociology, typifies this trend. Nowhere has this term been properly defined or theorised bythe new economic geographers, yet it is now firmly established as part of economic geography's conceptualvocabulary. In some respects, the networks-andembeddedness paradigm seems to lend itself to soft-focus treatments ofcapitalism, in which the roles of power and inequality are not so much denied but gently sidelined through theprivileging of the horizontal relations of trust, reciprocity, and associativity. So, as Sayer (2002, 49-50) observed,the "metaphor of embeddedness sounds soft and comforting, and possibly sends our critical faculties to sleep,but what it describes can, on occasion, be harsh and oppressive.... [A]t the same time as it highlights apparentlysofter versions of capitalism, it has little or nothing to say about issues of distribution and inequality." Economicgeographers have certainly not been oblivious to the limitations of benign forms of network analysis (see Aminand Hausner 1997; Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001), but, at the same time, some of its suggestivemetaphors and stylized arguments have passed into the literature in ways that often neutralize or obfuscaterelations of power, domination, exploitation, and inequality while demoting structural forces and conjuncturalcontexts to the sidelines. In as far as economic geography is a critical project, these are serious silences.Addressing them need not imply ending the fledgling conversation with economic sociology, but it surely mustentail selectively broadening and deepening this conversation. And this may mean spending less time talkingnetworks and more time engaging with macroeconomic sociology and with heterodox economics moregenerally. The problem, from an economicgeographic perspective, is that unsituated network approaches areonly "weakly contextual" (Gertler 2002, 89).10 The NES's continuing attempts to get in synch with orthodoxeconomics mean that the role of context must be weak or, at least, highly stylized. The economic geography ofthis world is banal and cartoonlike (regions with trust and regions without, networked spaces and hierarchicalplaces, cities with buzz and cities without, learning regions and dumb regions, and so forth). History, geography,and social relations are stripped out or stripped down in such treatments; "context" and conjuncture are reducedto background scenery, sketched out only in the broadest of strokes. It need not be like this, though. There areparts of economic sociology that do take historical conjunctures and institutional contexts seriously, even if theyhave yet to take geography seriously. In contradistinction to the NES, these currents may be characterized asforms of macroeconomic sociology. In contrast to the self-consciously organized advance of network sociology, the various strands ofmacroinstitutional work in economic sociology do not have such an easily defined center. Instead, there are atleast two contemporary currents of macroeconomic sociology-one that is organized around the varieties-of-capitalism rubric and the other that may be described as social constructivist or generically neo-Polanyian. Onereason, perhaps, why there is less of a sense of shared endeavor here than in the parallel strand of networksociology is that the connections between these two more macro approaches seem, if anything, to beloosening. They may even be headed in different directions. Potential affinities with economic-geographic workare evident in both lines of work, although in neither case have the links been firmly established. Both arearguably deserving of more serious attention within economic geography, although again the appropriatequestions concern which economic sociologies to engage with and around which issues. Capitalism, Now in Two Varieties? Hall and Soskice (2001, 6) characterized the varieties-of-capitalism approach as a form of "firm-centeredpolitical economy," the focus of which has been on the comparative analysis of developed capitalist economies.With origins in modernization theory (which was always state centric in orientation), neocorporatism (whichplaced analytical priority on the role of unions), and the social-systems-of-production approach (which privileged

production regimes and dynamics), this body of work has been preoccupied since the 1980s with thecomparative analysis of "coordinated market economies," such as Germany and Japan, and "liberal marketeconomies," such as the United States and the United Kingdom. The superior economic performance of theformer, more coordinated systems galvanized much of this work during the 1980s (see Dore 1987; Albert 1993),when a subtext was a shared antipathy to the ReaganThatcher experiments and a progressive preference formore organized, deliberative, and welfare-oriented approaches to economic development. On the face of it, theascendancy of neoliberal regimes during the 1990s severely undermined this story, pointing as it apparently didto the superiority of market-based approaches in this after-Fordist "war of the capitalisms." In fact, these abrupt changes in national economic fortunes underline a deeper theoretical point: that theappropriate basis for comparison between economic systems is qualitative difference, taking full account ofinstitutionalized specificities, not deference to some transcendental measure of "efficiency." So the relativesuccess of neoliberal regimes during the 1990s did not reflect an inevitable triumph of unfettered markets or"purer" forms of capitalism, but could be traced, first, to a series of situated advantages and institutionalparticularities of, say, the British and American models and second, to the tendency for "bad capitalisms toundermine the good" in the context of liberalized financial and trading regimes (see Gray 1998; Block 2000).This was not a simple story, then, of superior or inferior forms of capitalism (even though it was often told in thisway), but instead reflected the uneven (and dynamically interrelated) performance of qualitatively differentiatedinstitutional regimes. In early manifestations of the varieties-of-capitalism rubric, different "national capitalisms"were taken to represent distinctively institutionalized pathways of political-economic development, not simplyvariants or distortions of an otherwise normalized free-market model. On this basis, economic sociologistssubsequently responded to the debate on globalization by challenging notions of straightforward institutionalconvergence around "scaled up" Anglo-American norms, insisting instead that national economies will continueto respond to the pressures, opportunities, and constraints that are associated with globalization in ways thatreflect institutional legacies, cultural contingencies, and political strategies (see Berger and Dore 1996; Crouchand Streeck 1997; Triglia 2002). Some have suggested that the appropriate theoretical challenge, in fact, is toexplain the ongoing divergence of national capitalisms, which continues to be demonstrable on many measures(Hancke 1999; Whitley 1999; Soskice 1999). The adaptive capacity of some national regimes may be greaterthan others, of course, since the coordinated market economies seem to have found themselves at a strategicdisadvantage in the face of neoliberal globalism, at least in the short run (see Crouch and Streeck 1997; Wadeand Veneroso 1998; Dore 200O).11 This said, even if the pressures emanating from a more price-competitiveand unstable global economy tend to induce "generic" responses like welfare-state downsizing and labor-market flexibilization, it is certainly not the case that the institutional form of these responses is structurallydetermined. Neoliberalization, in this context, need not and indeed does not lead to simple convergence, and,by the same token, its manifestations are always hybrids, always couched within relations of unevendevelopment (see Peck and Tickell 2002; Peck 2004). Path dependency is one of the central motifs of the varieties-of-capitalism school. Yet the concept of path-dependent adjustment, within which social action is constrained and channeled by accumulated institutionallegacies, may be prone to Granovetter's (1985) original critique of "oversocialization." In practice, path-dependency arguments tend to focus on situations in which decision making is "locked in," having less to sayabout those path-altering moments when creative or revolutionary "breakouts" from institutionalized patterns ofsocial action may occur, either in principle or in practice (Crouch and Farrell 2002). Another consequence of thesomewhat introverted nature of these analyses is that they exhibit a pervasive "systemcentricity." And morethan this, national institutional systems are assumed to have a high level of internal integrity and congruence:Hancké (1999) argued that the varieties-of-capitalism approach rests on a "supermodular" conception ofinstitutional systems, within which national institutional ensembles are seen to be associated with strong pathdependencies. This is not simply an article of faith, but follows from unique complementarities between

