Talking About Organizations Podcast
Jul 21, 2026 · 40 min · 16 segments
In Part 2, we further contrast the relational work perspective of Zelizer and Bandelj with the dominant embeddedness perspective promoted by Granovetter and other early economic sociologists a few…
My sense was that one of the reasons why the embeddedness view is difficult to unseat is because so far, everything that we've covered in the relational work has sort of been in the realm of descriptive and explanatory models, whereas precisely to the point about the quantification and the ability to isolate variables and all that sort of thing, the embeddedness view would seem to lend itself more easily to prescriptive models, which is to say how you make decisions and how you act in this space.
Like what do you do to actually do something? Because anybody can sell a process model, consultants do it all the time, and they don't assume the risk if the process model doesn't work because, well, it's the company's fault who hired me.
who failed to exercise the process the way that it was supposed to be done or whatever.
But the fact that you have process models means that there's legitimacy that's in there.
Are there frameworks that are like really being peddled out there, which are relational view oriented for making decisions and taking action based on the theory?
Yeah, actually, that's an interesting point, because towards the end of part one, we were talking about, or at least I came at it more from an angle of research, quote unquote, productivity or this, you know, having stuff for people to do and measure and study in the ways we tend to, or like, you know, the most real estate in our journals go towards the kinds of research.
But your point is a good one, because I'm starting to wonder whether relational work is by nature not really meant to be, I mean, it's meant to be more of a window into understanding how things actually work in the world, and hence descriptive plus explanatory, but maybe not necessarily, you know, even if there were quantitative, let me put it this way, even if there were quantitative ways, and more reductionist ways to study it.
I don't know if it would, it's a theory that would lend itself to prescriptive strategic aids beyond, let's say, the concept of just matching.
So sure, if you were a consultant really trying to squeeze something out of this, you could create a diagnostic checklist for kind of characterizing the relational package and of where you are and where you're doing business and who it's with and whatever, and then make sure you act appropriately.
But in some sense, the outcome of all of it is appropriate or viable behavior, not profit maximizing or anything maximizing.
Yeah, and you can kind of see where I'm going because in the present environment, there's so much of a push to have return on investment or tools that there's a very, very strong interest in practical application and stuff that cannot be put into practice or used in practice or not seen as valuable in the present time.
My sense was that one of the reasons why the embeddedness view is difficult to unseat is because so far, everything that we've covered in the relational work has sort of been in the realm of descriptive and explanatory models, whereas precisely to the point about the quantification and the ability to isolate variables and all that sort of thing, the embeddedness view would seem to lend itself more easily to prescriptive models, which is to say how you make decisions and how you act in this space.
Like what do you do to actually do something? Because anybody can sell a process model, consultants do it all the time, and they don't assume the risk if the process model doesn't work because, well, it's the company's fault who hired me.
who failed to exercise the process the way that it was supposed to be done or whatever.
But the fact that you have process models means that there's legitimacy that's in there.
Are there frameworks that are like really being peddled out there, which are relational view oriented for making decisions and taking action based on the theory?
Yeah, actually, that's an interesting point, because towards the end of part one, we were talking about, or at least I came at it more from an angle of research, quote unquote, productivity or this, you know, having stuff for people to do and measure and study in the ways we tend to, or like, you know, the most real estate in our journals go towards the kinds of research.
But your point is a good one, because I'm starting to wonder whether relational work is by nature not really meant to be, I mean, it's meant to be more of a window into understanding how things actually work in the world, and hence descriptive plus explanatory, but maybe not necessarily, you know, even if there were quantitative, let me put it this way, even if there were quantitative ways, and more reductionist ways to study it.
I don't know if it would, it's a theory that would lend itself to prescriptive strategic aids beyond, let's say, the concept of just matching.
So sure, if you were a consultant really trying to squeeze something out of this, you could create a diagnostic checklist for kind of characterizing the relational package and of where you are and where you're doing business and who it's with and whatever, and then make sure you act appropriately.
But in some sense, the outcome of all of it is appropriate or viable behavior, not profit maximizing or anything maximizing.
Yeah, and you can kind of see where I'm going because in the present environment, there's so much of a push to have return on investment or tools that there's a very, very strong interest in practical application and stuff that cannot be put into practice or used in practice or not seen as valuable in the present time.
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