The notion of network is used in two different ways in current economic sociology. In its first use, a network is considered to be a form of coordination of collective action, an alternative to market and hierarchy, in its second use, network analysis is a method for describing relational structures. On the occasion of the publication of the Handbook of economic sociology (1994), edited by Nell Smelser and Richard Swedberg, in which eleven chapters deal with this difference, we rely on sociological theories of collective action and the notion of partial equilibrium in order to put forward a criticism of the first approach and a defence of the second.