constituent elements of the system, say, between the labor-market regime and the structure of the financialsystem.12 Although these arguments have been advanced empirically, there are still open theoretical questionsthat are related to the internal coherence and complementarity of specifically national systems and around the"tightness" (or necessity) of the fit between the different constituent elements of these systems (see Hall 1997;Hancké 1999; Ebbinghaus and Manow 2001). Orthodox economists, of course, typically find these loose,unsystematic, irregular, and contingent relationships extremely ad hoc (Richter 2001). Yet it is surely importantto acknowledge that institutional integrity, whether at the level of national "systems" or other scales, must bedemonstrated, not assumed. Correspondingly, the proposition that such post hoc functionalities necessarily oreven tendentially adhere to national-scale institutions, and therefore that "meaningful variety" is typicallyanchored at this scale, must also be an open question, in light of recent arguments about regionalization,"hollowing out," local capitalisms, transnationalization, and so forth. In principle, the varieties-of-capitalism approach can be applied at the sectoral or regional level, though theoverwhelming majority of work in this area has focused fairly unproblematically on the national state as thenaturalized unit of analysis. As Hall and Soskice (2001, 4, 16) stated: [W]e focus on variation among national political economies. Our premise is that many of the most importantinstitutional structures-notably systems of labor market regulation, of education and training, and of corporategovernance-depend on the presence of regulatory regimes that are the preserve of the nation-state [.. .] It ispossible to apply the general analytical framework ... to variations at the regional or sectoral level [whichprovide] an additional layer of support for particular types of coordination [and which enhance] a nation'scapacity to support a range of corporate strategies and production regimes. The scope effectively to "regionalize" the varieties of capitalism approach may be more restricted than Hall andSoskice implied, however, since the general thrust of the research in this field seems to be to systematize"variety" in relatively orthodox terms and in terms that merely reposition the Archimedean point of the market atthe end of a different axis (between coordinated and liberal market systems), rather than to unpack the sourcesand consequences of this variety at other scales of analysis. Although in the earlier stages of the developmentof the varieties-of-capitalism approach, common cause was being made with regulation theory and other morestructural-institutional traditions (see Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997), pointing to potential areas of contact witheconomic geography, its more recent development has been more economistic and perhaps lessaccommodating. Echoing the techniques of orthodox economics, the strategy has been to seek theoreticalclarity through the revelation of the microfoundations of institutional systems. Apart from passing references to the Third Italy and Baden WOrttemberg, the thrust of more recent work hasbeen to integrate the analysis of institutions, suitably modified, into rational-choice microeconomics. So, thesearch for a "general theory" of institutional complementarities led Hall and Gingerich (2001, 3) to assume that"firms are the central actors in the economy," the behavior of which "aggregates to national economicperformance." The rational-choice tail here is clearly beginning to wag the institutional dog. Thus, emphasis isduly placed on the capacity of institutions to "resolve coordination problems," contributing to "attaining therelevant equilibrium in contexts of coordination," the tortuously logical conclusion of which is that "theconstruction of coordinating institutions should be seen as a second-order coordination problem of considerablemagnitude" (Hall and Soskice 2001, 6,12,14). There is a fairly significant twist on the orthodox rational-choiceapproach here, however, since it is argued that there are situations in which (corporate) strategy and decisionmaking follow (institutional) structure, rather than precede it. Using techniques like game theory, the objective ofthis formalized strand of the varieties-of-capitalism approach is to resituate rational action in the context ofnational institutional systems (or stylized readings of these systems), rather than to take on the concept ofrational action itself. Rationality is not presumed to be universal, but is effectively rescaled around nationalinstitutional systems, each with their own coherent rationalities: "our approach predicts systematic differences incorporate strategy across nations, and differences that parallel the overarching institutional structures of the

political economy" (Hall and Soskice 2001, 15, emphasis added). The varieties-of-capitalism approach is moving away from the close socioinstitutional analyses of "real" nationaleconomies in favor of more abstract discussions of coordinated versus liberal systems, coupled withgametheoretic experimentation and parsimonious theoretical analysis. National economies seem on the way tobecoming data units, rather than objects of empirical analysis in their own right, while the concept of modes ofcoordination is abstracted away from the real economies that were the basis of the original generalization.Compounding the commonplace economic-sociological fallacy of counterpoising more or less socioinstitutionalreadings of the economy with an essentially neoclassical image of "the market," the varieties-of-capitalismapproach seems to be consigning itself to one end of a questionable theoretical continuum. Expressing aperhaps surprising degree of deference to the methodological routines and theoretical priorities of orthodoxeconomics, Hall and Gingerich (2001, 3-4) constructed their case in the following way: The varieties of capitalism approach draws a distinction between two modes of coordination. In one, firmscoordinate with other actors primarily through competitive markets, characterized by arms-length (sic) relationsand formal contracting. Here, equilibrium outcomes are dictated primarily by relative prices, market signals, andfamiliar marginalist considerations. In the other modality, firms coordinate with other actors through processesof strategic interaction of the kind [that is] typically modeled by game theory. Here, equilibrium outcomesdepend on the institutional support available for the formation of credible commitments, including support foreffective information-sharing, monitoring, sanctioning, and deliberation. ... At one end of the spectrum standliberal market economies . . . where relations between firms and other actors are coordinated primarily bycompetitive markets. At the other end are coordinated market economies . . . where firms typically engage inmore strategic interaction with trade unions, suppliers of finance, and other actors. . . . Market coordination is afamiliar concept in neo-classical economics, and the United States is a typical liberal market economy. So, in this orthodox form of reification, cases become types, and neoclassical textbook conditions prevail in theUnited States! Hall and Gingerich went on to make the point that firms will (rationally) choose between marketand strategic coordination strategies on the basis of their assessment of the prevailing operating environment,opting for the latter where markets are "fluid" and the former-which increasingly sounds like a suboptimal orsecond-best choice-"[w]here markets are imperfect." The institutional landscape invoked here is a largely inertone (Ebbinghaus and Manow 2001), since attention has been turned to the problematic of rational action in thisinherited environment. This form of reasoning is therefore increasingly incapable of surviving sociology's owncritique of orthodox economics, since surely all (actually existing) markets are imperfect and impure, in so far asthey are all embedded, albeit in contingent ways, in extra-economic institutions (see Barber 1995; Jessop2002). In its efforts to overcome what Barber (1977) called the "absolutization of the market," this variant ofeconomic sociology may now be shoring up this very distinction, even going so far as to sequester different"appropriate" analytical routines for the market and submarket systems, while implying that some varieties ofcapitalism are purer than are others. The varieties-of-capitalism approach has become increasingly preoccupiedwith the task of theorizing the market's "other," but in terms that circuitously secure a revisionist form ofeconomic imperialism. And while progressive and creative theoretical impulses can still be found in thisliterature, the reliance on increasingly stylized national ideal types may be constraining and limiting the project.The scope for building constructive connections between this literature and economic geography is likely to beconstricted if the trend toward orthodox formalization continues. In principle, economic geographers tend to bemore concerned with opening up sources of economic variety and diversity, rather than narrowing them down tonationally based ideal types, or theorizing them around some privileged "center," like the idealized market, orwhat some take to be its earthly surrogate, liberalized capitalism, U.S. style. But having said that economicgeographers may be inclined to search for more variety, not less, it must also be acknowledged that thechallenge of demonstrating variety-for example, between different "local capitalisms"-has only fitfully been takenup. Economicgeographic contributions have barely penetrated the varieties-of-capitalism literature, despite the

