从“内嵌”到“互嵌”:重构新经济社会学中的经济与社会

From Embeddedness to Inter-embeddedness:Reconstructing Economy and Society in the New Economic Sociology

以“内嵌性”为核心概念的新经济社会学在过去40年取得了丰硕的成果,但既有研究受中层理论取向的影响,普遍看重经验层面上的贡献,对一般层面上的基础性理论反思有所忽视。就理论而言,新经济社会学在理解“经济”方面存在三个问题:看待经济后果不全面;对“经济”的定义过于粗糙和狭隘;对经济与社会关系的定义有所矛盾。产生上述问题的原因在于新经济社会学过分侧重现实批判,激烈回应“经济学帝国主义”,照搬社会学中的社会秩序问题,不承认经济领域的相对独立性,主张经济领域缺乏内生秩序,最终演化为社会还原论。新经济社会学若要在下一阶段有所突破,必须和更宽泛意义上的社会理论有更多对话。具体主张包括:提出“经济与社会互嵌”的理论命题;在理论框架中恢复经济领域的自发秩序性;对等看待经济与社会,视二者之间的关系为液态相互渗透的互嵌状态。

Built on the core concept of“embeddedness”,the new economic sociology has achieved remarkable progress over the past four decades.However,influenced by the idea of middle-range theory,it has prioritized empirical contributions over general theoretical reflections.Theoretically,the new economic sociology misunderstands the economy in three aspects:inadequate understanding of economic consequences,underdeveloped and narrow definition of the economy,and contradictory definitions of the relations between economy and society.The reasons of such misunderstanding are the overemphasis of the new economic sociology on the critique of reality,the overreaction to“economic imperialism”,the uncritical acceptance of the“social order”problem in sociology,the ultimate degeneration into a social reductionism because of the refusal of the relative independence of the economy and insistence of the lack of the endogenous order in the economy.In order to have a breakthrough,the economic sociology should have more serious dialogues with social theory in a broad sense.In particular,our proposals include a view of the inter-embeddedness between economy and society,bringing the spontaneous order back into its theoretical framework,and an equal treatment of economy and society by viewing its relationship as fluid interpenetration.