The Always Embedded State: Six Types of State-Society Interaction

Abstract This paper offers a critical analysis of the concept of embeddedness as currently used in political sociology and state theory. It argues that the concept of embeddedness can be successfully used to solve a current theoretical impasse – namely, how to conceptualize statesociety relations. The paper creates a conceptual space at the intersection of two axes of variation: the pattern of embeddedness (mono-versus multi-embeddedness) and the degree of state autonomy (captive versus autonomous). A central finding of this paper is that at least six types of embeddedness can be shown to exist in this conceptual space. In the remainder of the paper, the six types are described using a range of evidence extracted from the literature. One major advantage of the proposed typology is that it is able to incorporate, under the same umbrella, a variety of preexisting approaches of state-society interactions.