Introduction

The rise of the Internet and cyberspace puts great effect on human life because the new communication technology restructures and reproduces human life (Escobar 1994) and fosters virtual community (Baym 1995; Fox & Roberts 1999; Jones 1995), which is different from that of the social world of physical contact. However, it is important to point out that cyberspace is not actually isolated from the physical world (Ward 1999: 21; Wellman 1997: 448), as ‘Virtual communities involve a combination of physical and virtual interaction, social imagination and identity’ (Shumar & Renninger 2002: 1-2). As the node of the intersection and interaction is usually the actor who constructs social networks in both virtual and real space, his/her actions may carry across the boundary of the two spaces. The dialectical relationship between human action and social networks may be the key to understanding Internet society.

The classical studies of relations between action and social network usually choose economic action as the research object and propose the concept of embeddedness (Beckert 2003; Granovetter 1985, 1992). The traditional concept of embeddedness was generated by disputes on whether or not economic action in industrial society is economically rationalized and separated from interpersonal networks and other personal attributes. Polanyi pioneered the study of embeddedness and argued that ‘man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships’ (Polanyi 1957/1944: 46). Economic rationality continues to be challenged as some scholars believe that it is partial and inadequate to understand economic behaviour in an isolated domain dominated by the hypothesis of economic man (Billig 2000; Salisbury 1973). ‘It has long been the majority view among sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and historians that such behaviour was heavily embedded in social relations in premarket societies but became much more autonomous with modernization’ (Granovetter 1985/1992: 53). Modernization theory also claims that the rationalization of market exchange should isolate economic action from personal relations and human emotion. But some studies that followed showed that social relations and social network still operate in modern economy (Davern 1997).

As both economic action and social network operate in the real world, it is not difficult to identify the dynamics of embeddedness.