scope for mutuallyinforming engagement. Capitalisms: Under Construction If the varieties-of-capitalism approach is succumbing to what McCloskey (n.d.) characterized as"econowannabeism," an arguably more fruitful line of inquiry is being pursued by a variegated group ofneoPolanyians. In Krippner's (2001) terms, these neo-Polanyians have defined the analysis of concreteeconomic forms as a positive analytical program, one that perforce must embrace the critical deconstruction ofwhat pass for "market" structures and relations (see also Mitchell 1998). The casual equation of markets,neoclassical analysis, and American capitalism, Hall-andGingerich-style, has no place here. The starting pointfor this kind of work is the explicit rejection of presocial conceptions of the market, coupled with an antipathytowards assertions about the "natural" state of capitalist relations. Fred Block (2002,223) has sought tocharacterize this approach as one based on the notion of capitalism as a constructed system: [B]oth within societies and as an international system, capitalist arrangements are not natural but need to beconstantly constructed and reconstructed. Capitalism cannot rely on simple continuity over time because it iscontinually generating new conflicts and contradictions that have to be resolved or contained through consciousactivity. .. . The market system is based on the illusion that factors of production-including land, labor, andmoney-are commodities that are produced for sale on a market. This commodity status must be assumedbecause otherwise there is no assurance that the price mechanism will equilibrate supply and demand.However, land, labor, and money are not true commodities; they were not really produced for sale on themarket. The constant work of "constructing capitalism" is the effort needed to paper over this yawning gapbetween reality and the market model. Even as market discourses become increasingly pervasive, the prosaic reality is that capitalism requiresperpetual institutional reinvention. There is no Holy Grail in which neoclassical analysis, neoliberal dogma, andactually existing American capitalism are conjoined in a final, contradictionfree synthesis. The work ofreconstructing capitalism is continuous and, despite some appearances to the contrary, there is no rule book. In the face of neoliberal fatalism, this conception is potentially liberating in both theoretical and political terms,since it draws explicit attention to some of the ways in which progressive reconstructions of this variegatedcapitalism may be conceived-up to and including transformation of the system. Moreover, there is no need todeny the less-than-accommodating realities of neoliberal geopolitics while doing so. As Block (2002, 224) noted: [T]here are many varieties of capitalism and there are many different ways that these varieties can bearticulated together into a global system. Some systems of articulationlike the ones favored by neoliberals-operate to reduce varieties of capitalism that are possible at the national or regional level; but other systems ofarticulation are consistent with much greater variety at the national or regional level. It also follows that just asdifferent varieties of capitalism can have dramatically differing levels of inequality or of economic insecurity forpoor and working people, different systems of international articulation might be more or less consistent withreforms favoring subordinate classes. Although these observations provide an intriguing point of departure, Block (2002, 224, emphasis added) readilyconcedes that "it is not enough to say that capitalism is a constructed system. The task is to illuminate how it isconstructed: to see how a diverse and often contradictory set of practices are welded together to producesomething that has the appearance of being a natural and unified entity." Fundamentally, this is a task fortheoretically informed concrete research, and it is one to which economic geography may make a positivecontribution, since it tends to privilege suggestive analyses of actually existing economies, fully and properlysituated in their historical-geographic context. In this respect, there are strong connections to be made withrecent work in economic anthropology, in which there has been a productive debate around culturalconstructions of capitalism and "local capitalisms." Here, the point is not to wallow in ethnographic diversity forits own sake, proliferating variants of capitalism willy-nilly, but to develop causatively significant accounts of

economic variety in space (and through time). "Speaking oi'guanxi' or 'predatory' or 'diaporic' capitalism," asBlim (2000, 33) remarked, "is not to trade metaphors but to create a possible field and vocabulary for describingvariation in a constructive, causally interesting way." So it is clearly not enough simply to state that capitalism isa locally constructed system. The task is to illuminate how these local constructions have evolved, how theyintersect, and how such a geographic sensibility makes a difference to the form and functioning of variegatedcapitalist economies. Economic geographers, for their part, may have been more successful in convincing oneanother of these arguments than they have in making their voices heard in the wider field of heterodoxeconomic studies. Deconstructing markets, market relations, and market ideologies means confronting the messy reality ofeconomic behavior and economic structures, not assuming them away. "Market actors," as Fligstein (2002, 200)noted, "live in murky worlds," in which information never flows freely, rules vary, actions are mutuallyinterdependent, and motivations are always mixed. And it follows, of course, that the notion of market purity,which suggests that market relations reflect innate human urges, is an ideological construction, rather than anapproximation of reality. Explaining the production and utilization of different market scripts-from the new-economy stories of the last American boom through post-Fordist discourses on the social-democratic Left to themaster narratives of neoliberal globalism, free trade, and free markets (see GibsonGraham 1996; Dicken, Peck,and Tickell 1997; Kelly 1999; Thrift 2001; Sheppard 2002; Peck 2002a)-therefore has an important part to playin the wider task of accounting for patterns of economic behavior and processes of economic restructuring. Thistask will always be messier and more inconclusive than the clean models of orthodox economics would have usbelieve, for it must confront the reality that all economies are hybrid, mongrel structures. This is what Hodgson(1984) called the "impurity principle," that all economic systems blend and fuse "market" and "nonmarket"elements, such that this binary distinction-which the NES may have inadvertently helped to sustain-is rendereddefunct. As Polanyi (1957, 250) famously put it: The human economy ... is embedded and enmeshed in institutions, economic and noneconomic. The inclusionof the noneconomic is vital. For religion or government may be as important for the structure and functioning ofthe economy as monetary institutions or the availability of tool and machines themselves that lighten the toil oflabor. The study of the shifting place occupied by the economy in society is therefore no other than the study ofthe manner in which the economic process is instituted at different times and places. It makes no sense, in this context, to categorize economic formations in terms of their deviation from theutilitarian abstraction that is the pure market economy, to construct a single axis running from the liberal to thecoordinated market, to represent networks as synonymous with or parallel to markets, or to base interpretationsof market behavior on the ideological fiction of homo economicus because continua that have been constructedaround these abstract positions rest on mystification. Polanyi's contributions can be criticized on this score, too,for he also engaged in a discussion of degrees of embeddedness and disembeddedness, pointing to anapparent historical tendency for market systems to become relatively disembedded from societal structures, incontrast to the more deeply embedded alternative economies of redistribution and reciprocity. Those who wouldotherwise seek to build on Polanyi's insights usually find it necessary to clarify, correct, or contextualize thisflawed historical-theoretical interpretation (see Block and Somers 1984; lie 1991; Swedberg and Granovetter2001; Block 2003). Barber (1995,400) complained that doing so affords the market "a false kind of analytic aswell as concrete independence," which, in turn, tends to lead to "a further common error: that the market is notonly disembedded and independent but also that it is the part of society that determines all the rest." Theseerrors are compounded, of course, when the market is equated with American capitalism and when this, in turn,is represented as the normative ideal against which "transitional," "unfree," "developing," or "sclerotic"economies are judged. This is, of course, not just a neoclassical but a neoliberal conceit. In contrast, a social-constructivist conception of the market draws attention to the ways in which markets, eventhe celebrated American markets, operate in the context of, and are infused with, particular configurations of

