Your search

This article considers Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as part of the projects in ‘new governance and decentred regulation’, which draw social forces towards the regulation of economic behaviour. It uses Karl Polanyi to open up pertinent interfaces between society and economy for observation, and Gunther Teubner to substantiate a ‘regulatory’ view of the company's social relationships. The article finds that CSR combines movements for the recognition of social relationships, on an...

The concept of marketization denotes the expansion of market coordination into non-market coordinated social domains as well as its intensification in already market-dominated settings. This article sets out to reconstruct an institutionalist theory of marketization. As a point of departure, it critically examines the related contributions of Karl Polanyi and Jürgen Habermas. The analytical strength of Polanyi's theory of marketization lies in the discussion of the contested embeddedness of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the reasons behind a decade long contestations between the Georgian government and the petty traders over the access to the public space for commercial use. Design/methodology/approach – The paper relies on the repeated ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tbilisi in 2012 and 2013. The ethnographic interviews with legally operating traders and illegal street vendors are supplemented by the in-depth interviews with the...

This article shows, through a detailed examination of Karl Polanyi’s published works and unpublished writings, that Polanyi relies heavily on the neoclassical economics of his time in his conceptualization of the market in capitalist societies. This approach is instrumental to the thesis of The Great Transformation concerning the destructive impact of the market on society. However, such an analytical perspective neglects the social character of the market economy. This perspective is also...

This article attempts to provide a critical understanding of the dual signification of “precarity”. It explores what “precarity” as a concept may potentially offer to studies of the changing contemporary political economy of migration. It discusses shifting trends in global migration and point to tendencies for a possible convergence between “South” and “North”, “East” and “West”. Based on a review of current advances in research, it discusses, with reference to the classical work of Karl...

The current scenario in western countries is characterised by a crisis over the last thirty years of class conflict; by the mainly negative consequences of globalisation and of the transformations by production processes of the mobilising strength of work; by the cancellation of the relationship between labour and political representation; by the difficulties of traditional trade unionism; and by the emergence of the social movement unionism (SMU) paradigm. In this article, these phenomena...

A decade before Foucault began to work with the related concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Gellner posed a series of questions which are suggestive of a similar line of inquiry. Gellner did not pursue this strand of his thought as an historical sociologist however. Instead he packaged it into a functionalist account of how industrial society reproduces itself. In Gellner’s writings, biopolitics is both present and absent, like a redacted text. This is the focus of this article, which...

This article examines the use of competition as an object and mode of governance. It first considers how competition might become a principle of economic organization and, relatedly, how it may become part of state projects and practices. Second, it comments on the discursive and material dimensions of competition, considering it as a social construct and as a social constraint. Third, it examines the rather idealized representations of competition in the broader doxa of liberalism and...

The grip of austerity in European politics since 2008 presents a double puzzle: electorally weak center-left parties offering no definite alternative, and the surprisingly efficient pursuit of “fiscal consolidation”. To understand this double puzzle this article investigates the institutional bases of alternative economic thinking during the 1930s versus the post-2008 crisis years. Noting the recent prominence of a new social type, the European economist-technocrat (eet), I highlight the...

This article seeks to use Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, first published in 1944, to understand the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Polanyi's basic premise was that a great crisis must result from powerful causes. He argued that the crisis of the 1930s was a consequence of three distinct processes: deep imbalances in the global trading system, a crisis within the global financial mechanism that was supposed to manage those imbalances, and a failure of adaptation...

Polanyi offers a powerful vision of a “great transformation” that will reverse the subordination of society to the economy and reassert the primacy of social protection in the context of modern society. Pursuit of the great transformation is one way of conceptualizing the quest for “development” in the positive sense of ecologically sustainable human flourishing. This paper explores how the contemporary interaction of national and global political dynamics affects the trajectory of Polanyi's...

The state incentivizes investors to entrust capital to public corporations by granting shareholders enforceable rights over managers. However, these rights create legal “access points” through which social movements can make nonpecuniary claims on the corporation. I use original historical research on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s administration of federal securities law to show that concern over nonpecuniary claims motivates the state to enact the role of “market protector.” In...

Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation is a classic... it has come to be recognized as a founding charter for economic sociology. It anticipated major accomplishments of late-twentieth-century social science (including, among others, Ben Bernanke’s studies of the Great Depression and Amartya Sen’s work on famine). Its core problems—how do societies respond to globalization? how do they address the risks of market failure?—are central to contemporary macrosociology. It is probably time...

This article looks at the issue of political disengagement in mature democracies and the growing tendency towards disconnect between citizens and their political representatives. It locates itself in relation to 'demand-side' (external to politics) and critical 'supply-side' (focused on the political centre) explanations of disengagement. It concentrates on the latter and, accordingly, builds on critical, post-Marxist and elite-oriented work. As such it follows on from earlier calls in the...

The paper analyzes interdependence of the market sphere which functions according to the logic of contract, and the sphere of non-market activity within economy, where the logic of gift dominates as a paradigm. The purpose of the analysis is to present how the above concepts of societal exchange intertwine and complete each other within the socio-economic order. This is followed by the description of 'pre-market' economic paradigms (based on Karl Polanyi's contribution) such as reciprocity,...

To face an unequal world requires us to interpret and explain it, to be sure, but also to engage it, that is, to recognize that we are part of it and that we are partly responsible for it. In other words, inequality is not just something external to us, but also invades our own world. I begin, therefore, by examining the global community of sociology through the lens of inequality. I then consider two recent perspectives on our unequal world from outside sociology: the moral radicalism of...

Drawing upon The Great Transformation (1944), we outline Karl Polanyi's environmental sociology by presenting his major insights on economic substantivism, fictitious commodities, and double movements. Polanyi wrote his opus in challenge to Von Mises' Austrian School of Economics and its pursuit of an autonomous, self-regulating global free market. Polanyi's recognized the social and environmental limits of a fully free market and reasoned that inevitable market excesses would result in the...

This article discusses why many social scientists including Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, and Karl Marx are dissatisfied with an overreliance on markets, and a conceptualization of markets being efficient, fair and rational. Topics include five types of arguments critical of markets including the Marxian approach to markets, the rise of Karl Polanyi's view that markets are fragile, and a more complex decision-making approach starting with Max Weber's view of social action.

Thomas Piketty's imposing volume has brought serious economics firmly into the mainstream of public debate on inequality, yet political science has been mostly absent from this debate. This article argues that political science has an essential contribution to make to this debate, and that Piketty's important and powerful book lacks a clear political theory. It develops this argument by first assessing and critiquing the changing nature of political science and its account of contemporary...