Granovetter and Williamson essentially address the same issue—the
solution to the problem of order (Granovetter) and the inhibition of
opportunism and malfeasance (Williamson). For Williamson, the solution
lies in the emergence of organizational forms that minimize malfeasance.
Granovetter’s “embeddedness argument stresses [instead] the role of concrete
personal relations and structures (or “networks”) of such relations in
generating trust and discouraging malfeasance” (Granovetter and Swedberg,
1992:60). Granovetter then backs away from charges of replacing one
sort of optimistic functionalism for another by conceding that social relations
may on occasion provide the means for greater malfeasance: “The
embeddedness approach to the problem of trust and order... makes no
sweeping predictions of universal order or disorder but rather assumes
that the details of social structure will determine what is found” (1992:63)
(emphasis added). For Granovetter, in other words, social outcomes are
determined by, and can be read off, social structures. As Williamson (1993)
has recently and correctly pointed out, his approach and Granovetter’s are
entirely complementary.