cultural, legal, political, and institutional relations, not the least among which are shared understandings of the"contractual" nature of market exchanges themselves. The market therefore ceases to be the privileged,Archimedean point around which alternative, "more social" systems are arrayed; there is no Archimedean point.It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of this point for an economic geography that is even loosely weddedto the concept of an uneven, variegated, hybrid economy (see Clark 1998). Although it may yet to have beenformalized as such, the spatially variegated economy is one of the fundamental constructions of heterodox,postautistic, decentered economics. And even if they have yet to state it forcefully in this context, economicgeographers have had a great deal to say about this variegated economy, both theoretically and empirically(see Massey 1984; Barnes 1996, 2003; Gibson-Graham 1996; Amin and Thrift 2003). The challenge is to makesense of both the macro and the micro sources of variegation-or, as Massey put it, to hold on to the general aswell as the particular-without falling into the "thousand capitalisms" trap of indiscriminate cultural theorizing (toomessy) or the "two capitalisms" trap of sociological formalism (not messy enough). Theories of uneven capitalistdevelopment and concepts of local institutional specificity should not be seen as irreconcilable alternatives, butdifferent sides of the same phenomenon-the variegated economy. This said, the attendant methodological and theoretical challenges are anything but resolved, as some of thedebates around postsocialist economic transformations, for example, have clearly demonstrated. Stark andBruszt's (1998) analysis of the "recombination" of capitalisms in Eastern and Central Europe, and theirassociated forms of path-dependent restructuring, provides a sharp critique both of "one best way"neoliberalism and of "one inevitable way" structuralism. They have also connected a variety of institutional andnetwork forms to a series of relatively "structural" features of this variegated capitalist landscape by way ofcomparative analyses of actually existing capitalisms. "As sociologists with a disciplinary disposition to exploitvariance," Stark and Bruszt (2001, 1131) stated, "we see real analytic leverage in taking the diversity ofcapitalisms as an object of study and comparing capitalisms vis-à-vis each other." Since many economicgeographers may be said to have a parallel predisposition toward the suggestive exposure of spatial variabilityin economic forms and relations, there is clearly scope to build up such comparative sociological approaches(see Pickles and Smith 1998). Differences will no doubt remain, however, over the bases on which "variegation"are being established: Burawoy (2001, 1114, 1116) criticized this work for privileging (superstructural)institutional manifestations of capitalism while failing to delve into questions of diversity at the (base) level ofclass relations and forms of production: Even though capitalism may diverge in its expression from sector to sector, from country to country, from regionto region, these divergences are interconnected-the result of common underlying economic processes. To studysuch sui generis economic processes, one must subordinate the study of historical paths and trajectories tocareful in situ analyses of actual social relations. ... It is difficult to talk independent national or regionalcapitalisms-as is implied in "comparing capitalisms"-when the global order is so interconnected. We need tounderstand how the global, whether through supranational institutions, transnational connections, orpostnational discourses, has mediated effects on what has come to be called the "local." Burawoy would apparently wish to cut through many of the institutional layers that are so often affordedexplanatory weight by both economic sociologists and economic geographers, seeking to uncover thegeneralized capitalist dynamics that lurk beneath the much-vaunted varieties. Although Burawoy's method alsocalls attention to global-local articulations, these articulations are viewed from the other end of the telescopefrom those that begin with variety. For their part, Stark and Bruszt (2001, 1131) were uncomfortable with whatthey characterized as Burawoy's "unitary model of capitalism [and his analytical] standpoint outside capitalism."At the same time, Burawoy's skepticism calls attention to the risks of a relativist analysis of capitalism, giventhat different models or varieties of capitalism clearly exist within the context of both deep transnationalconnections and combined and uneven development. Declarations of hybridity, after all, presupposeinterconnection and family resemblance, as well as local variation, the explication and theorization of which may

be viewed as a particularly economicgeographic task (Peck 2004). As Burawoy (2001, 1118) rhetorically asked,"how many advanced capitalisms can there be in the world?" Making sense of the uneven terrains of capitalism means taking "embeddedness" seriously in amacrosociological sense. Social constructivists insist that economic relations must not be reduced to marketrelations, that the two are not coterminous. Even the most "marketized" transactional environments fuse whatmay be conventionally understood as market and nonmarket elements, just as they often imply extensive-not tosay deepening-roles for the state. The projects of state building and market building are continuous ones, andthey are deeply interpenetrated (Block 1994, 2003; O'Neill 1997; Fligstein 2001). Especially vivid contemporaryillustrations of this situation can be found in the extensive market-building projects that are under way in EasternEurope, the former Soviet Union, China, and the European Union (see Fligstein and Mara-Drita 1996; Grabberand Stark 1997; Gerber and Hout 1998; Fligstein and Sweet 2002), while neoliberalism can also be understoodas fundamentally a state project (Birchfield 1999; Lamer 2000; Tickell and Peck 2003). Yet, of course, thissituation is anything but new. After all, the vision of the free market itself began life as a Utopian construct, asPolanyi powerfully argued; its transformation into a prevailing ideology and an associated set of institutionaltechnologies involved decades of concerted political action. In this sense, as Polanyi (1944, 140-41) ironicallyobserved, "The road to a free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous,centrally organized and controlled interventionism.... While laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberatestate action, subsequent restrictions on laissez-faire started in a spontaneous way." Moreover, this road is stillbeing traveled, in that the process of installing and maintaining markets is a continuous one, beset by failures ofgovernance and unforeseen perturbations, rather than one that is focused on a predetermined and realisticallyattainable destination. Even the fabled economic theorists of the nineteenth century, of course, lacked a fullyformed and coherent vision of the market system that was gradually coming into being. ... It was not for them the explicit, full-blown"utopia" that Polanyi called it. ... Since the socio-historical process created what we now know as the marketsystem in a bits-and-pieces, incremental, unintended way, the theorists and ideologists who were among thesignificant actors in that process likewise created only theoretical bits-and-pieces of what gradually coalescedinto a highly structured intellectual creation that still has its scientific and ideological functions. . . . Structuralchanges in society and vast new ideological tides were in favor of the economists, of course, but the history ofthe times shows how slow and hard social and scientific changes are. (Barber 1995, 394-5) The rule book for liberal capitalism was not completed in the nineteenth century. In fact, the principalcontemporary manifestation of this project-that of neoliberal globalism-could be described in almost preciselythe same way: it has its recent origins in a disparate set of "bits-and-pieces" influences, including theascendancy of Chicago School economics, the rise to power of conviction politicians like Reagan and Thatcher,the various experiments with "shock therapy" in Chile and elsewhere, the reconstruction of cold war geopolitics,the imposition of structural adjustment programming, the "transition" projects in Central and Eastern Europe, theideological realignment of the various multilateral institutions, and the increased reach of think-tank networks(see Larner 2000; Dezalay and Garth 2002; Sheppard 2002; Tickell and Peck 2003). The point is that neoliberalideology was not simply "out there," waiting to be invoked, but instead had to be constructed, and its rise tocontemporary dominance was not preordained, but has involved incrementalism, trial-and-errorexperimentation, and encounters with a series of fortuitous or path-altering conjunctures. It is a measure of therelative success of this concerted ideological and institutional project, of course, that neoliberalism has theappearance of a monolithic, omnipresent, and inevitable "force of nature." Under the surface, neoliberalism is amore fragile creation than these appearances suggest: its politicaleconomic narrative has been stitchedtogether from a series of partially overlapping fragments, and there has been a need for several midcourseadjustments. In fact, the project of neoliberalism seems increasingly to be preoccupied by, if not mired in, themanagement of its "own" contradictions, since institutional flanking mechanisms are repeatedly invoked as a

