用中文总结提炼以下内容：INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF EMBEDDEDNESS
How behavior and institutions are affected by social relations is one of the
classic questions of social theory. Since such relations are always present,
the situation that would arise in their absence can be imagined only
through a thought experiment like Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature” or
John Rawls’s “original position.” Much of the utilitarian tradition, including classical and neoclassical economics, assumes rational, selfinterested behavior affected minimally by social relations, thus invoking
an idealized state not far from that of these thought experiments. At the
other extreme lies what I call the argument of “embeddedness”: the argu-ment that the behavior and institutions to be analyzed are so constrained
by ongoing social relations that to construe them as independent is a
grievous misunderstanding.
This article concerns the embeddedness of economic behavior. It has
long been the majority view among sociologists, anthropologists, political
scientists, and historians that such behavior was heavily embedded in
social relations in premarket societies but became much more autonomous with modernization. This view sees the economy as an increasingly
separate, differentiated sphere in modern society, with economic transactions defined no longer by the social or kinship obligations of those transacting but by rational calculations of individual gain. It is sometimes
further argued that the traditional situation is reversed: instead of economic life being submerged in social relations, these relations become an
epiphenomenon of the market. The embeddedness position is associated
with the “substantivist” school in anthropology, identified especially with
Karl Polanyi (1944; Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957) and with the
idea of “moral economy” in history and political science (Thompson 197 1;
Scott 1976). It has also some obvious relation to Marxist thought.
Few economists, however, have accepted this conception of a break in
embeddedness with modernization; most of them assert instead that embeddedness in earlier societies was not substantially greater than the low
level found in modern markets. The tone was set by Adam Smith, who
postulated a “certain propensity in human nature . . . to truck, barter and
exchange one thing for another” ([I7761 1979, book 1, chap. 2) and assumed that since labor was the only factor of production in primitive
society, goods must have exchanged in proportion to their labor costs-as
in the general classical theory of exchange ([I7761 1979, book 1, chap. 6).
From the 1920s on, certain anthropologists took a similar position, which
came to be called the “formalist” one: even in tribal societies, economic
behavior was sufficiently independent of social relations for standard
neoclassical analysis to be useful (Schneider 1974). This position has recently received a new infusion as economists and fellow travelers in history and political science have developed a new interest in the economic
analysis of social institutions-much of which falls into what is called the
"new institutional economicsn-and have argued that behavior and institutions previously interpreted as embedded in earlier societies, as well
as in our own, can be better understood as resulting from the pursuit of
self-interest by rational, more or less atomized individuals (e.g., North
and Thomas 1973; Williamson 1975; Popkin 1979).
My own view diverges from both schools of thought. I assert that the
level of embeddedness of economic behavior is lower in nonmarket
societies than is claimed by substantivists and development theorists, and
it has changed less with “modernization” than they believe; but I argue
also that this level has always been and continues to be more substantial
than is allowed for by formalists and economists. I do not attempt here to
treat the issues posed by nonmarket societies. I proceed instead by a
theoretical elaboration of the concept of embeddedness, whose value is
then illustrated with a problem from modern society, currently important
in the new institutional economics: which transactions in modern capitalist society are carried out in the market, and which subsumed within
hierarchically organized. firms? This question has been raised to prominence by the “markets and hierarchies” program of research initiated by
Oliver Williamson (1975).