8. Embeddedness

In the previous section I introduced the idea of boundary setting, in this section I will continue exploring a second concept, embeddedness.

If the interventions of GS are bounded it is also equally true that the actors in the SG are embedded in dynamic social, material and economic structures that enable and constrain their individual choices.  Kooiman (2002, 2008) in his discussion of interactive governance theory invokes the concept of structure using the ideas of Gidden’s (1984) theory of structuration. Structuration is a broad sociological theory that attempts to clarify the role of agency and structure in the production and reproduction of social systems. Agency is the idea that individuals have choice in the actions that they perpetrate, in other words freedom to affect the world around them. Structure is conceived of as the social fabric that surrounds actors both enabling and constraining action, or another way of looking at it is the way that an individual’s actions are limited and predetermined by external social forces. Extreme views of these forces can attribute either far too much freedom of action in the form of an undersocialized, fully autonomous rational decision maker often modeled by economists, or provide far too little freedom in the form of an oversocialized, completely dependent and constrained individual perhaps best exemplified by Rousseau’s social contract. Structuration theory says that there is a balance between the roles of agency and structure and highlights that structure not only constrains but can also enable individual action.

Structuration theory also provides another even more significant perspective on social action, an idea that Giddens labels as duality. This is the idea that action in society is both limited by structure and changes structure at the same time. As actors perpetrate action in social reality they are guided by structure, however they still maintain some degree of agency and through their action change the nature of the existing structures, perhaps slowly and imperceptibly, but change nonetheless. Another author, Granovetter (1985), develops this idea by criticizing the extreme views of undersocialized and oversocialized actors as both visualizing a set of fixed rules, either internally or externally generated, that will be consistently followed, when in truth the rules of the game are continually changing. He uses the term embeddedness to describe the dynamic interactive actor that both has agency and is constrained and enabled by structure, a term I feel more simply and clearly captures the way I view social action in this thesis.

The ideas of structuration and embeddedness were both fashioned to describe the reproduction of social systems, and as such focus almost exclusively on the social nature of this process. However in truth, society is surrounded by a material world that has a significant impact on the shape of social systems. Giddens (1984) notes material constraint as one of three senses of structural constraint, but other authors (see Benton 1996 and Mansfield 2003) have spent more time establishing the structuring characteristics of the material world, perhaps best illustrated using an example of a river. The physical existence of the Mekong River enables the practice of farming, however it also restricts because there is only a limited quantity of water. Social organization can improve the efficiency of distribution of the water, but there is a finite limit that cannot be overcome. People also have agency in the material world, such as the ability to fell trees and dig ponds, but this also has limits. I feel this ‘materialistic’ perspective is important to highlight in my analysis of certification of Pangasius farming, which is strongly affected by and affects material realities, and fits very well within my conceptualisation of the embeddedness.

Figure 2 is a visual representation of my perspective of the concept of embeddedness as compared to under- and over-structured world views. The view of embeddedness in this thesis has the following four important characteristics:

1. The system is produced through both agency and structure
2. Structure is enabling and constraining
3. Production of the system is recursive, that is, structure constrains/enables action and is reproduced and changed by action
4. Structure includes both social and material realities

The concept of embeddedness is important to this thesis, rather than the simplified structural views, because it provides a more holistic insight into how individuals in a system-to-be-governed affect the system and how they are affected by it. The view of structure that a governance system approaches with will influence their choices for intervention, and will also provide a different interpretation for the results that it experiences.

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the potential matches and mismatches between the existing Pangasius farming system and new environmental and social sustainability certification systems. The concepts of boundaries and embeddedness will provide a concrete way of evaluating the governing system and the system-to-be-governed. Comparing the insights from the two concepts within the interactive governance framework will provide some insight into how the two systems will interact together. The preceding section I have attempted to elaborate on these two concepts sufficiently to allow them to form a clear and concise foundation for the rest of the thesis as I evaluate the governability of environmental/social certification and Pangasius aquaculture in Vietnam.

In the next section I will present my detailed research questions. Typically they are presented before the theoretical framework but I have waited to write the questions until I had a strong understanding of my theoretical basis before proceeding