means of supplementing and sustaining flawed programs of marketization and "deregulation" (see Nairn 2000;Peck and Tickell 2002). Polanyi (1944, 139, 140-41) may have been describing contemporary processes of neoliberalization when hecommented on the discordance between free-market rhetoric and proactive statecraft in nineteenth-centuryEngland: There was nothing natural about laissezfaire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowingthings to take their course.... To the typical utilitarian, economic liberalism was a social project which should beput into effect for the greatest happiness of the greatest number; laissez-faire was not a method to achieve athing, it was the thing to be achieved. ... Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the freeworking of the system. Thus even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties,and those whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the self-same state with the new powers, organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissezfaire. If the ideological project of neoliberal globalism rests on a (powerful yet misleading) vision of a flat-eartheconomy, comprised of free-trading, flexible agents, then a critical economic-geographic counterproject wouldseek strategically to survey the uneven landscape, to expose the cracks and fissures-what Block (2000) called"welds"-in this supposedly unitary system. It would draw attention to the ways in which uneven spatial andsocial development disrupt this universalist narrative; it would map out the command centers and constitutivenetworks of the project; and it would explore its vulnerable flanks, its fissures of stress and contradiction, itssites of localized failure and frontiers of active extension, and the alternative economic geographies that arebeing made both in its wake and in its stead. Indeed, there are signs that some movement in this direction isoccurring (see Mitchell 1995, 2001; O'Neill 1997; Kodras 2001; Olds 2001a; Sheppard 2002; Brenner andTheodore 2002), although progress has been fitful so far. This is one of the many areas in which economicgeography may make common cause with the socialconstructivist wing of economic sociology (and relatedareas of economic anthropology), a common cause that need not be established in the relatively shallow termsof overlapping substantive interests, but, more fundamentally, may also reflect an emergent sense of mutualtheoretical conviction around the concept of the variegated economy and around the historical geographies ofmarket making. Variegated Economies, Variegated Economics This mutual conviction is emergent in the sense that the connections between the respective strands ofeconomic sociology and economic geography-neither of which, of course, are unitary projects-are only tentativeat present. On the positive side, however, they are suggestive of potentially creative cross-disciplinary synergiesin theory development and, perhaps, even in concrete research programs. And while socialconstructivisteconomic sociology may not be listening to economic geography at the moment, the potential for anengagement certainly exists. Moreover, there are things that economic geographers and economic sociologistsmight be usefully saying to one another, not the least of which concern the theoretical fundamentals aroundwhich there is some basis for broad agreement. In principle, this conversation might begin around any of anumber of shared concerns, challenges, and causes, some of which are well established and others of whichmay only now be coming into focus. Among the many potential points of engagement, the following areintended to be suggestive and illustrative, rather than prescriptive. First, there is a quite widely shared skepticism in the two subfields about the theoretical worldview of orthodoxeconomics, which, in practical terms, may be considered to locate both in the broad field of heterodox economicstudies. In this context, one need not be a card-carrying member of the postautistic economics movement toagree with key elements of its alternative program for the progressive opening up of economic analysis,involving inter alia a commitment (both theoretical and political) to engage with economies and economicproblems in all their concrete and "real-world" complexity, the privileging of social-scientific rigor over scientism,an embrace of analytical pluralism, and an appropriate degree of humility in confronting intractable challenges

of economic theory and practice, the restoration of historical-institutional analysis-together, it should be added,with economicgeographic analysis-as cornerstones of a more heterodox economics, and an enhancedcommitment to social responsibility and social justice (see Fullbrook 2003). Clearly, this stance must amount tomore than oppositionalism because a position on economic theory that is staked out primarily in terms of areaction to, or an inversion of, neoclassical economics is likely to be distorted and partial. As the experience ofnetwork sociology shows, the result can be that the endeavor remains in the shadows of orthodox economics,skirting the problem of market essentialism, instead of developing an independent dynamic as a positiveprogram. Establishing a deeper engagement with social-constructivist economic sociology, on the other hand,would seem to work with the grain of a great deal of contemporary practice in economic geography and mightenable the subdiscipline to reclaim something approaching a collective research agenda-social-constructivisteconomic geography?-and perhaps even a shared theoretical object-the spatially variegated economy? Ifeconomies are embedded in qualitatively different ways not only "always" but "everywhere," then there is amassively challenging task at hand for economic geography, that of mapping the hybrid formations of realeconomies in movement. At present, it is probably fair to say that such arguments are not being forcefullyarticulated in the postdisciplinary field of heterodox economics. second, economic geography and socialconstructivist economic sociology share a concern with problematizing"context" and conjuncture in a more far-reaching fashion than in neoclassical economics or, for that matter, innetwork sociology. In positive terms, this concern reflects a mutual interest in various forms of "integral"economic analysis, in which markets, in particular, and economies, in general, are confronted as institutionalphenomena, as political constructions, as historically and geographically specific formations, and so forth (seeSunley 1996; Clark 1998; Peck 2000; Walker 2001; Jessop 2002). In arguing for a more vigorously institutionaltreatment of "context," for example, Gertler (2002, 95) made the case for an explanation of "distinctive anduneven, though systematic, economic geography of context." It is a more than merely semantic point thatcontext must be pulled out of the shadows and theorized more explicitly because the backgrounding of contextsimultaneously implies the backgrounding of issues that are related to the spatial constitution of economies. Somaking a strong case for context is not just an empirical position; it is a theoretical and methodological stance.One of the striking features of the various ways in which network sociologists and institutional economists havesought to unfreeze the noneconomic parameters of the economy, to highlight the social and institutionalembeddedness of "market" processes, is that they have done so, for the most part, without theorizing thesimultaneously spatial constitution of these phenomena.13 The typically undertheorized ways in which labelslike "regional," "local," and "national" are casually applied to phenomena, such as industrial districts, modes ofregulation, learning systems, governance regimes, systems of innovation, varieties of capitalism, and so forth,has prompted criticism from geographers. Yet, realistically speaking, there is still much to do to convert thisskepticism into a positive theoretical research program and to convince economic sociologists and heterodoxeconomists that these concerns are substantive, rather than secondary or, worse still, merely semanticdistinctions or articles of (geographic) faith. In some respects, this represents both the most significantchallenge, and the greatest opportunity, for economic geographers to make a mark in heterodox economics.Fundamentally, it is the challenge of explaining economic variety, including where it comes from and why itmatters, rather than taking this as a pregiven and unquestioned point of departure. Macroeconomic sociologistsare largely convinced that history matters in this respect; they have barely engaged with the question of howgeography may matter (although see Arrighi 1994). Demonstrating how geographic context matters, of course,involves dispensing with the notion that the effects of, say, gender regimes, production cultures, or governancesystems are merely "contextual" in the first place. Instead, their constitutive effects must be demonstrated, notmerely asserted or assumed. Third, a parallel set of arguments can be constructed about (the social construction of) scale, which has been asignificant focus of theoretical endeavor in economic geography in recent years and has enabled geographers

