Granovetter rejects both the undersocialised fiction of autonomous economic actors and the oversocialised image of behaviour mechanically determined by norms. His iconic idea is embeddedness: economic action takes place within concrete networks of trust, obligation, information and repeated association. The theoretical contribution is to make social structure internal to markets rather than an external context added after economic calculation. Methodologically, Granovetter compares theoretical traditions and empirical cases of employment, firms, fraud and inter-organisational relations, demonstrating how network position shapes apparently individual decisions. The conceptual operation is relational specification: exchange is reconstructed as a situated process whose possibilities depend upon prior ties and institutional histories. The wider bridge reaches economic sociology, network analysis, organisational theory and urban studies. Embeddedness also complicates moral assumptions, since networks can sustain cooperation while enabling exclusion, collusion and unequal access. Markets emerge as institutional ecologies in which efficiency, confidence and power are jointly produced.
