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[eng] Generally, the notion of embeddedness is used to suggest that some kind of economic activity depends on social structures, and especially on social networks. But, where do social relations come from ? Several studies of social networks show that personal relations are most of the times created within collective contexts (families, organisations, what we call "circles"), until they become autonomous, that is to say, until they decouple from them. In this article, we define after Harrison C. White the notions of embedding and decoupling as dynamic processes that move action from the level of collective entities (firms and markets for example) to the level of individuals, or mutually. We illustrate our reasonning with two kinds of data : one on cooperations between research laboratories and firms and another on personal networks. [fre] Généralement, la notion d'encastrement est utilisée pour suggérer qu'une activité économique quelconque dépend des structures sociales et en particulier des réseaux sociaux. Mais d'où viennent les relations sociales ? Les études de réseaux sociaux montrent que les relations personnelles se forment le plus souvent au sein de contextes collectifs (familles, organisations que nous appelons des cercles), jusqu'à ce qu'elles acquièrent une autonomie, c'est-à-dire qu'elles se découplent de ces contextes. Dans cet article, nous définissons à la suite de Harrison C. White les notions d'encastrement et le découplage comme des processus dynamiques faisant passer l'action du niveau des entités collectives (entreprises ou marchés par exemple) au niveau des individus, ou réciproquement. Nous illustrerons notre raisonnement en nous appuyant sur deux types de données : l'un sur les collaborations entre laboratoires de recherche publique et entreprises, l'autre sur les réseaux personnels.

IntroductionThe question of which kind of entities are really interacting is specifically central and difficult in the study of cooperations between research laboratories and firms, because these cooperations involve various kinds of agents.In France, a contract of cooperation between a research laboratory and a firm is signed both by the firm and by a big research organization like a university or the CNRS. The contract generally mentions the name of the research laboratory, as it is defined by the university or the CNRS (the french national center for scientific research), and also the name of the research leader. For the research side, there are three different levels of action : the liable organization ; the research laboratory as an internal organization inside the university or the CNRS ; and at last a single researcher. It is also known (Amiot, 1996) that there is fourth level, which is the small research team (a dozen of researchers) working with the scientific leader. For the firm, there are also several levels, especially for a group : the group ; a local establishment really cooperating with the laboratory ; a specific team within this establishment ; and at last, the industrial leader of the cooperation.Which is the appropriate scale of analysis for the study of this kind of interactions between heterogeneous agents ? What are the agents really interacting (individuals, small teams, organizations) ? What are the processes by which decision making shifts from a level to another ?We will address these questions on the basis of the results of an empirical study of cooperations between firms and CNRS laboratories in the field of engineering, conducted in order to understand the genesis of cooperations. For that, we have reconstructed 130 stories -1 This paper presents the first results of a study made with the support of the CNRS program "Les enjeux 2 from the beginning to the end -of cooperations (with a contract at one time, but not necessary during all of the story), involving 27 scientific leaders, 19 laboratories and 81 industrial partners (firms or interprofessionnal organizations). These stories were reconstructed by using interviews with the participants, in the laboratory and in the firm. A minimum of two interviews (and a maximum of five) were used for each story. The stories have various duration (from six month to forty years) and take place in various fields (computing, electronics, fluid mechanics, chemical engineering, etc.) and various institutional contexts (existence of a technical milieu with associations or government organizations). The questions were mainly focused on the genesis of any cooperation and also on the processes of routinization and institutionnalization resulting in a shift of the level of action and relationship (shifting from individual level to the organizational one for example). We will discuss the various kinds of meeting using the notions of embeddedness (Polanyi, Granovetter, White), and decoupling (White), and more generally the theory of Harrison White's "Iden...

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the article relies on the analysis of Social Networks in order to compare the networks at work in the composition of thesis committees between 2003 and 2008 in a French provincial university in three very different disciplines – astrophysics, archaeology and economics – so as to test the hypothesis that connections actually pre-existed to graduation. Were members co-authors of scientific publications or were committees constituted only for the sake of awarding a PhD? Astrophysics and its “equipment” ethos is the one to superimpose most often committee membership and co-publishing. Archaeology falls somewhere in-between, due to the greatest scarcity of committee members. Last of the three, economics actually separates the two types of collaboration by most frequently inviting international researchers. Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00143