to speak in distinctive ways in debates on globalization (see Swyngedouw 2000; Brenner 2001), but has barelypenetrated the wider discussion surrounding the social construction of economic processes. There is a tellingresonance between geographic critiques of conventional globalization narratives-which take issue with thefrequent invocation of an ostensibly "out there" zone of unregulated, universal, and unmediated market forces-and sociological critiques of orthodox economic narratives-which take issue with the idea of an ostensiblyseparate sphere of undifferentiated and purely rational action. As the critiques have revealed, both theseorthodox constructions recycle the myth of a disembedded, placeless economy (Peck 2002b). These orthodoxtropes have even found their way into robustly heterodox analyses. Jessop (2002, 212), for example, stated that"we are witnessing a new round of disembedding associated with globalisation-a complex, multi-scalar, multi-faceted process which is reinforcing the abstract-formal moment of exchange value ... at the expense of thesubstantive-material moment of use value," although he went on to observe that these apparently free-floatingprocesses of disembedding also seem, paradoxically, to have been constructed on particular spatiotemporalfoundations. If, as Barber (1995) and others have insisted, all economies are embedded, then the globaleconomy is no exception, but there is much work yet to be done convincingly to pull apart the orthodoxbinarisms of global/abstract/ disembedded market versus local/ concrete/embedded market, on which so muchcontemporary commentary rests (Escobar 2001). Strategically useful in this respect is work that sets out touncover the local and sociospatial constitution of ostensibly "global" processes (see, e.g., Olds 2001b;Sheppard 2002) or that problematizes explicitly transnational and extralocal forms of economic embedding andinstitutionalization (see, e.g., Wright 1999; Mitchell 2001). There is also important work to be done indenaturalizing received terms like national economy or local production system (see Radice 1984; Mitchell1998; Jessop 1999), to reveal the constructed (and repeatedly reconstructed) nature of such categories. Fourth, in terms of the substantive content of work that may facilitate a widened interdisciplinary dialogue, muchmore may be done to explore the historical geographies of market making and state building, at a variety ofscales and in a variety of (comparative) spatial contexts and to examine the social (re)construction of economicinstitutions more generally. Geographic work in this vein could usefully contribute to the wider project ofdenaturalizing economic phenomena, at the same time as deepening the theoretical and empirical content ofoften-casual economic-sociological claims about the role of "context" in economic behavior. Economicsociologists have produced many of the seminal contributions on market making (see Smith 1989; Block 1990;Evans 1995; Abolafia 1996; Fligstein 2001), although issues that are related to the spatial and scalarconstitution of these market-building projects play no more than trivial roles in these accounts, most of whichare aspatial or implicitly nationcentric. Here, geographic phenomena are reduced, for the most part, to dataunits or case-study sites, rather than being considered loci for theorizing (although see Somers 2001),suggesting that there is creative conceptual and concrete work still to be done at this interface. But the silencesare not only on the side of economic sociology: strangely, markets-even socially constructed oneshave notreceived a significant amount of attention in contemporary economic geography (see Sheppard 2000). If thissilence means that the big questions about markets and their theorization are being handled elsewhere, then itis troubling. If the market is largely ignored, if it is an absentee concept in economic geography, then itsorthodox reproduction is being sanctioned through nonengagement. Fifth and finally, an enlivened conversation on the socially constructed, variegated economy need not (andshould not) be a solely intellectual exercise, but must be articulated in such a way as to open up political as wellas theoretical possibilities. As Block (2000) insisted, the task of deconstructing the edifice of neoliberalglobalism is at the same time one of envisioning its progressive and continuous reconstruction. Such a stancemay be compatible with many kinds of political programs, from the reformist to the radical, although Block'sapproach is especially suggestive, since it conjoins the processes of theoretical and political reconstruction: [S]ocial democracy and the more left visions of New Deal liberalism were based on the premise that capitalismwas a natural system whose logic could be controlled by the countervailing pressures of a strong state. It is as

though capitalism was like a river system expected to flood every spring, so that reformers set out to build acomplex system of levees and canals to prevent the floodwaters from doing damage. . .. The deconstructivepolitics I am envisioning is not antistate: it continues to rely on the state's strength in a variety of ways [forexample] to place controls on international capital mobility and to enforce progressive taxation. . . .Nevertheless, deconstructive politics is able to imagine far more decentralized mechanisms for providing socialservices, building infrastructure, assuring adequate employment creation, and so on, because it is no longernecessary to build up the central state as the only countervailing power to a capitalism that operates with theforce of nature. [Wjhile social democratic reform strategies have seen the state as a necessary counterforce tothe power of capitalism as a natural system, the deconstructive politics makes greater use of a "jujitsu" strategyin which the opponent's own weight and strength become sources of weakness. (Block 2000, 96-97) One need not agree with the particularities of such political programs to acknowledge the creative possibilitiesthat could be opened up by likewise denaturalixing neoliberal globalism and free-market fundamentalism.Challenging economic orthodoxies is an important component of this wider task, not the least because itrepresents one of the constitutive elements of contemporary economic hegemony. And short of merelycontinuing to anticipate the long-delayed terminal crisis, it can assist in transformative and liberatory thinkingwhen it is connected to purposive attempts to think outside the neoliberal box. "Since capitalism is not acoherent social system with a logic of its own," Block (2000, 97) emphasized, "but rather, a contradictory set of practices given artificial unity and coherence by marketideologies, it is impossible to know in advance when we will have left the terrain of capitalism behind." This,then, may be a (relatively concrete) place to start. And while the seeds of such a purposefully deconstructiveproject have been planted in economic geography, their potential has yet to be fully realized (Larner and LeHeron 2002). Economic geography, in this respect, needs (shared) purpose as well as pluralism. As Barnes(2002, 11) argued, the task for a critical economic geography must extend beyond the "explanatory-diagnostic"to embrace the "anticipatory-utopian." The approach advocated here is compatible with such a vision but, at thesame time, somewhat distinctive-it may be characterized as explanatory-transformative. Conclusion: Talking Dirty There is no single or conclusive answer to the question of whom economic geography should "play out with,"and perhaps it does not matter, in this increasingly pluralistic and decentered subdiscipline, that economicgeographers are playing out all over the place. It will certainly matter, however, if economic geography becomessplintered, if the collective whole becomes less than the sum of the atomized parts, if there is a slide intorelativism. In retrospect, some of the subdiscipline's most creative moments in recent years have occurredwhen a degree of collective momentum was generated around a shared project-think, for example, of the early1980s work on industrial restructuring (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Massey and Meegan 1982; Scott andStorper 1986), or the early 1990s contributions on post-Fordism (Storper and Scott 1992; Amin 1994). Neitherof these episodes was exclusively anchored in economic geography, but instead drew upon, as well ascontributed to, the energy of what were interdisciplinary endeavors. During the past two decades, theseendeavors have had relatively little to do with orthodox economics and much more do to with the unruly andvaried band of small-"e" economists who variously describe themselves as industrial sociologists, politicaleconomists, regulation theorists, evolutionary economists, or economic sociologists. Sociology has clearly not been the only influence here, and it may not even have been the primary influence,but the engagements with sociology have certainly been productive. So, in the mid-1980s there was what mightbe styled a Lancastrian moment, focused largely on British sociology, an encounter that, among other things,was associated with the localities debate, the "gendering" of economic geography, and a series of advances inthinking about the relationship between "social relations and spatial structures" (see Gregory and Urry 1985;Cooke 1989; Bagguley et al. 1990). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, attention moved to Italian and Frenchsociology, as the debates about flexible specialization and industrial districts moved to center stagetrie neo-

