Social Embeddedness Research Articles

Rethinking Tibetan Buddhism in Post-Mao China, 1980–2015

The literature on Tibetan Buddhism in post-Mao China presents a bifurcated history: ethnic nationalism and (traditional) identity are foregrounded in scholarship on the revitalization of Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet; consumption and/or (global) modernism are emphasized in studies of its spread in Sinophone China. Although there are considerable historical and social differences between these different constituencies, these characterizations do not fully capture the social differences, as well as convergences, that have shaped everyday engagements with Tibetan Buddhism among Tibetans and Chinese. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in northeastern Tibet and other recent ethnographic studies, I attempt to complicate this picture, arguing that we need to pay greater attention to the affective dimension of Chinese engagements, the social embeddedness of Tibetan Buddhist institutions in the Tibetan context, and the transformations that have taken place in Tibetan areas, as elsewhere in China.

The lived experiences of the African middle classes Introduction

What are the experiences of the African middle classes, and what do their experiences tell us about social change on the continent? While there have been ample attempts to demarcate the parameters of this social group, the necessary work of tracing the social life and social relations of the middle classes is just beginning. The articles in this special issue provide compelling accounts of the ways in which the middle classes are as much made through their social relations and social practices as they are (if indeed they are) identifiable through aggregate snapshots of income, consumption habits and voting behaviours. Rachel Spronk (2018: 316) has argued that ‘the middle class is not a clear object in the sense of an existing group that can be clearly delineated; rather, it is a classification-in-the-making’. We agree, and our aim in bringing these contributions together in this special issue is to develop our understanding of how this process is emerging in different contexts across Africa. In her opening contribution, Carola Lentz suggests that we need more research on ‘the social dynamics of “doing being middle-class”’, or what we term here ‘middle-classness’, which attends to this ‘classification-in-the-making’ through urban–rural changes over intergenerational life courses, multi-class households, kinship and social relations. Such an agenda has recently been opened up by two edited volumes on the African middle classes (Melber 2016; Kroeker et al. 2018). We further develop this agenda here through a series of empirically rich articles by scholars in African studies, anthropology, literature and sociology that explicitly address the question of the lived experiences of the middle classes. Echoing Spronk's unease with taking ‘the middle class’ as an already constituted social group, what emerges across the articles is rather the unstable, tenuous and context-specific nature of middle-class prosperity in contemporary Africa. Social positions shift – or are questioned – as one moves from the suburb to the township (Ndlovu on South Africa) or into state-subsidized high-rise apartments (Gastrow on Angola). Stability gives way over time to precarity (Southall on Zimbabwe). Wealth is not tied to the individual but circulates more widely through social relations. Should one invest in the nuclear or the extended family (Hull on South Africa; Spronk on Ghana)? In a house or a car (Durham on Botswana)? And why does it matter – for the individual, the household, the family, the city, the nation and the continent? To grasp what it means to be middle-class in Africa today necessarily requires an understanding of the historical, social and spatial embeddedness of lived experiences at multiple scales.

Testing the social psychology of protest: empirical evidence from the Israeli experience

ABSTRACTWhat drives a person to take part in a collective action and engage in political protest? This is a question that has long interested social scientists. Recent theoretical and empirical research in industrialised countries that centres on the political behaviour of individuals examines five main factors – grievances, efficacy, identity, emotions and social embeddedness – to understand what leads citizens to join social protests. Drawing on such research and using Israel National Election Studies (INES) data, this article examines the political attitudes of participants in the widespread ‘Social Justice’ protests that took place in Israel in 2011, with the aim of explaining what motivates civic participation in such protests. By analysing the profile of the demonstrators, our findings provide additional empirical evidence to the theoretical approach and assist in understanding political protest behaviour in general.

When Three’s (Good) Company: Third‐Party Friendships on Cooperation across Departments

AbstractThe social embeddedness perspective highlights that socially embedded dyads are more cooperative than dyads that are not embedded by common third parties. Going beyond the traditional emphasis on the number of third parties, our study examines which third parties are more influential in promoting cooperation in interdepartmental dyads. Based on the logic of dependence from interdependence theory, we show that providers are more cooperative to recipients when third‐party friends have more organizational knowledge to offer socio‐emotional support to providers, but this effect is reduced when providers themselves have more organizational knowledge. Third‐party influence is also marginally attenuated when providers have a larger circle of friends. Overall, our findings advance the social embeddedness perspective by instilling a greater appreciation for dyad member’s dependence upon the third party in explaining third‐party influence on cooperation.

