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Globalisation can in a polanyian sense be understood as a double movement. Societal reaction to the shortcomings of the corporate driven process of globalisation from above (the first movement) creates a counter movement from below (the second movement). The relations between different actors within the political landscape and the area of tensions between the two movements are characterised by the gramscian war of position and its power struggle over the hegemonic discourse. At times the...

The article presents the conference paper titled "Bridging boundaries and Mending Fences? Finding community in transboundary conservation approaches" prepared for the "Annual Convention of the International Studies Association" held in Honolulu, Hawaii. It discusses the implementation of the Community Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana in early 1990s. It examines the contemporary applications of the idea of embeddedness which was coined by intellectual Karl Polanyi as an...

This article describes a strategy of modeling embeddedness of economic behavior as a process, as opposed to viewing it as a time-independent relationship between behavior and a social factor in which it is subsumed. I first reconstruct Polanyi's classic processual model of embeddedness and derive from it a set of intuitive tests, which are then applied to key modern approaches in economic sociology: structural, neo-institutional, neo-weberian and Fligstein's...

The article focuses on the relevance of economist Karl Polyani's economic theories and tries to analyze if his book titled "The Great Transformation," could be considered as the foundation of current economic sociology and international political economy. The author of the article says that Polayni's theories focuses on contemporary economic sociology, market economy's self-destructive approach and consideration of the market economy as integral part of the society. His work on...

The  rise  of  the  Social  Forum  phenomenon  has  been  heartily  welcomed,  partly  so  as to unite diverse discourses of anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist resistance under a common  banner.  There  are  debates  worth  flagging,  however,  that  draw  our  attention to  political  philosophies  (typically  binary  statist  versus  anti-statist  disputes),  visions of agency (typically networked movements versus parties), and potentials for revolutionary processes to emerge within...

Recent globalization theory reflected a chain of world historical events since the end of the Cold War. Globalization theories were tools for the making of political alliances between market liberals and political, liberals. From the mid-1990s a broad range of institutionalist social science programs showed that globalization outcomes were often better explained by institutional logics (including cultural ones) than by global flows per se. This is, among others, illustrated by the debate on...

The article analyzes the global economy by subjecting it to an interpretive scheme derived from popular culture Boganism, an Australian colloquialism or street slang used by teenagers. Boganism, the social phenomenon of being both unaware and irresponsible, is the result of a particular type of human abandonment. This abandonment is linked to the new hypercapitalism of globalization. The article will establish the structural roots of boganism, examine the case of the abandonment of U.S....

A one-dimensional view of capitalism inevitably leads to the conclusion that labour is in a state of deep crisis. However, if we examine globalization as a contradictory process, then it is possible to regard its relationship with labour as a transformative one. In this context, the decline of trade union density in developed countries and the rise of new forms of trade unionism in selected countries of the South, illustrate the contradictory relationship between labour and capital. In...

This text was the original second chapter of the author's doctoral dissertation (Escobar 1987); this chapter was never included in the book that eventually grew from the dissertation (Escobar 1995). Although the chapter's contribution to debates on the economy are largely synthetic and certainly not original, the author wanted to publish it for a number of reasons. First, the alleged triumph of neo-liberal ideologies and the increase in depth and scope of market cultures at present make even...

This paper brings together data from 17 OECD countries on scientific publications, patents and production, to explore the relationship between scientific and economic specialisation for 17 manufacturing industries. Since Marx, there has been a fundamental debate in economics about the link between science and the economic system. Marx argued that the needs of production shape scientific developments and that science has become a factor of production, whereas Polanyi argued that developments...

The varied questions which arise from the contributions made in this work provide a new modernity to Karl Polanyi and show the major interest in bringing together, as openly as his own, the various historical and economic specialties , Archaeological, ethnological, present in the House of Archeology and Ethnology of Nanterre. One of the most stimulating aspects of the contributions gathered here is the importance given to the presence of men, far beyond the simple equation of economic...

The Global Resistance Reader provides the first comprehensive collection of work on the phenomenal rise of transnational social movements and resistance politics: from the visible struggles against the financial, economic and political authority of large international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to the much less visible acts of resistance in everyday life. The conceptual debates, substantive themes and case studies have been...

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion in the world today. A number of explanatory theories exist, but in this paper, I hone in on the nexus between economic restructuring and Pentecostalism to explore this extraordinary expansion. Bringing together the work of feminist political economists and of Karl Polanyi, I argue that neo-liberal globalization threatens mechanisms for meeting social reproductive needs. Neo-liberalism cannot meet these needs on its own, and I suggest that...

This dissertation considers the status of citizenship in an era of neo-liberal globalization. Citing increased labor migration and the retreat of domestic social policies throughout the world as intersecting processes, I argue that narratives of national citizenship lie at the heart of this intersection, transformed by rapidly changing geopolitical conditions. Despite challenges, national citizenship remains a relevant political category, though reformulated along the lines of neo-liberal...

This article illustrates the continuing salience of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) by employing two of its central concepts, fictitious commodities and the double movement to interpret the globalisation countermovement and one of its most important figures, José Bové. I explain the transformation of José Bové from rural sheep farmer to French folk hero and global activist and analyse the extent to which his rhetoric and political actions are congruent with Polanyi's key...

This article explores Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the institutional separation of politic and the economy in the context of the 19th century market economy. The contribution his analysis could make to the quest for viable alternatives to the contemporary neo-liberal international order depends on how we construe two key concepts in his work, “disembeddedness” and “countermovement”. In this regard the author suggests that: 1) In Polanyi’s work the disembedded economy appears not as a...

This paper is based on the idea that between the 1920s and the mid-1930s in Vienna there were two forms of heterodox economic theory: the Austrian economic school headed by Ludwig von Mises and another interesting form of heterodox economics opposed to the Austrian school (above all politically) and pursued by various social thinkers (Otto Neurath, Karl Polanyi, Otto Bauer, Felix Schaffer, Felix Weil, Jacob Marschak). They were engaged in the debate on the possibilities of a planned economy:...

The rise and fall of the New Middle East (NME) cannot be separated from wider global developments and must therefore be studied in relation to them, in both their ideational and material aspects. The ideological background of the NME has drawn upon the ideology of globalization and shares its underlying tenets of rationality, professionalism and virtues of market economy. In the early 1990s a discourse of globalization was set in motion, highlighting economic and technological development...

This unique Handbook contains substantial and invaluable summary discussions of work on economic processes and issues, and on the relationship between economic and non-economic areas of life. Furthermore it describes conceptual orientations that are important among economic anthropologists, and presents summaries of key issues in the anthropological study of economic life in different regions of the world. Its scope and accessibility make it useful both to those who are interested in a...