Preface Acknowledgements and return journeys Visualizing socio-legal frames, concepts, and methods 1 Doing, talking, and thinking (and why we’re not getting it right) Crashes, crises, catastrophes Doing, talking, and thinking The law and the economy don’t really exist PS: Nor does society How metaphors use us Constructing reality Introducing homo juridicus and homo economicus An ongoing conceptual commitment to embeddedness Introducing an economic sociology of law (ESL): the home of embeddedness The career of embeddedness in ESL and two conceptual conundrums Embeddedness in academic literature: drawing parallels and drawing conclusions Introducing our “guide” personas: Ann, Polly, and Lillian Bibliography 2 Introducing an economic sociology of law What is an economic sociology of law (ESL)? The role of economic sociology of law: responding to disciplinarity The intellectual heritage of ESL: economic sociology and socio-legal scholarship Socio-legal heritage Economic sociology heritage “Black boxes” and taxonomies Text; subtext; context Empirical; conceptual; normative Econo-socio-legal Instrumental; affective; belief-based; traditional Micro; meso; macro; meta Writing the rules of the game: indicators as technologies of governance ESL is (currently) a pseudo-constructivist lens: boundaries and borderlands Bibliography 3 Embeddedness: A biography of a concept Embeddedness: the origins Talking about embeddedness Karl Polanyi’s always (or never) embedded market The “accidental” revival of embeddedness Critiques of embeddedness Critiques of macro-level embeddedness Critiques of micro-level embeddedness Reconciling macro- and micro-level embeddedness? Reconciling the implications: cognitive and normative embeddedness How might we make embeddedness more consistent? Embedded liberalism Embedded autonomy Reconciling the insights? The embeddedness conundrum is reinvented Bibliography 4 Embeddedness: The internal inconsistencies The internal inconsistency of embeddedness: “what are we talking about?” Block’s interpretation of Polanyian embeddedness Dale’s interpretation of Polanyian embeddedness Doughnut Economics versus The Econocracy Doughnut Economics The Econocracy Emblematic of a wider approach What is embedded? And in what? Bibliography 5 Embeddedness: The external conceptual incompatibilities How we tend to think (our default conceptual tools) How we might think differently (challenging default conceptual tools) Thinking about embeddedness as a black box Proposing an alternative ESL lens: beyond embeddedness Shift 1: from the actor to their interaction Trust is important in understanding interactions Shift 2: embeddedness to feedback loops Understanding feedback loops through performativity Exploring the performativity of law and economics with a thought experiment Beyond homo economicus-juridicus? Bibliography 6 Beyond embeddedness: The next steps What remains of ESL without its core concept of embeddedness? Lingering questions about an ESL lens What, where, or who is “the social”? But “how much?”: the “sociological fallacy” Removing the core concept: what is left? What’s in a name? Linguistic limitations Clean models or dirty hands? ESL, politics, and power: can an ESL lens ever be apolitical? Responding to crashes, crises, catastrophes Our conceptual commitment to embeddedness continues Shoehorning concepts into categories: Happy the Elephant, Chucho the Bear, and their friendsShoehorning concepts into categories: COVID versus the economy? Rebalancing voices and values: becoming ‘homo sociologicus’? “Happy” Bhutan “Sustainable” Oslo Framing the future? Rebalancing voices and values Moving beyond embeddedness? Bibliography Epilogue: Notes about the characters Index