Social inclusion in an alternative food network: Values, practices and tensions

The paper explores the challenges faced by a consumer food cooperative to combine social inclusion and embeddedness in its urban environment with the standards of food quality it targets. While the difficulty to make alternative food networks (AFN) socially accessible is well documented in the literature, little is known about the organizational practices to foster inclusion in AFNs. Based on over 100 participant observations of meetings held at the cooperative and food activities with members of community organizations, our research has produced understanding on how a participative process - through collective decisions, exchange of knowledge and commitment to workslots - could facilitate or restrain social inclusion. Results suggest that the promotion of the value of sociocultural equality in access to quality food for the largest number is hindered by differences of food, consumer and participation cultures between members and non-members of the cooperative. The value of sociocultural equality in access to quality food is pragmatically challenged by the practice of social inclusion regarding the food supply and the participation in voluntary work.

Entrepreneurial finance journeys: embeddedness and the finance escalator

ABSTRACT This paper re-visits the traditional model of the finance escalator, which outlines alternative financial pathways for entrepreneurs depending on their aspirations and stage of development. Building on social, spatial and institutional embeddedness perspectives, the dynamic and interactional challenges of financial decisions are captured through an exploratory interpretivist approach. Ten early funding journeys of entrepreneurs in Scotland, all of whom sought external funding, were scrutinized with the objective of revealing motivations, reasoning, and patterns behind funding decisions. Surprisingly, these entrepreneurs all initially sought value-added financial capital, but issues including control (perceived as ownership), speed of access, and external environmental pressures caused them to accept offers (often unsolicited) from familiar sources. As a result, a revised finance escalator is proposed. The extent to which these findings are context specific is discussed.

Hungary’s Over-powerful Government Party and the Desperate Opposition

This paper focuses on Hungary’s illiberal regimes from the perspective of the opposition – a perspective we believe has been under-scrutinized so far. It argues that in order to understand the regime’s success it is crucial to explain why opposition parties have been unable to offer a credible alternative. The paper argues that the opposition is in a trap with three unfavourable factors mutually strengthening each other and undermining its ability for success. They are (1) the cartel party system; (2) the weak social embeddedness of opposition parties; and (3) lack of their presence in local politics. At the same time, we also point out that the rise of a tiny joke-party’s success (The Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party) highlights that these obstacles can be overcome even with very limited resources. Nevertheless, it is still unclear if the Dog Party’s innovative approach to doing politics could be ‘institutionalized’ – i.e. if it offers a feasible model strategy for opposition parties – or it is only an efficient way of mocking and criticizing how the political system operates.

Family-managed firms and local export spillovers: evidence from Spanish manufacturing firms

ABSTRACT By combining arguments from regional economics and family business research, the aim of this article is to test the relationships among local export spillovers, management characteristics, and export propensity on a large sample of Spanish manufacturing firms over the 2003–2015 period. We find that family-managed firms, compared to their non-family counterparts, benefit more from being located in regions with a high density of exporters. Because of their firm-specific social capital and strong embeddedness in local networks, family-managed firms are better positioned to leverage the spatially bounded flow of knowledge and information in these regions, resulting in a higher likelihood to export than non-family firms. Additionally, our results show that the knowledge spillover effect is stronger for small and low-tech family firms’ export propensity.

The Persuasive Effect of Competence and Warmth on Clothing Sustainable Consumption: The Moderating Role of Consumer Knowledge and Social Embeddedness

Commonly, most companies regard consumer satisfaction to be their major goal. Companies have in the past been focusing on consumer choice in product sales from a utility theory perspective. However, these days, in addition to personal choice, clothing disposal and sustainable consumption are also becoming main concerns of consumers because of growing environmental problems in many parts of the world. In this research, two studies were conducted, and the results of study 1 were economic factors that affected sustainable consumption behavior positively, and competence cognition was the basis of this effect. A philanthropic factor also positively influenced sustainable consumption behavior, and this effect was mediated by warmth cognition. Economic factors influenced consumers’ product disposal behavior not only through competence cognition but also through warmth cognition. Therefore, to encourage disposal behaviors, such as recycling and donation, strategies are needed that can appeal to economic advantages. Study 2 examined the clothing disposal behavior considering environmental economic factors by scenarios. As a result, it was confirmed that environmental economics factors influenced clothing disposal behavior. In addition, we could confirm the moderated mediating effect as well as the moderating effects of knowledge level. The implications of these results and some suggestions for future research are discussed.

The concept of perfect competition as the law of economics: addressing the homonymy problem

The rapid expansion of economic analysis is visible in many areas of law. In some of them – in antitrust in particular – economic reasoning is already perceived as the dominant discourse. This article is an attempt to contemplate a reverse analysis. Instead of addressing the legal domain from the perspective of economics, it tries to explore the economic discipline through the lens of a lawyer. The analysis is directed at one of the main principles of neoclassical economics – the concept of perfect competition: partly to explore its constitutive role in economic reasoning, but also in order to articulate the misconception with which some economists approach legal regulation of economic relations. It attempts to explain why economic analysis is bound to address broader societal problems in a purely pragmatic way, quantifying the whole spectrum of societal values, reducing them to the common economic denominator of efficiency. This feature of economics is embedded in its epistemology and should not be perceived as its normative claim. In other words, the fact that welfare economics reduces the social interests to cost–benefit calculus does not automatically characterise it as being irresponsive to the social embeddedness problem.

