ordename este texto y crea un diseño para que quede bien dentro de un documento word: "n to a sociologically thin notion of market economy. As Mann points out (1986, p. 61), ‘This is ironic, as Polanyi's principal mission was to liberate us from the modern market mentality!’ Instead of being liberated from the concept of the market, Polanyi's thought is plagued by opposition to it.
7. Ramifications: the antinomies of embeddedness
This paper attempts to show that Polanyi operates with two different notions of embeddedness: embeddedness as a historical variable and embeddedness as a methodological principle. The duality that is at the heart of Polanyi's embeddedness concept manifests itself in the following manner. First, embeddedness as a gradational concept, as a variable pertaining to economic 
systems in history, is a theoretical proposition in the sense of arguing a separation between economy and society as the market economy becomes the dominant economic system in history. Second, the general and abstract concept of embeddedness—all economies being embedded in social institutions—is not a theoretical proposition, but rather a methodological principle. The metamorphoses of embeddedness—the two variations that are found in Polanyi's oeuvre—have important ramifications for contemporary economic sociology. First, embeddedness as a theoretical 
proposition on the changing place of economy in society is misleading, since it presupposes economy as an autonomous sphere without social content. This is paradoxical since embeddedness is defined as a reaction to the economistic model of behaviour that denies the social character of human action. Second, the usefulness of embeddedness is limited to its methodological 
function because it is not more than a ‘conceptual umbrella under which one should look into and think about what are the connections between economic activity and the social, the political, the institutional, the historical, the cultural elements that economic activity is mixed up with’, as Granovetter states in a symposium on embeddedness (
Krippner
et al.
, 2004
, p. 133). Yet it should be recognized that embeddedness in this capacity falls short of providing a theoretical alternative to mainstream economics.
The gradational concept of embeddedness, through which Polanyi offers a more elaborate picture of how he conceptualizes economic life, is erroneous because it reifies the market economy 
in the way mainstream economics conceptualizes it; it purports an image of past economies where all economic activities are carried out in the name of non-economic ends; it contradicts the general proposition that all economic activity is embedded in social life.
17
The problem is that this conceptualization of embeddedness naturally leads to the notion of social life consisting of separate spheres; the market becomes a social sphere devoid of social content. Such a view is untenable. The physical notion of a ‘sphere’ is a misleading way of thinking about economy and society because neither is a physical entity with a definite shape and boundary; rather, they are the accumulation and patterning of social relationships in a given time-space regionalization (
Giddens, 1984
). As such, any recourse into conceiving of these entities as physical spaces constitutes a form of reification. Strictly speaking, economy and society as bounded ontic entities do not exist. As a result, one cannot be embedded in the other, nor can the embeddedness level change over time.
Polanyi's gradational concept of embeddedness is a historical one because Polanyi sees the institutional separation of economic life from social life as a historical process. This historical dimension of the concept is lost in Granovetter's revival of embeddedness (1985), but conceptualizing ‘economic’ and ‘social’ as belonging to different social spheres remains alive 
(
Krippner, 2001
). Unlike Polanyi, who is inspired by Maine and Tönnies' ideas on the historical evolution of societies, Granovetter's reformulation carries the influence of Parsons and action theory ( 
Krippner, 2001
). Curiously, although with a different logic, the mistake is the same. In arguing that ‘economic action is embedded in structures of social relations’ (1985, p. 481), Granovetter too elicits the physical imagery of economic and social spheres.
Evoking physical imagery has consequences. In a careful analysis of Granovetter's (1985) appropriation and reformulation of the term,
Krippner (2001)
demonstrates the antinomies of Granovetter's reformulation by pointing out: (a) how it assumes an ontological distinction between economic and social spheres, and (b) how this prevents economic sociology from asking important theoretical questions. She substantiates these points by showing how such a formulation cripples the study of the market in sociology (2001, p. 801):
In attempting to steer an intermediate course between the twin perils of under- and oversocialized views of action, Granovetter has run the ship aground on a conception – common to both 
– that insists on the separate nature of economy and society. This problem manifests itself in the perverse symmetry that exists in the discipline: researchers either study economic processes in social terms, in which case they abandon the sphere of the market; or, they study the market as a theoretical entity in its own right, in which case they purge all social content.
Krippner's astute observation on the study of the market in economic sociology is important; it implies that economic sociology motivated by the embeddedness concept faces considerable difficulties in showing how economic processes and outcomes are social. This is not surprising. Embeddedness, unintentionally assuming a demarcation between the economic and the social, leads researchers to ask questions in the form of how ‘economic’ is related to ‘social’. As a result, it creates a tendency to analyse economic phenomena either
qua
social by de-emphasizing economic phenomena or
qua
economic by discarding social factors. This is paradoxical, since the main aspiration of the embeddedness concept is to reject the alleged demarcation between economic and social phenomena.
At its best, as a methodological principle, embeddedness invites the researcher to look for the social processes that structure and shape economic life. However, embeddedness itself is not a causal force or mechanism, nor does it specify how economic activities are structured by social factors. Hence, the quintessential limitation of embeddedness as a paradigm for contemporary economic sociology: while it provides a powerful critique of the neoclassical model of behaviour and while it points out how that model violates the true nature of economic activities, it does not provide an alternative theoretical framework capable of demonstrating how social factors enable and structure human action.
18
At its worst, embeddedness misguides economic sociology if it is taken as anything other than an abstract methodological principle, as can be witnessed by the common interpretation of embeddedness as indicating that ‘economic’ is submerged in ‘social’. The concept of embeddedness is thus limited.
To be sure, embeddedness is useful as a method of inquiry into economic life. All human activities are structured by social factors, and economic activities are not an exception to this 
rule. In this capacity, as
Beckert (2003
, p. 796) puts it, ‘[Embeddedness] points to the indissoluble connection of the actor with his or her social surrounding’. It is precisely in this manner that embeddedness opened venues 
for empirical research after the publication of Granovetter's classic article (1985), motivating economic sociologists to find social processes where neoclassical economists simply see self-interested behaviour. As a result, in contrast to what Schumpeter purported, economic sociology overcame the intellectual division of labour between economics and sociology by undertaking the task of determining what economic outcomes social processes produce. However, a theoretical vacuum characterizes economic sociology. Economic sociologists often stay on the familiar ground of ‘social’ and shy away from ‘economic’; they focus their empirical studies on meso- and macro-level social processes (Collins, n.d.) and rarely ask the traditional questions that have preoccupied economics for centuries, despite being united in their criticism of mainstream economics.
Thus, simply assuming ‘the indissoluble connection of the actor with his or her social surrounding’ is not sufficient; rather, it is necessary to advance this methodological principle by developing theoretical frameworks that show how economic activities are social in the first place. Embeddedness does not have the potential for such theoretical progress, despite its importance as a methodological principle.
19
Consequently, the analysis presented in this article joins the recent calls in economic sociology (
Krippner, 2001
;
Beckert, 2003
) to underline the limitation of embeddedness as a paradigm for economic sociology and the necessity of developing new paradigmatic approaches.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>, Robert Jansen, Greta Krippner, Michael Mann, Gabrielle Raley, Bill Roy and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions, criticisms and other help. 
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