There are two weak areas in transaction cost economics: the personal compatibility between clients and consultants, and the abstractness of transaction cost analysis and its lack of applicability to real-life problems for clients. In their transaction-cost-based article on consulting, Kehrer and Schade (1995: 468; author's translation) admit to these vulnerable points as follows: “This form of compatibility [in terms of personal and organizational features] can only be sensibly investigated between concrete consultants and clients, that is, on a case-by-case basis. In this article, in which a general comparison of the benefits of internal versus external solutions is in the foreground, we exclude these compatibility issues from the analysis.” Kehrer and Schade (1995: 476) further admit that their analysis cannot be applied immediately to a concrete decision-making problem, for their economic comparison between making and buying consulting services is too abstract.

Admitting the existence of these weak aspects is music to the ears of some sociologists, such is their distaste for the other discipline. What economists may consider a minor blind spot of the theory is, according to some sociologists, a weakness that renders many economic analyses void. The argument is that, because of these weaknesses, cost considerations are overruled by tie quality. Granovetter (1985) was not the first to recognize these problems of economic analyses, but he was the first to realize that an entire theory emerges through these blind spots.