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The idea that economic activities may be described and studied as 'embedded' in social relations has been central to much debate in recent economic sociology. The present paper analyses legal struggles over the status of begging in US law and argues that conflicting rhetorical accounts of begging illustrate social actors' efforts to articulate the interconnectedness of their social world, including the ways in which economic practices are embedded in their social and institutional contexts. The paper thus suggests that embeddedness is not just something identified by social researchers, but also a problem faced by social actors as they try to understand the socio-economic order in which they live and act. By arguing for or against the claim that begging is simultaneously an economic action and the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, the voices in this debate attempted to affect the future of this marginal economic activity.

Debates around the state-firm analogy as a route to justifying workplace democracy tend toward a static view of both state and firm and position workplace democracy as the objective. We contend, however, that states and firms are connected in ways that should alter the terms of the debate, and that the achievement of workplace democracy raises a new set of political issues about the demos in the democratic firm and “worker migration” at the boundaries of the firm. Our argument thus contains two key steps: first, drawing on an empirical case study of a worker-owned firm, we enrich the state-firm analogy by developing a more dynamic view of both, focusing on the creation of workplace democracies, worker movement in and out of them, the dynamic meanings of “citizenship” within them, and the status of the unemployed in a world of democratic workplaces. Second, we then argue that in moving to a more sociological view of the state, the things we were comparing begin to show their real-world connections to one another. By going beyond the idealized view of states that has distorted the state-firm analogy debates, we arrive at a more robust view of how widespread workplace democracy might reconfigure basic political relationships in society.