The Social and Political Embeddedness of the Economy

No one doubts the importance of the economy, political authority and social norms in our everyday lives. Considering each of these in isolation however, casts a shadow on the often curious interactions between markets, States and society. All social science disciplines have therefore developed interdisciplinary fields to study how politics shape and contain the evolution of markets, how the economy changes social interactions and transforms political settings, how markets are embedded in societal norms and transformed through institutional adaptation or how socio-economic systems and their political structures vary across countries and evolve over time. What is sometimes referred to as the meta-discipline “socio-economics”, covers a variety of subfields such as institutional economics, political economy, economic sociology, socio-economic history or law and economics. At the most general level, these inquiries are united by an interest in the making and unmaking of institutions, be they stable social practices or formal sets of rules embodied in organizations that structure the relationships between economic activities and political organization. Projects submitted in this area could concentrate on the evolution of markets or the politics of economic governance; international, national or regional market arrangements; the social foundations of production, exchange and consumption; anthropological or socio-historical studies of socio-economic orders; or the evolution and effects of law for the functioning of the economy.

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