Marshallian moment (see Pyke, Becattini, and Sengenberger 1990; Storper and Scott 1992; Barbera 2002;Whitford 2001). And, the subsequent period, what may be characterized as economic geography'sGranovetterian moment, focused on American sociology, has been associated with an outpouring of work onembeddedness, institutions, and networks (see Grabher 1993; Amin and Thrift 1994; Lee and Wills 1997;Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001). All these moments of engagement, in other words, have left importanttraces, and they have been associated with variegated bodies of work in economic geography that have beencreative, not derivative. But economic geography's success in "talking back" to sociology, in its various guises,has been more variable. Although the engagements of the 1980s and early 1990s were genuine dialogues inmany respects, the relationship with network sociology has been more distant and more asymmetrical. Maybeeconomic geographers have had less of substance to contribute to the project of network sociology, but it mustalso be recognized that this project has itself been much more absorbed, first, with its largely unrequitedrelationship with economics, and second, with internal questions of academic institution building. Morefundamentally, the controlled and limited fashion in which network sociology sought to "bring in the social-contextual" has seriously narrowed the terrain upon which geographic contributions might have been made.Economic geography, too, is located at the blurred edges of the network optic. But just like economic geography, economic sociology is far from a monological endeavor. While networksociology constitutes the contested core of the latter, the nascent forms of network geography have not (yet?)cohered into a consolidated theoretical project. In some respects, the Granovetterian moment may be alreadygiving way to a Latourian moment, as garden-variety network analysis is displaced by actor-network theory andas ANT colonies proliferate in the subdiscipline. While many of these lines of inquiry have been fruitful, there isa growing recognition of the need to refocus beyond the network optics, even while building on some of theseinsights (Henderson et al. 2001; Sayer 2002; Smith et al. 2003). It has been suggested here that one way to doso-to move beyond the study of embedded, networklike relations in markets-is to engage more seriously withtheoretical and substantive issues around the social construction of markets and of economies more generally.We should be wary of academic divisions of labor that place markets beyond reach. Heterodox economies'recognition of the "impurity principle" (Hodgson 1984), on the other hand, opens up significant terrains ofpotential engagement for economic geography. Mongrel economies are also (necessarily?) spatially variegatedeconomies. If market relations really are embeddeded, in a more than trivial sense, then explorations ofinstituted, unevenly developed, and hybrid economic phenomena-what may be termed the "thick geographies"of spatially constituted economic formations, conjunctures, and landscapes-have both an analytical and apolitical role to play. Here, common cause may be made with those heterodox economic sociologists who havebeen seeking to "thicken" and retheorize Polanyian concepts like embeddedness from a range of theoreticalperspectives (see Burawoy 2003; Silver and Arrighi 2003; Krippner et al. 2004). This means doing more thanpicking up the crumbs from the table of orthodox economics, but using the ingredients of heterodox economicstudies in a radically different way. As lie (1991, 227, 230) stated: What have been regarded as "frictional" variables in the neoclassical framework-social relations and groups,norms and rules, alliances and conflicts, power and control-all become the objects of analysis [in economicsociology]. ... By taking the embeddedness thesis seriously, we can penetrate the ideological veil of the marketto reveal the distinct social organizations of commodity exchange. Why should we conflate the exchangebetween individuals in weekend flea markets with the transaction between transnational corporations andanalyze them under a single conceptual rubric? Rather than assuming the invisible hand, we should investigatethe concrete social relations of those who buy and sell: the visible hand of the market. A number of poststructuralist contributions to economic geography have begun to pose these kinds of questionsin their own ways (see Barnes 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996; Pickles and Smith 1998; Amin and Thrift 2003), butthere is scope to broaden this effort. Political economy-not the clunky stereotype that often circulates in theliterature, but dynamic, heterodox political economy-should be seen as an ally in this endeavor, not as the

enemy. If there is a foe out there, it surely takes a different formin the fateful nexus of neoclassical economicsand neoliberal politics. If economic geography is to play a part in challenging these entrenched orthodoxies,then it will need to find and make common causes, even as it remains a pluralist project. As a gesture in thisdirection, it has been argued here that there is much to still to be learned-both negatively and positively-fromeconomic sociology. An enriched appreciation of the busy frontiers and dead ends of the NES can be useful notjust for its own sake, but as a way for economic geography to get a better sense of itself and of some of itspossible futures. Crucially, it should involve making a careful assessment of the ideas, frameworks,constructions, and sensibilities that may be usefully "imported" into the subdiscipline of economic geography,but it must also involve more than this. It must involve finding the most suitable terrain across which to haveconstructive and critical dialogues. It must involve developing our own traveling concepts, framed in the contextof a range o/transdisciplinary theoretical projects and shared problematics. As economic geography continuesto search for a voice in the interdisciplinary conversation, it could do worse than to focus on some of the waysthat we may talk back to different parts of economic sociology and heterodox economics. Perhaps these would-be fellow travelers are not listening all that much at the moment, but at least they have ears. In contrast, economic geography's stilted conversation with economics seems destined to remain a "dialogue ofthe deaf (Agnew 2002, 585). Even the most constructive attempts to initiate this conversation, like the Journal ofEconomic Geography, seem only to be confirming this underlying irreconcilability. The editors of this journalrecently concluded, rather soberly, that the message from the pattern of manuscript submissions was that "[t]hegulf between the two groups remains wide," since the contributions from geographic economists "tend to reflectthe worldview of neoclassical economics"; meanwhile those from economic geographers "are more eclectic inapproach, more willing to entertain alternative conceptualizations that provide new insight, but less willing tosacrifice empirical realism for abstract universalism" (Arnott and Wrigley 2003, 2). At the very least, this meansthat the disciplines are talking past one another; more pessimistically, it may mean that there is little prospect ofa meaningful relationship. Serial failures of communication between orthodox economics and economicgeography reflect fundamental differences of methodology and theoretical practice, that may border on flat-outincompatibility. Economics, for its part, seeks to make a virtue of its conservatism and exclusivity, its centralinstitutions being dedicated to the preservation of a well-insulated intellectual monoculture (see Mirowski 1990,2002). In a sense, the study of economics has become disembedded from the rest of the social sciences in away that echoes the orthodox conception of the disembedded market (lie 1991; Peck 2002b). Apparently miredin context, with dirt on their hands, it is no wonder that economic geographers are not being heard in economicsdepartments. They are not even speaking the same language. For his part, Agnew (2002, 584) anticipated that a union with the dismal science would be an "unhappymarriage." It would also be a profoundly asymmetrical relationship, in which one partner did most of the talkingand not much listening. Perhaps it is time to recognize that there are limited prospects here, and that this is notsimply a matter of superficial appearances but of underlying character. Earning the respect, even the attention,of orthodox economics would not only involve learning to speak its language; much more seriously, it wouldmean surrendering the nearest thing there is to a basic, economic-geographic "fact"the recognition of aninstitutionally cluttered and spatially variegated economic landscape. Other than in a fractional sense, this is notpart of the orthodox worldview, which amounts to a flat-earth theory of a unified market economy. Thefundamentally ageographic conceit of orthodox economics, as Marshall Sahlins (1972, 127) once put it, is to"detach the principle of individual maximization from its bourgeois context and spread it around the world."Certainly, there will be a high price to pay if the only way to engage with orthodox economics is on its ownterms, since it would imply jettisoning much of what the critical and diachronic social sciences stand for.Moreover, the argument that space and place are associated with constitutive consequences for the functioningof economies flatly contradicts the economists' anticontextualist reductionism to abstract "location" and itspredisposition toward universalism. It represents a denial of the variegated economic landscape across which

