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Microinsurance — defined as low‐cost insurance products targeting low‐income populations — exemplifies key themes in contemporary neoliberalism, and has figured prominently in neoliberalism's turn to discourses such as 'risk management' and 'financial inclusion'. The development of commercial markets for microinsurance, however, has in practice been highly variable and often very limited. This article considers the implications of this process of 'truncated commercialization'. It draws on a...

Capitalism is in crisis, again. Inequality, measured in wages, wealth distribution, employment, ‘affordable’ housing, has become the dominant framework for understanding the economy. Through this lens, people can extrapolate to the macroeconomic from their own individual experiences.

A stalemate has emerged in mainstream liberal/left responses to Trump. Many commentators prefer to see our predicament in terms of either class-based or identity politics. Vis-à-vis the influence of the Chicago school of economics and its structural adjustment schemes, we crosshatch MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign and Polanyi’s Great Transformation to envision overcoming this stalemate. King’s effort to radicalize the welfare state from below by linking struggles against poverty, racism, and...

Karl Polanyi (1944, 1968) argued that the 'disembedding' of the economy from society entailed a curtailment of social constraints on economic transactions. This disembedding coincided with what Max Weber (1946) called disenchantment, and the erosion of cognitive-experiential reciprocity between humans and nature. Following Lynn White Jr. (1967), many scholars of religion and ecology have argued that losing the sense of divinity immanent in the world caused the modern devaluation of nature....

'No human beings, at whatever stage of culture, completely eliminate spiritual preoccupations from their economic concerns' (Malinowski 1935: xx). Drawing on the history and theory of economic anthropology from the pioneering investigations of Bronislaw Malinowski to the work of a postdoctoral research team at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/S) between 2009 and 2012, this paper* explores the interface between ritual and the economy in socialist and post-socialist...

China's greater Middle East geoeconomic strategy is centered on an external trade and industry policy. This trade and industry policy combines geopolicy and geoeconomic policy to export industrial capacity bases in what amounts to a geoindustrial policy and a parallel trade strategy. Practical coordination is under the umbrella of the central International Capacity Cooperation macro-policy. China's provincial governments are then tasked with offshoring China's industrial capacity to Middle...

Over the last two decades a rich and diverse body of literature has emerged which uses the ‘double movement’ to analyse social, political and economic change in the global South. The main aims of this article are to expand the boundaries of this scholarship and improve our understanding of how to use the concept to analyse capitalist development in the region. It seeks to achieve this by explaining and extending the original formulation of the double movement, creating a dialogue between...

In the current times of political crisis, a giant thinker such as Karl Polanyi will return to the forefront of intellectual debate. Many of his important early articles have only been available in Hungarian or in German. With the publication of The Hungarian Writings (2016), edited by Gareth Dale (Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Brunel University London), a major gap in Polanyi studies has been filled. These essays, published for the first time in English, provide...

Across a crisis-stricken Europe battles rage for post-neoliberal hegemony, with "race" and "austerity" as central signifiers. One of the places where the frontlines are most pregnant is Sweden; long perceived as a role model for its welfare state, cultural equity and social equality. Sweden is, however, facing social conflicts following in the tracks of a deep transformation in terms of welfare cuts, racialization and growing social polarization, targeting in particular a disadvantaged...

In the twenty-first century, global business regulation has come of age. In this article, we review the literature on globalization and business regulation from the angle of transnational governance, a recently evolving interdisciplinary field of research. Despite the multiplicity and plurality of regulatory platforms and products that have emerged over time, we identify common patterns of field structuration and parallel trajectories. We argue that a major trend, both in practice and in...

Information policy has become one of the key instruments for the commodification and marketization of goods in contemporary capitalism. However, the spatializing role of this and other legal regimes has not been explored in depth. Among the categories of goods whose production and circulation is shaped by information policy, geographic information is increasingly salient in the digital economy due to the strategic and economic value derived from its integration of location and context. This...

This article argues that we are witnessing a fundamental transformation of capitalism. Under the auspices of an economic shift, social reproduction and constituent care and care work are undergoing a process of reorganization. The first part draws on Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the relation between market and society and on contemporary revisions of his approach. Referring to core arguments from his perspective on the market society it identifies processes of commodification, marketization...

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought a series of economic reforms: privatization, increased foreign direct investment and weakened benefits. Correspondingly, some scholars expected trade unions to serve as a major contribution to the development of a democratic civil society that would serve as a Polanyian double movement to these disruptive reforms. However, Russia's steelworkers have stood out as particularly weak and unwilling to strike due to their dependence on their employer for...

Most people read Karl Polanyi today because his critique of laissez faire capitalism seems remarkably applicable to our neoliberal times. Although his late work on ancient and ‘archaic’ economies has enjoyed a consistent specialist readership, Polanyi is best known today for his 1944 magnum opus, The Great Transformation (henceforth GT). Covering a large sweep of mostly European history, the GT seeks to show that the attempt to create a ‘self-regulating market’ was a radical and recent...

This paper looks at the European integration project in its current iteration drawing on Karl Polanyi's assertion that markets are inseparable from the socio-cultural context. In this regard, all attempts to liberalise the economy (not excluding European integration, which is based on the principle of the single market) have practical and indeed tangible political ramifications. The main hypothesis of the paper lies in the recognition of the fact that the neoliberal agenda is one of the...

The starting point of the paper is the meteoric rise of care and care work upon the societal and sociological agenda. Referring to Polanyi, the authors argue that this is the manifestation of a new phase of capitalist societalisation (Vergesellschaftung) of social reproduction in the form of an economic shift. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the societal organisation of care and care work and questions of inequality and justice.Design/methodology/approach The first part of the paper...

Amidst state-level budgetary pressures and growing elderly populations, many US states have adopted managed care for home-based services funded through the Medicaid program. New York State’s managed care mandate is part of a Medicaid ‘Redesign’ targeting health outcomes, cost control, and administrative efficiency, reflecting features emphasized by both governance and New Public Management frameworks, but neither adequately captures this case. Incorporating a Polanyian perspective can...

Modern heterodox theories of money reject the neoclassical conception of money as primarily a medium to facilitate exchange. These heterodox theories of money all have as common starting point an analysis of credit-debt relations in which production is a central feature, with these economies organized along capitalistic design. The Keynesian-Marxian framework describing the process of monetary circulation, traditionally referred to as the theory of the monetary circuit (TMC), perhaps best...