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This article applies Karl Polanyi's observation of a double movement of law in the history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe to an analysis of Bali's integration into the global cultural economy. It describes how the increasing disembedding of the island's tourist industry from local norms and institutions, and the parallel disjuncture between Balinese religiosity and Indonesian state religion have created a condition of increasing collective anomie that has in turn provoked...

Solidarity economy (SE) initiatives constitute a worldwide phenomenon that is today at the heart of numerous economic and social debates. They are active in very diverse economic sectors, aiming for example to create employment for poor and low-qualified workers. We begin with presenting a Polanyian framework for the analysis of such economic activities, which enables us to develop a plural and integral conception of a productive organisation. We draw on Polanyi's thesis that economy is a...

The three books under review in this article all demonstrate the beginnings of a shift in the tone of literature on or derived from the work of Karl Polanyi. On one hand, the authors all show a willingness to admit a variety of problems and weaknesses in his work. But on the other hand, it is precisely this degree of critical introspection that enables the authors under review to identify some of the most important and contemporarily relevant aspects of Polanyi's thought. In the two main...

Coming along with Polanyi's ideas of fictitious commodity, this paper seeks to reveal the logical inconsistencies and silents in the economic science arguments on the labor force as a commodity. Once Marx's influence on the anti-capitalist movements is outstanding, we need to show his contribution, through his economic thought, to the scientific economism. As is well known, when proposed that the commodity sell by the worker was the 'labor force' instead the labor, as the classical...

The article discuss the characteristic of the current neoliberalism to understand it as a changeable and complex project whose economic and political sustainability is continuously reinvented and whose governance and spatiality is in need of being understood differently, if a viable alternative is to be constructed. Taking the recent neoliberal crisis as a point of departure, it discusses three main and interrelated aspects: firstly, the polymorphic characteristics of neoliberalism as a...

The purpose of this paper is to seek to apply Polanyi's theory of the double movement as a response to the effects of economic liberalization and globalization to the pre‐2007 American economy. In so doing, it seeks to ascertain the reasons why this assumed double movement did not materialize until after the post‐2007 global economic crisis. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is structured as a theoretical and historical analysis, building upon Polanyi's nineteenth century...

Our ambition is to point out that a fresh look at what is usualy considered to be Karl Polanyi’s magnum opus, The Great Transformation, opens some new prospects on its analytical. This interpretation qualifies some of the Hungarian author’s main critics, directed against his concept of desembeddedness. With this aim in mind, we re-interpret this debate in epistemological terms, i.e. the link between concepts and reality ; then we try to connect Karl Polanyi with the notion of performativity,...

The article reviews the book "Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market," by Gareth Dale.

The global subprime mortgage crisis in 2007–2008 led to an economic recession in Singapore, but the economy recovered strongly to post a 14.5% expansion in 2010. This article examines how labour market repositioning policies contributed to this recovery. Following Karl Polanyi's conceptualization of the economy as an ‘instituted process’, I explore how these policies function as state-driven redistributive strategies aimed at triggering reciprocal responses from employers and workers within...

Abstract This paper argues that development studies could benefit from a closer engagement with the arguments of Karl Polanyi. Firstly, a Polanyian perspective gives greater weight to non-economic and non-material factors in making, maintaining and modifying markets. Secondly, it focuses research on the problematic, state- sponsored and contested process of bringing the market actor into being. Finally, a Polanyian approach might better link a, broadly speaking, leftist analysis to 'real...

This article provides foundations to K. Polanyi's famed argument that monopoly power in the global capital market served as an instrument of peace during the Pax Britannica (1815-1914). We focus on the role of intermediaries and certification. We show that when information and enforcement are imperfect, there is scope for the endogenous emergence of 'prestigious' intermediaries who enjoy a monopoly position and as a result, control government actions. They can implement conditional lending:...

The world economic crisis should be seen as an episode in the history of money. “National capitalism” was the main way of organizing money in the twentieth century and its symbol was national monopoly currency. This system has been unravelling since the US dollar de-pegged from gold in 1971. The result is a disconnect between politics which are still largely national and the money circuit which is decentralized and global. The work of Georg Simmel and Karl Polanyi is enrolled to explain this...

Crisis and institutional environment, crisis and organisational anticipations and crisis and consumer behaviour, just a few of the uses of the word « crisis » ; a word which, for over four years now, for the less perspicacious, and for over thirty years, for those who have been watching the bigger picture, has been the most appropriate word for this stage of development of the contemporary economic system. But exactly « what crisis are we talking about? ». That which is the result of a...

Bob Jessop applies cultural political economy to the global economic and ecological crisis. He presents theoretical preliminaries concerning economic and ecological imaginaries, and then goes on to highlight the multidimensional nature of the current crisis and struggles over its interpretation.

Arthur Okun famously argued that “effciency is bought at the cost of inequalities in income and wealth”. Okun's trade-off represents the antithesis to Karl Polanyi's view of the relationship that the more embedded markets are in society, the better the social and economic outcomes they produce. This paper refines both these views. We argue that not all forms of market embeddedness are created equal, and that the relationship between equality and efficiency can be both positive and negative....

Acclaim for the first edition: 'The volume is a remarkable contribution to economic anthropology and will no doubt be a fundamental tool for students, scholars, and experts in the sub-discipline.' _ Mao Mollona, Journal of the Royal Anthropologica

This chapter responds to Fred Block's article about the weaknesses of the concept of capitalism because of its close association with Marxism, and his proposal for a Polanyian analysis of political economy. In this chapter, I interrogate what may be the commonalities as opposed to divergences between Marx and Polanyi, and I question whether the concept of capitalism is really so wedded to Marxism so as to loose its analytic value, and be better replaced by notions such as market society, or...

This article argues that social scientists should reconsider the analytic value of the term "capitalism." The paper argues that the two most coherent definitions of capitalism are those derived from classical Marxism and from the Worm System theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. Marx and Engels' formulation was basically a genetic theory in which the structure of a mode of production is determined by the mode of surplus extraction. During the course of the 20th century, however, Marxist theorists...

In the neoliberal era, Karl Polanyi’s notion of the ‘double movement’ has been widely deployed by social scientists as a critique of the prevailing order and a predictor of its demise. This article presents the double movement theorem, drawing upon Polanyi’s published and unpublished writings. It explores parallels between his explanation of the advent of the 19th-century free-market regime in Britain and recent Polanyian accounts of the rise of neoliberalism. Following an analysis of the...