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This article contends that decommodification is an appropriate concept for understanding diverse initiatives such as fair trade, microfinance, open source, social enterprises, and the environmental commons as component features of a common process. Decommodification is conceived as any political, social, or cultural process that reduces the scope and influence of the market in everyday life. Given recent transformations in market societies, a more expansive framework for decommodification...

The argument focuses on the corporate state as an increasingly significant political assemblage that has enabled new configurations of power with related social effects. Here the discussion proceeds from Karl Polanyi's thesis in The Great Transformation. A critical idea that Polanyi pursued related to the state production of economism and individualism, which prepared the ground for the expansion of capital in its globalizing form. The essay develops this idea, indicating that the...

How can a partial, revisable utopia of 'decent society' be used as a yardstick for assessing today's impersonal forms of social integration? In economic life - this essay's focus - Polanyi's hopes that the 'economic system' might cease 'to lay down the law to society' is a start. Recently, financial firms sold commodified promises and obligations on the allure of democratizing credit and providing financial 'choice' to millions. Yet these 'civilities' exploited people's hopes for a dignified...

This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for ‘going on’ in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in...

The dominant narrative around the unfolding capitalist crisis is firmly focused on the dominant economies, and in particular the US. This is understandable given that the proximate causes of the crisis lie in the imperial heartlands and crisis resolution measures taken there will have a global impact. But a 'view from the South' is needed to redress the balance and prevent the decimation of global majority likelihoods being presented as mere collateral damage. The first section below tackles...

This paper addresses a puzzle: how to account for changes in the routine behavior of groups, organizations and individuals in Britain? Following a detailed analysis of state-market interdependence and the role of the state in creating the market, an analysis drawn from the thinking of Weber and Polanyi, we suggest adapting Weber's notion of bureaucratic revolution: in what we call the British bureaucratic revolution, the state has played an essential role in social change by creating...

The main purpose of this paper is to understand Polanyi's research project after The Great Transformation. This includes his developing ideas on economic history and theory of economic institutions after 1947, when he came to Columbia University in New York. This paper deals mainly with Polanyi's new agenda, namely "the place of the economy in society" in the intellectual context of post World War II United States of America.

On the basis of the "challenge" North (1977) identified in the works of Polanyi, we propose to outline the originality of North's institutionalism, especially in comparison with "new institutionalism" in economics as well as in sociology. Far from endorsing the dichotomy between market and non market dimensions of economic activities at the basis of the analyses of Williamson and Granovetter, North's definition of institutions as "rules of the game" allows him to conceive of institutions as...

I examine Fair Trade (FT) as a social movement that emerges as a regulative force in response to the rise of neoliberalism. I apply Polanyi's (1944, 1957) classic concepts of embeddedness and the double movement to understand the conflict that arises within a coherently motivated social movement. Using interview and participant observation data along with content analysis of FT organization mission statements, this research examines the role of conflict within the FT movement over how best...

This article analyzes the development of “local food” institutions from a social movements perspective. Over the last decade, institutions that “shorten the links” between producer and consumer have developed through a diverse collaboration of many social sectors (farmers, agronomic experts, retailers, chefs, food writers, and several distinct consumer sectors). Some agronomists and rural sociologists critical of the globalization and industrialization of agriculture have recognized this...

The paper aims to examine Karl Polanyi's view of market evolution in the context of the emergence of a national grain market in China's transition economy. The dataset used includes information about inter-provincial grain trade on China's grain market from November 1999 to October 2000. A priori blockmodelling method is used for hypothesis testing. This paper finds that a partially integrated national grain market had emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century in China in spite of...

AbstractMany have argued that the success of European integration is predicated on reinforcing market structures and some have gone further to state that the creation of a transnational market results in a decoupling of markets from their national political and social frameworks, thus threatening to unravel historical social bargains. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Ruggie and using their insights regarding the social embedding of markets, we dissent from this view by examining...

The paper was presented as a keynote lecture at the 10th anniversary of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) in April 2008. It surveys the trajectory of scholarly work on labor after 1945, from its initial emphasis on rights of industrial and social citizenship to its present preoccupation with "flexibility" and "flexicurity." It recalls the dissolution of the "Fordist" compromise in the 1970s and the subsequent gradual expansion of markets as the dominant mechanism for...

This paper examines and analyses the organization and functioning of subaltern peasant sanghams (grassroot associations of the poor) and their place-based as well as network-based strategies in building autonomous local communities that challenge the consequences of neoliberal globalization in general and the commodification of agriculture and food in particular. The major objective of the counter-hegemonic organizational strategies is to build self-protective and subsistence communities, to...

Polanyi (1944, [1957]1968) has distinguished three “patterns of social integration,” namely, “reciprocity,”“redistribution,” and “exchange.” This triad has provided the starting point for most subsequent discussion. Our purpose is to introduce a further type of coordination, the “destructive mode of coordination.” This mode achieves coordination by intimidation, threat, and the use of non-institutionalized coercive means. Resources and human efforts are allocated in order to appropriate what...

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...