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This article discusses some alternative or critical theoretical contributions regarding globalization and labor. The main question in this discussion is if there are changes in direction of a possible revitalization of labor movements and if international solidarity can increase due to globalization. This question also relates to discussions of changes in division of work, the concept of work, working class, commodification, decommodification, and new centers of global production--all...

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss group learning in line with economic perspectives of embeddedness and integration emanating from the work of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi’s work defines economy as a necessary interaction among human beings for survival; the economy is considered inextricably linked from broader society and social relations rather than autonomous and driven by self-interest in free market conditions. He specifically outlines three key forms of integration that are crucial to...

The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, written in 1944, is a twentieth-century classic. It presents a passionate critique of the inhumanity of liberal capitalism, an inhumanity which, Polanyi thought, could never be repeated. The social and political institutions developed in the post-War period not only protected society from the cruelty of the self-regulating market, but were essential to enable the market itself to function. The history of the market, Polanyi tells us, is a history of...

Purpose -- This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capi-talist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activ-ities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ). Design/methodology/approach -- This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory -- "embeddedness" and "the informal economy." These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology's engagement with...

This article attempts to combine the Polanyian perspective on the issue of market societies with an the analysis of the institutional foundations of capitalism that is facilitated by the Varieties of Capitalism(VoC) approach. The article departs fromthe argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working ofmodern capitalism, but became entrapped in an overt structuralismwhich considers institutional change as just an interplaywithin a self-odering...

Underpinning this article is the proposition that regional integration with a social dimension has the potential to engender a more equitable pattern of globalisation. The empirical focus of the article is on the ex)tent to which the insights of 'embedded liberalism' associated with regional economic integration between he industrialised nations of the European Union (EU)can be applied to regional economic integration within sub-SaharanAfrica. The article contends that EU market...

This paper examines the declining support for centrist parties in many western countries. Using the seminal ideas of Karl Polanyi, the paper argues this decline is attributable to the rise of neo-liberal free market policies that have resulted in widespread insecurity and led many voters to seek out political alternatives on the right and left. The paper further examines possible reasons why parties of the right, rather than the left, have been more successful at this historical juncture in...

This thesis proposes a new counter-narrative to the neo-liberal agenda that combines two seemingly disparate bodies of work: New Governance and Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice. New Governance is a new and rapidly growing strand of legal thought and practi ce that has simultaneously developed a following in Europe and the United States. In short, legal scholars in this field of research are advocating a shift away from long-standing command-style, fixed-rule regulation toward more...

The article discusses the emergence of millennialism, which is considered as one of the outcomes of the spiritual victory of Christianity over the Greco-Roman culture. The formulation of the historical-sociological category of cultural catastrophe by Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi is tackled. The presence of a divine messenger as one of the three elements of a messianic movement is cited. The concepts of revolutionarism, Jacobinism and Marxism are also addressed.

The paper examines Nancy Fraser’s Polanyian reading of the current capitalist crisis and her expansion of Polanyi’s notion of the ‘double movement’–social forces struggling for marketization and social protection– into a ‘triple movement’ by adding the struggle for emancipation as a third factor. In its first part, the paper reviews Fraser’s central arguments with a special focus on her reading of Polanyi’s idea of the “fictitious commodities” land, labor, and money. Second, the authors...

In contemporary political economic analyses of development processes, Hernando De Soto'sThe Mystery of Capital, has been one of the most discussed, albeit controversial, books. Although well received by global development agencies such as the World Bank, a key exponent of De Soto's work, positing that the creation and institutionalisation of individual property in housing and land revives “dead capital” and creates the conditions that will enable the poor to emerge from abject poverty, has...

This article argues that thinking about entrepreneurship as a potential instrument for relief from endemic poverty and disadvantage, especially among the Indigenous, has all too often been captive to a concept of entrepreneurship that is built out of constrained economic and cultural assumptions. The authors develop this argument from a critical discussion of contributions by Karl Polanyi and Robert Heilbroner. The result is that approaches to venture have been encouraged that are sometimes...

This special issue asks what role society can play in the regulation of transnational risks, as an alternative to or at least significant addition to reliance on state regulatory activity and the myth of the self-regulatory capacity of markets (Stiglitz, 2001, p. xiii). How can a social sphere contribute to the prevention and management of risks, often transnational in nature, posed by economic activity? Leading socio-legal scholars explore whether and how the idea of harnessing the...

This article identifies a triple crisis of capitalism based on the three fictitious commodities as identified by Karl Polanyi: labour, money and land. This framework is used to integrate the environmental crisis into the wider crisis of capitalism. It argues that international actions required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are going to present major challenges for capitalism with implications for the current dominance of market power and the subservience of state and social power. The...

Public service labour’s distinctiveness is insufficiently understood or recognised; and in its ad hoc growth under liberal ideologies of state intervention (those of Mill and Keynes), it has been treated both as if it were and were not public service labour. This paper teases out some of the crucial links between liberal ideologies of state intervention and the social praxis of public service unionism, outlining the latter’s historical struggle against this paradoxical treatment, which...

This paper first explores the notion that the limitlessness of knowledge is a privileged source of the restlessness of capitalism [Metcalfe, J. S. 2001. “Institutions and Progress.”Industrial and Corporate Change10 (3): 561–586; 2002. “Knowledge of Growth and Growth of Knowledge.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics12 (1): 3–13; 2004. “The Entrepreneur and the Style of Modern Economies.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics14 (2): 157–175; 2010. “University and Business Relations: Connecting the...

This paper outlines a ‘substantivist’ approach to the regional economy of the Pilbara in Western Australia, inspired by a constructive reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi's methodological legacy. Beyond the metaphor of embeddedness, it makes the case for a more wide-ranging methodological engagement with Polanyi's brand of substantivist socioeconomics, in dialogue with the empirical investigation of actually existing and variegated socioeconomic formations. A Polanyian optic, amongst other...