economic geographers ply their trade. Beyond measuring the distance between economically significant points on the map and weighing the terms oftrade, then, there may be few tasks for economic geographers on the featureless plain invoked by orthodoxeconomics. Laboring in this inhospitable environment consigns economic geographers-along with economichistorians, economic anthropologists, and economic sociologists-to an intellectually deskilled role, prisoners inwhat Polanyi (1977, xl) characterized as the "rubber cell of self-defeating notions." Although this regimen maybe attractive to some, the currently constituted practices of economic geography seem more attuned with themore prosaic process of grappling with economic "realities." An economic-sociological sensibility seems to befundamentally more compatible with these practices, one that permits the (theoretically informed and informing)comparison of "the economic institutions of different periods and regions without running the danger of foistingupon the bare facts the market shape of things" (Polanyi 1977, xl). It has been suggested here that economicgeographers have much to gain from initiating conversations with those in fields, like macroeconomic sociology,that have unambiguously rejected market essentialism, in all its guises. Yet, in as far as the comparativedynamics of institutionally situated economies represents a serious concern in contemporary economicgeography, it is probably fair to say that the attendant theoretical commitments have been embraced only in anambiguous and partial manner. Maybe the time has come to commit? Sidebar With all the usual disclaimers, this article benefited from discussions at the "Economic Geography MeetsEconomic Sociology" sessions at the Philadelphia meeting of the Association of American Geographers andwith John Alien, Ash Amin, David Angel, Trevor Barnes, Fred Block, Neil Brenner, Gernot Grabher, MartinHess, Ray Hudson, Bob Jessop, Greta Krippner, Wendy Lamer, Roger Lee, Andy Leyshon, Linda McDowell,Phil O'Neill, César Rodríguez, Mike Savage, Andrew Sayer, Gay Seidman, Nik Theodore, Eric Sheppard, AdamTickell, Matt Vidal, Josh Whitford, Erik Olin Wright, Neil Wrigley, and Henry Yeung. I am also grateful to BrendaParker for her assistance. Footnote 1 Among a vast number of contributions over the past decade, see especially Amin and Thrift (1992,1995),Dicken and Thrift (1992), Grabher (1993), Saxenian (1994), Harrison (1997), Leyshon and Thrift (1997),McDowell (1997), Schoenberger (1997), Storper (1997), Cooke and Morgan (1998), and Gertler and Wolfe(2002). 2 The Handbook contained chapters written by leading contributors to these latter fields-Geoffrey Hodgson,Richard Nelson, and Oliver Williamson. 3 Swedberg (2004, 3) observed that the disdain for Marxian insights within the NES reflects the fact that "thedays of radical sociology [are] over." 4 Not without significance in this regard have been the parallel attempts to institutionalize the project ofeconomic sociology, particularly in the United States, through initiatives like the establishment of an EconomicSociology section of the American Sociological Association in 2000 and the activities of explicitly heterodoxorganizations like the Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics, which was formed in 1989. U.S. Newsand World Report's ranking of graduate programs now includes an economic sociology section. 5 Polanyi, in fact, was skeptical of both economic and institutional essentialism, his argument being that "sinceactually existing market economies are dependent upon the state to manage the supply and demand for thefictitious commodities [of land, labor, and money], there can be no analytically autonomous economy" (Block2003, 8). 6 Dierdre McCloskey (n.d., 3), for one, has pleaded with economic sociology not to take this course, which sheregards as a scientific cul-de-sac in which formalistic rigor is substituted for social-scientific significance: "Ascientist must of course think and watch, theorize and observe. Real and progressive sciences, like socialhistory and geomorphology, do both. But the trouble with blackboard proof and statistical significance is that

though they look like thinking and watching, they are actually not. ... I regret to say that blackboard theorizingwithout empirical purchase and statistical significance without practical significance constitutes a cargo cult inmodern economics. . . . Please, please, let's get back to the sort of real science that social historians andparticle physicists do, where we deal as scientists do with the one thing needful in science, oomph. And shunthe cargo cult, oh ye econowannabes." 7 Granovetter (quoted in Swedberg 1990,104), for his part, stated, "It would be to go too far to replace themarket with network analysis . .. one should rather try to combine them." 8 "I am all for parsimony," Granovetter (quoted in Swedberg 1990,106) explained, and while this statementneed not imply an embrace of rationalchoice reductionism, it does reflect an underlying predilection for relativelysparse, austere, and quasi-formal methods. 9 Significant and suggestive exceptions, which have treated "context" in a more than merely contextual manner,have included Christopherson (2002) and Gertler (2002, 2004). The varietiesof-capitalism approach has alsobeen invoked in studies of the geographies of business systems (see Dicken 1998; Yeung 200Ob; Dicken,Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001). 10 This orientation is echoed in economic geography itself. Dick Walker (2001, 171) remarked that "the NewRegionalists have been preoccupied with industrial clusters, network analysis, and local institutions ofgovernance . . . while skirting the larger questions raised by classical political economy . . . about classes,distribution, political conflict, and state action." 11 These contemporary analyses of a neoliberalizing international economy echo Polanyi's work on theresponses of different (national) market societies to the pressure of the Gold Standard regime (see Block 2003;Burawoy 2003). 12 From this perspective, the effectiveness of the German training system, for example, is not derived simplyfrom an "internal" institutional functionality, but from the larger context in which this system is embedded-industry-level pay bargaining limits wage competition among firms, the financial regime delivers patient capitaland supports long-term planning horizons, industrial relations conventions provide for the negotiation ofagreements around skills and training, and so forth. 13 And when spatial variegation is recognized, it is often reduced to noise, to stylized, binary categories, orworse still, to frictional imperfection. In DiMaggio and Powell's (1983, 148) analysis of institutional isomorphism,for example, the concern is with the destruction of variety, with the "inexorable push towards homogenization."Economic geography needs to confront these (formidable) arguments, not assume that unevenness andvariegation are self-evidently fundamental features of economic life. We must convince others of this point, notjust ourselves. References References Abolafia, M. 1996. Makingmarkets: Opportunism and restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press. Agnew, J. A. 2002. Review of A companion to economic geography and The Oxford handbook of economicgeography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92:584-8. Albert, M. 1993. Capitalism against capitalism. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Alexander, J. C. 1992. Some remarks on "agency" in recent sociological theory. Perspectives 15:1-4. Amin, A., ed. 1994. Post-Fordism: A reader. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Amin, A., and Hausner, J. 1997. Interactive governance and social complexity. In Beyond market and hierarchy:Interactive governance and social complexity, ed. A. Amin and J. Hausner, 1-31. Cheltenham, U.K.: EdwardElgar. Amin, A., and Thrift, N. J. 1992. Neo-Marshallian nodes in global networks. International Journal of Urban andRegional Research 16:571-87.

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