A Theoretical Agenda for Economic Sociology

Abstract

relationships power and compliance, well beyond what individuals' incentives can explain.Trust and power drive a wedge between interests and action.And this happens in part because norms and identities result from and structure interaction in cognitive and emotional ways that escape reduction to self-interest, and indeed are key in actors' definitions of what their interests are.The second problem for reductionist accounts is that even though we see some spaces where one may adequately explain outcomes by a purely interest-driven model, there is rarely any simple reduction to individual action that can explain how such spaces evolved as they did, with the constraints and incentives that individuals find themselves acting out (cf. my exchange with Gibbons in Granovetter 1999, or such accounts as Padgett and Ansell 1993).In fact, this is a corollary to a more general argument that action driven by interests as well as that driven by trust or power, occur and have outcomes in ways determined by larger contexts than those in which they are located.I mention the situation of interest-driven behavior first only because it is more typically analyzed as context-free.This second point does not privilege structure over agency, as individuals who find themselves in situations determined by forces beyond their control, and often far beyond their lifespan, may nevertheless turn these situations to advantage and make a deep imprint on future actions and institutions.For example, though it was quite late in the game before Cosimo de Medici could "suddenly apprehend the political capacity of the social network machine that lay at his fingertips" (Padgett and Ansell 1993: 1264), which he had done little to create, once he did, he dramatically changed the course of Florentine history for many generations.In practice, these two problems typically occur in the same cases, and though one should separate them analytically, it is hard and somewhat artificial to do so for any particular instance, and I do not succeed very well at it in what follows.But I will try to focus first on the mixed sources of action within confined social spaces of the sort that White (1992) referred to as "molecules", before moving in the following section to how such molecules are constituted.

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