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AbstractA major thinker and inspiring teacher, Karl Polanyi's contributions have long been influential in a variety of disciplines, notably economic sociology and economic history. Two of his innovations, substantivist economic anthropology and the “double movement thesis,” are recognized as seminal. All of the works for which he is known, however, were written late in life, when in exile, and very little is known of his Hungarian writings, virtually none of which had, until now, been...

The growth of precarious work since the 1970s has emerged as a core contemporary concern within politics, in the media, and among researchers. Uncertain and unpredictable work contrasts with the relative security that characterized the three decades following World War II. Precarious work constitutes a global challenge that has a wide range of consequences cutting across many areas of concern to sociologists. Hence, it is increasingly important to understand the new workplace arrangements...

This paper intervenes in the Granovetter-Polanyi debate by reassessing the level of embeddedness of social and economic relations under conditions of systemic transition. Using panel data collected in Poland, this analysis examines this relationship for three distinct periods of transition: initial (1988-1993), advanced (1993-1998), and post-transitional (1998-2003). This paper shows that during transition from communism to capitalism economic relations tended to disembed from social...

Zelizer’s work may be read as an attack on the central Polanyian thesis: that the market system threatens social life by the undue prominence it lends the economy in the organization of modern society. The recent publication of Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy (2005a) is therefore an excellent opportunity to review the general trend of her work Zelizer 1979, 1985, 1994, and contrast her leading ideas to the central thesis that gives Polanyi’s work its particular flavor: the danger...

La formación profesional ocupacional (FPO) se ubica en una encrucijada de problemáticas que analizaron tanto Karl Polanyi como Max Weber y Michel Foucault. Por un lado, el papel fundamental que desempeñan los mercados autorregulados en el nuevo gran cambio que significa la globalización suscita un movimiento contraprotector del que participa esta capacitación para el empleo. Por otro, respalda el desarrollo de la organización racional capitalista, la cual a su vez implica su racionalización....

As the hard core of western economic theory, the "economic man" assumption has been contradicted and challenged by the "social man" assumption since it formatted, which promotes economic theory to have adjusted its protective belt to promote the development of economics discipline. Polanyi's " embedded" theory, as the base of economic sociology which takes "social man" assumption as its hard core, is a subversive critique to "economic man" assumption. Based on "social man", New Economic...

En premier lieu, c'est la critique du capitalisme et du fascisme comme la prolongation toujours possible de celui-ci qui nous semble devoir être traitée. L'interprétation chrétienne du marxisme, à laquelle se livre Polanyi, est une façon de comprendre la condition d'étrangeté qu'éprouve l'homme moderne face à lui-même ; cette interprétation permet aussi de voir dans le fascisme la négation même du socle judéo-chrétien qui fonde en Occident la communauté humaine authentique. En second lieu,...

The article presents a presidential address by Michael J. Piore, delivered at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Meeting 2008 in San José, Costa Rica, in which he discussed the relationship between sociology and economics, and the role that this relationship plays at the current political juncture in the transition from neoliberalism to the formation of public policy.

Throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the 21st century, campaigns by labor rights activists brought the issue of labor exploitation by Northern transnationals (TNCs) operating in the Global South into the centre of public debate. Labor rights scholars raised the possibility of a broader Polanyian 'double movement' in the global economy, as the polarizing effects of neoliberal globalization produced anti-globalization movements and shifts towards forms of social protection through...

The essay, after trying to do a synthesis of today's debate about business and ethics, proposes to return to Karl Polanyi starting from a different meaning of the three founding principles proposed by the author (exchange, reciprocity and redistribution).

Economists are fond of proposing market solutions for many problems of resource allocation, while scholars from other social disciplines are often less inclined to adopt such solutions. In this essay I interpret the dichotomy for/against the market in the light of the one between neoclassical economics and the socio-anthropological tradition which originates with Karl Polanyi. In the first part, I suggest that this dichotomy runs in parallel to the one between facts and, which is typical of...

The main goal of this work was to theoretically conceptualise the process of marketisation which designates the transformation of society into a market economy and social relations into market relations. The starting point is first the comparative analysis of the definitions of the term market by some classic authors (Smith, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Parsons), each of whom define it from their perspective as a monetary mechanism of exchange in the economic sphere of social activity. In the...

REVIEW: Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a...

Building on Polanyi's concept of the “double-movement” through which society defends itself against domination by the self-regulating market, this article sets out some key organizational and ideological hurdles that the contemporary “movement of movements” must surmount to challenge the hegemony of neo-liberal globalization. After outlining neo-liberalism's failures, it makes an argument for the possibility of “counter-hegemonic globalization,” defined as a globally organized project of...

This article originated with a puzzle : how best to account for changes in the behavior of groups, organizations and individuals in Great Britain ? A detailed analysts of what Weber and Polanyi identified as interdependencies between state and market, and of the state's role in creating the market, led to the decision to adapt the notion of bureaucratic revolution put forward by Weber. We argue that the British bureaucratic revolution is reflected in the fact that the state plays an...

This article relates contemporary Austria's much-discussed and internally contested identity politics to transnational socio-economic transformations and their far-reaching local/national effects. A qualitative analysis of (wide-ranging contributions to) current debates on the environment, food production, climate change, social inequality and welfare, higher education, art, migration, and unemployment reveals a recurring pre-occupation with expanding/encroaching markets, their advocated...

The traditional ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm suggests that resource mobilization based on ethnic group membership and the particular structural conditions of the economy and society combine to facilitate ethnic enterprise. Yet, this model remains largely descriptive and imprecise with respect to how and why class and ethnic resources and structural opportunity matter. Furthermore, this approach neglects to consider the likelihood that other non-ethnic social groupings distinct from...

While Polanyi argues that all economies are embedded and enmeshed in social relations and institutions, he tends to see market economy as disembedded, which reveals a tension in his thought. The main motivation for this paper is to understand the origins of this tension. On the basis of a systematic formulation of Polanyi's work, it is argued that Polanyi employs embeddedness in a dual manner: (a) as a methodological principle akin to methodological holism, and (b) as a theoretical...

The overarching question raised in this special issue is whether societies can, do or indeed should steer new and emergent science and technological development and its management on to trajectories construed as more or less 'desirable'. It therefore sits at the interface of two arenas. These are governance: processes of shaping/steering emergent technologies and markets; and sustainability: normative agendas incorporating a range of potentially competing conjectures and internally...