Agency Relationships, Embeddedness and Employment Relations

Economic sociology, for all its successes, is yet to develop an explanation of recent growth in market-driven policies such as flexibility in the use of labour and precarious employment. Embeddedness-centred perspectives in economic sociology are unlikely to correct this omission because their objective is to show that market-driven practices are not what they seem, i.e. that under a closer examination they also prove the embeddedness thesis. However, if the current labour market practices and those of two decades ago both represent embedded economic relations, then the concept of embeddedness sheds little light on key social and economic processes of our times. This article, inspired by the role that organized labour played in recent market transitions in Eastern Europe, demonstrates that a theory of agency relationship is a necessary addition to the embeddedness thesis, if economic sociology is to account for labour's present tendency to eschew social protection.