Reading one classic paper by Mark Granovetter one sees how much we need the sociologist approach to economic action, far less naïve that the economists'. Two examples here:
To say, as Williamson does, that reliance "on internal promotion has affirmative incentive properties because workers can anticipate that differential talent and degrees of cooperativeness will be rewarded" (1975, p. 78) invokes an ideal type of promotion as reward-for-achievement that can readily be shown to have only limited correspondence for existing internal labor markets (...).
(Granovetter 1985:499)
(...) to avoid the the functionalims implicit in Williamson's assumption that whatever organizational form is most efficient will be the one observed. Before we can make this assumption, two further conditions must be satisfied: (i) well-defined and powerful selection pressures toward efficiency must be operating (...)
(Granovetter 1985:503)
References
Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3):481-510.
Williamson, O. (1975). Markets and Hierarchies. New York: The Free Press.