Designing Cattle: The Social Practice of Constructing Breeds

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how cattle breeds are constructed through social practice—which we conceptually develop as “designing” cattle. We show how breed varieties are designed, informed by the social, material and moral embeddedness of cattle breeding associations’ visions of the future and how they draw on science and technology in their breeding strategies. Based on an analysis of the trade magazines of three different breeding associations, we illustrate how breeding associations are working to establish four different varieties of Swedish Mountain Cattle (SMC). We conclude that the concept of designing cattle enables us to unpack how breeds are socially constructed and institutionally stabilized through sociotechnical imaginaries.

A gender- and class-sensitive explanatory model for rural women entrepreneurship in Turkey

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to offer a new gender- and class-sensitive framework for research on rural women entrepreneurship by focusing on the women’s agricultural cooperatives in Turkey. Although these cooperatives have been promoted as ideal bottom-to-top organizations to integrate women into economy as entrepreneurs, there has been significant decline in their numbers. This paper tackles with this contradictory situation and intends to offer an alternative research framework on the viability of the women’s agricultural cooperatives in Turkey.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is built on a critical assessment of the existing literature. It argues that a framework that brings together macro-, meso- and micro-factors will provide a springboard to unfold the gendered processes integral to rural female entrepreneurship in Turkey. Drawing on intersectional theory, the multilayered factors which operate to rural women’s (dis)advantages through the cooperatives are unfolded as policymaking, policy implementation and everyday experiences.FindingsFor policymakers and implementers, it points out the need for a holistic and integrated understanding of rural female entrepreneurship and for re-formulation of policies at the state level. For rural women, it draws attention to the measures required to be taken at the cooperative level to overcome inequalities.Originality/valueThis paper is original in making explicit social, political and economic embeddedness of female entrepreneurship in rural Turkey.

Doing Internet research with hard-to-reach communities: methodological reflections on gaining meaningful access

This article contributes to scholarship on digital sociology by addressing the methodological challenge of gaining access to hard-to-reach online communities. We use assemblage theory to argue how collaborative efforts of human participants, digital technologies, techniques, authorities, cultural codes and the human researcher co-determine aspects of gaining access to online subjects. In particular, we analyse how credibility and reflexivity are assembled in an online research context. This is exemplified by our own experiences of researching hackers that dispute surveillance and the social embeddedness of darknet drug market users. In this article, we demonstrate the utility of an assemblage perspective for understanding the complexities involved in negotiating access to hard-to-reach communities in digital spaces.

An ecological monetary theory

While money is critical to the modern world, ecological economics does not have a theory of money that is applicable to its theoretical framework and policy prescriptions. Accordingly, the field often defers to an orthodox conception of money that is historically inaccurate and ontologically inconsistent. The dualized nature of Western philosophy informs orthodoxy by defining money according its function as a medium of exchange. This conceptualization creates logical and historical problems that can be addressed by exploring an interdisciplinary literature that defines money according to its nature as a social relation expressed in a unit of account. This paper develops an ecological monetary theory that is simultaneously rooted in a socio-historical understanding of money's nature, and in an ontology of social and ecological embeddedness. Such a theory provides ecological economists, and others concerned with social and ecological equity, with a framework from which to address monetary systems and policy.

What’s the market got to do with it? Social-ecological embeddedness and environmental practices in a local food system initiative

Food system localization is often advocated by academics, activists, and policy makers as a means of effectively addressing the negative social and ecological consequences of current systems of food production. Activists and academics alike point to the range of different social relations facilitated by proximity and face-to-face interactions that are defining features of some local food system initiatives (LFSI). The concept of social embeddedness, which posits that economic activity is entangled with ongoing social relations, is frequently used to interpret the social relations of LFSI and to frame overarching arguments. Social embeddedness has been used to describe the alterity of LFSI, but much of this work has yet to assess how embedded social relations affect market functioning or sustainability in these systems—particularly for environmental aspects of sustainability. In this article we utilize the lens social embeddedness to assess what we call social-ecological embeddedness (SEE), which considers how, and to what extent, environmental practices on LFSI farms are enmeshed with the ongoing social relations of the local food system initiative. After developing the SEE approach, we use it to examine how social relations in a farmers’ market network in New York City, USA, influence environmental practices on participating farms, and the implications of social-ecological embeddedness for building more sustainable food systems.

