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After a brief study on the place given to Polanyi’s thought in contemporary economic sociology, the paper examines Zelizer’s works on money and her opposition to Polanyi’s thesis on embeddedness, grounded on the symetry between markets and social life.

The multiple ways in which multinational corporations, financial and commodity markets and global trade feed into today's civil wars have recently become a key policy concern of the international community. Over the past five years, a number of initiatives have been launched, aimed at controlling the trade in conflict goods, ensuring good resource governance, advocating corporate social responsibility and promoting conflict-sensitive business practices. This article assesses these...

Globalization is undoubtedly the great overarching paradigm of our era. However, there is still little agreement on what globalization actually ‘is’ and some do not accept that it ‘is’ anything at all. This new book addresses the contestation of globalization by the anti- or counter-globalization movement. To contest means to challenge, to call into question, to doubt, to oppose and to litigate. This study shows how globalization is ‘contestable’ in many different ways and how the...

This article advances the concept of “time–space intensification” as an alternative to existing notions of time–space distanciation, compression and embedding that attempt to capture the restructuring of time and space in contemporary advanced capitalism. This concept suggests time and space are intensified in the contemporary period – the social experience of time and space becomes more explicit and more crucial to socio-economic actors’ lives, time and space are mobilized more explicitly...

This paper attempts to provide a framework for understanding the way globalization has reshaped the terrain and parameters of social, economic and political relations both at the national and global levels, and exerted pressure on the resiliency capacities of capitalism. It proposes to examine the ways social relations of domination and subordination are produced, reproduced and maintained while continuously undergoing transformations. Through conceptualizing the evolution of the capitalist...

The concept of vulnerability was introduced into IR theorising by Keohane and Nye who saw it as one of the consequences of complex interdependence and it is being increasingly employed by IGOs to capture the impact of globalisation on society. However, the concept has been little used in the academic literature on globalisation, except in a descriptive sense. This article argues that the concept has the potential to fill a gap in the toolkit of the ‘new’ IPE, offering an analytical category...

Fair trade requires that developed country consumers engage in market-based transactions with developing country producers. Yet this is not market trade in any straightforward sense, because the purchase of fairly traded products brings consumers into two market relationships at the same time. One is the market relationship through which consumers buy the product itself, which enables them to act altruistically by consciously paying the price premium that the producer receives. The other is...

Hannes Lacher presents a new critical social theory of international relations that integrates sociology, history and political geography to understand the formation and development of modern international relations. Far from implying a return to state-centrist Realism, this essential new volume leads us towards a critical social theory of international relations that questions the prevailing conceptions of the modern international political economy as a collection of nationally bounded...

This article argues for the continuing relevance of Fred Hirsch's The Social Limits to Growth (1976), valued as a critical analysis of the consequences of markets on the moral fabric of society. Two concepts that are fundamental to Hirsch—the commercialization bias and the depleting moral legacy—will be scrutinised. We further claim that this book, by emphasizing the tendency to market expansion and the corresponding commodification of increasing spheres of social life, while simultaneously...

The Polanyian problematic presents us with a unified, complex, and dialectical means to interpret globalization and its social contestation by diverse social and political forces. For Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), globalization as we know it would probably be conceived of as an extension of the ‘one big self-regulating market’ he discerned in his day, while his belief that ‘simultaneously a counter-movement was afoot’ provides an interpretative lens to examine the various facets of the...

In its first part (§ 2-4), the essay presents an outline of market economy in a globalization era, highlighting its marked changes and the wide fields of its questionable nature. In the second part, some discontinuity features came out in the last decades are shown (§ 5). They are particularly referred to critical analysis and alternative experiences springing up from below, (i.e. associations, groups, movements of the civil society) and meeting in a common attempt of getting economy and...

The popularity of deconstructivist architecture around the world has invited controversy over the sensationalist design of these buildings. New urbanists, in particular, have criticized decon architecture as alienating and disorienting. From a historical perspective, this opposition between deconstructivists and new urbanists is the latest in a long line of debates over what constitutes "good design." Using a political-economy approach based on the work of Karl Polanyi, this article examines...

The article examines the transformation of the moral economy in the book "The Great Transformation," by Karl Polyani. Polyani's work has been criticized for having an anti-democratic, Aristotelian, and aristocratic undertones. However, the author claimed that it has been misinterpreted and a communitarian-liberal debate has been brought to clarify the nature of moral economy.

The focus of this article is on interpretation of progress of post-communist transformations. Classical approaches, particularly those of Max Weber and Karl Polanyi, rather than modern ones are used as basis for the empirical analysis. I argue that the success of capitalist project, both now and in the past, stems from the ability to work out a general consensus about the preceding economic order. I also claim that ethnic homogeneity can be a favorable factor for the post-communist...

s essay aims to analyse the most recent acquisitions in economic sociology, setting out from the problem of embeddedness. Firstly, the contribution offered by Mark Granovetter shall be illustrated, demonstrating how the interpretation proposed by this scholar is concentrated on a structural-relational perspective that tends to trace the explanation of economic phenomena to a theory of social networks. In order to enrich and integrate this approach, the contribution offered by the...

This chapter examines Karl Polanyi's critique of formalism in economics and his case for a more institutional economics based upon a reconstitution of the facts of economic life on as wide an historical basis as possible. The argument below reviews Polanyi's argument with regard to the relation between economic anthropology and comparative economics, the contrast between the formalist and substantive approaches to economic analysis, the notion of an economistic fallacy, the most important...

"L'expression "économie de la connaissance" a, en ce début du XXIe siècle définitivement remplacé celle, très en vogue à la fin des années 1990, de "nouvelle économie". Les sociétés les plus avancées auraient désormais atteint un nouveau stade du développement économique dont la connaissance serait le facteur essentiel. Cette idée laisse supposer que jusque-là, celle-ci ne jouait qu'un rôle secondaire dans le processus productif. L'auteur se propose d'expliquer le sens et les implications...

Karl Polanyi a établi une célèbre distinction entre "all purpose money", caractéristiques des sociétés modernes, et "special purpose money", caractéristiques des sociétés anciennes. C'est la conception polanyienne des monnaies modernes qui est critiquée dans ce texte : non seulement elle conduit à considérer que les sociétés modernes ne connaissent pas de "special purpose money", mais en plus elle ne permet pas de renouveler la conception courante de la monnaie (sous-entendu moderne) qui en...