Taking Stock of Social Embeddedness: A Systematic Review on the Evolution of the Construct

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, research on social embeddedness and socially embedded exchange has grown to occupy a prominent place in organizational theory research. But while a large volume of research makes reference to the construct of social embeddedness, few papers have attempted to assess the state of our knowledge about the construct. In this paper, we take stock of our field's understanding of the construct of social embeddedness. We systemically review and analyze 346 articles in seven prominent journals to examine how researchers' use of the construct of social embeddedness has developed and changed over the twenty years since original Granovetter's (1985) article on socially-embedded exchange. We identify trends and themes in social embeddedness research and in other research that, in various ways, invokes the social embeddedness argument. Our results show that the majority of studies invoking social embeddedness use the argument for peripheral purposes. Moreover the studies using social embeddedness as their core argument concentrate on a specific element of social embeddedness, not the whole argument. We conclude our paper by outlining further steps in progress of an increased understanding of social embeddedness.

Keywords: Social embeddedness, Economic sociology, Social relations, Granovetter