DRUG MARKETS AND ANONYMIZING TECHNOLOGIES

Online drug markets taking advantage of social media and encryption software (e.g. Tor network) and cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin, Monero) to conceal the identity and physical location of their users are a relatively new area of internet research. Yet, a range of socio-technical innovations have contributed to the proliferation of drug markets on the Internet. Due to the illegality of drugs and drug dealing are anonymizing technologies regarded as important socio-technical practices among its participants allowing to mitigate risks of vendors and customers when exchanging drugs. This panel draws together a number of leading scholars in this emerging area of research to explore questions and issues associated with online platforms enabling illicit transactions. The collection of papers in this panel contribute empirical data and theoretical insight on a range of relevant topics in the study of online drug markets, including methodological challenges, social embeddedness, trust production and governance on cryptomarkets. Various papers in this panel propose new concepts for understanding cryptomarkets as social phenomena where relationships enable economic transactions. It also pluralizes trust building on online platforms and, expanding it from merely institution-based mechanisms to include social relations such as interpreting signs and signals or previous interactions between buyers and sellers. They also expand on reliability of data gathered via anonymous online interviews, drawing attention to participation of marginalized communities. The aim of this panel is to bring together new research to further our understanding of the overall impact of online platform emergence upon global drug markets and to better model their impact on drug dealing, online networks and society in general.

Janus-faced activists: the social and political embeddedness of civil society in Niger

AbstractThis article discusses the workings of civil society and its leaders in Niger. Tracing the country's historically sedimented socio-political order, it argues that Niger's civil society is characterized by a twofold embeddedness. Since the introduction of multiparty politics in 1990, the political game in Niger has been exemplified by co-optation, bribery and corruption. These spoils are a central focus for civil society leaders who have become experienced in the political game. Indeed, actors’ social embeddedness in networks of solidarity demands that they capture and redistribute the spoils they receive. At the same time, however, their social and political legitimacy as civil society leaders rests on their ability to avoid becoming entangled in the game, and to avoid accusations of ‘playing politics’. In other words, civil society activists are embedded in the same social and political structures as state bureaucrats and politicians. In this context, civil society activists cannot maintain the moral high ground they often claim to occupy.

Numeracy practices and vulnerability in old age: interdependencies and reciprocal effects

In this paper we discuss individual numeracy practices of older people (age cohort 65 and above), concentrating on findings concerning interdependencies of numeracy practices and vulnerability and their reciprocal effects, drawing on first results of a qualitative, explorative study entitled ‘Numeracy as social practice in the course of time’. For this paper, we examine the issue of vulnerability in relation to dimensions such as financial and economic situation, health and social embeddedness. Drawing on the concept of ‘numeracy as social practice’ according to Baker and Street (International encyclopedia of adult education and training, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1996), we focus on the strategies of older people using numeracy practices and skills to lead independent, self-determined and autonomous lives, to experience individual life satisfaction and to avoid vulnerable situations. The findings, derived from in-depth interviews with the above-mentioned cohort, show that various meanings are attributed to numeracy practices in response to certain requirements and needs concerning personal well-being, as well as anticipating developments such as biographical transitions. We discuss how mathematical knowledge and skills are applied when transformed into individual numeracy practices. Our findings, which demonstrate the creative and meaningful use of numeracy practices according to personal needs, are then discussed within the scope of formal teaching and learning processes in basic adult education.

History of Economic Thought as an Analytic Tool: why Past Intellectual Ideas Must Be Acknowledged as Lighthouses for the Future

Contemporaries tend to question certain belief systems including academic systems of knowledge. Paradigms evolve to become a subject of inquiry. The need to acknowledge history of economic thought as a neglected but important domain of economic inquiry as an important discussion topic. During recent decades, history of economic thought has largely been abolished and has disappeared from many contemporary teaching curricula in economics. The article argues that our academic understanding of economics is incomplete if we do not respect history and understand the social embeddedness of economic institutions and social behaviour. Of course, one must distinguish between history of intellectual ideas and economic history. Both items have to be discussed separately when assessing methodological appropriateness and benefits. The argumentation is based on the work of Joseph A. Schumpeter who dealt in detail with the question why and how to deal with historiography as a tool of proper economics in his substantial introduction to the 1945 book History of Economic Analysis.

Three positions on the fat body: Evaluating the ethical shortcomings of the obesity discourse

This article raises serious ethical concerns regarding the medical discourse on obesity. It offers a description of three alternate positions on the fat body: the scientific approach dominant within medicine, the critical view mainly raised by social scientists, and the voices of fat people themselves. By viewing and comparing the perspectives these positions reveal, it is possible to underline the complexity of the problem labeled as the “obesity epidemic” and draw attention to serious ethical concerns in the mainstream medical discussion. Medicalization of fat people narrows the focus on the “obesity epidemic” where it is framed as private and personal rather than social and political. It is also argued that the hegemonic discourse of medicine omits the social embeddedness of fat people and ignores their own voices and narratives. This undermines the well-being of fat people and hides their humanity as well.