Disembeddedness

Disembeddedness refers to a condition in which economic activity, social relationships, or institutions become detached from the social, cultural, and moral contexts that once regulated them. The concept is most closely associated with Karl Polanyi, who argued in The Great Transformation that the rise of the self-regulating market in nineteenth-century Europe pulled the economy out of society, treating land, labor, and money as fictitious commodities and provoking a protective countermovement. Mark Granovetter reversed the emphasis by arguing that all economic action is embedded in networks of social relations, so that complete disembedding is a myth, and Sharon Zukin and Paul DiMaggio distinguished structural, cultural, cognitive, and political embeddedness. Anthony Giddens used disembedding to describe the lifting out of social relations from local contexts and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space through symbolic tokens such as money and expert systems. Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity and Georg Simmel’s analysis of the money economy explore related themes. Fred Block and Nancy Fraser have revived Polanyi in analyses of neoliberalism and financialization. Disembeddedness remains central to research on markets, globalization, modernity, trust, and economic sociology.