Beyond the social embeddedness of economic activity: the quality-orientedness in coffee production of Timor-Leste and its implication for legal pluralism

Abstract

Legal pluralism has argued that overlapping and ambiguous regulatory bases can be found in any social field. However, most legal pluralism scholars still deplore the fact that the dominant view of the legal mechanism assumes a unified legal system with stable legal hierarchies. Does this mean that the dominant legal philosophy has very effectively disguised those complicated legal-pluralist negotiations as a realm of fixity? This question may be connected with another important question of how multi-scale normative orders are represented in knowledge practices. Attempting to explicate these questions, I aim to illuminate the issue of multiscalarity through a rethinking of the social embeddedness of economic activity. While some critical discussions on the concept of social embeddedness by economic geographers tended to focus on the typology of embeddednesses for explaining the linkage between social factors and economic outcomes, this assumed linkage itself must be carefully examined. In this paper, it is argued that since the social is not inherently a spatial concept, a turn to the act of embedding is required, detaching the adjective social from the noun embeddedness. Indeed, spaces are defined and redefined by identifying the terms of incorporation into the multiscalarity in question, rather than by their spatial property per se. In parallel, the complementarity between vertical and horizontal networks as simple reflections of realities must be rejected, requiring a new point of departure for legal pluralism in the context of rural development.