Enzo Mingione

Embeddedness, Path Dependency and Social Institutions

This paper argues for a theoretical approach based on embeddedness which assumes that the economic actor is not an atomized and utilitarian individual, but is in fact positioned within specific historical and institutional contexts in various social networks. This approach is based on Polanyis critically debated contribution which allows for an empirical study of the diversity of institutional structures and of the significance of configurations of insertion within different social networks. Such diversity results from the double movement of disembeddedness and re-embeddedness caused by the spread of constantly emerging market opportunities, and by the importance held by the historically and culturally different selective processes of path dependency in the construction of the institutions of social regulation and of the socialized preferences of economic actors. Within these processes attention is given to the transformation of social systems based on reciprocity (household, kin, social capital networks, etc.), associations of shared interests, forms of economic organization (in a plurality of coexisting ‘economies’), unequal distribution of power, and political intervention.

Territorial division of labour and capitalist development

The object of this study is to help clarify the relationship between the development of productive forces and the evolution of territorial structures, the use of territory, the links between town and country and between developed and depressed areas. The subject is fraught with difficulties of both a theoretical and a methodological nature. Recent research has been aimed at defining the links between different territorial phenomena, the different social classes, economic development, the labour market and other large-scale sociological and economic phenomena. Despite all this an adequate general theory or methodology is not yet available for use in the advanced study of these problems. Research has only cast light on certain aspects of this problematic area. Work has been done on the relationship between rent and industrial development during particular historic periods in a given country, the development of an isolated community, the social and territorial divisions within a large city, the respective rates of industrialization and urbanization in a given country and so on. Many difficulties have however hindered the formulation of a basic theory of the relations between territorial inequality and economic development. Indeed it is usually the gulf between research data and the broader interpretative hypotheses about society which makes the researcher’s job so hard’even if his work is based upon a comprehensive methodological framework such as Marxism.