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The article examines the ideology critical potentials of the concept of the embedded market, made famous by philosopher and economic historian Karl Polanyi. It explores several readings of this concept and assesses their ability to revive critical powers of sociology. It discusses the book "The New Spirit of Capitalism," by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, as a specific take on such an idea. It also offers a re-examination of Polanyi's interpretations of the embedded markets thesis.

This article reviews sociological research about economic globalization’s impact on work and labor in developed and developing countries since the 1980s. We find that this period of neoliberal globalization influences work because of intensified activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), financialization of the global economy, and amplified prominence of international organizations, some of which diffuse neoliberal policy scripts while others mobilize a transnational civil society....

This paper draws parallels between the market trend in the English NHS and Polanyi's (1957) The Great Transformation account of how the rise of markets provokes a self-protective counter-reaction that tries to re-embed economic relations in social relations. We report findings from a qualitative study of NHS contracting, which examines the recent move to harder-edged contracts with greater use of financial penalties and incentives. In practice, use of these techniques tended to be confined...

The management of environmental pollution has traditionally been accomplished via the regulatory power of the state, but more recently the rise of a new, market-based form of governance has been observed. This article examines the sector of water quality trading, in which caps are placed on surface water pollution and polluters can purchase “offset credits” from farms or other polluters who are under their cap. Using a content analysis of program case studies and federal and state trading...

The article reviews the book "Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market," by Gareth Dale.

The strategy for NHS modernization in England is privileging individual choice over collective voice in the governance of healthcare. This paper explores the tension between economic and democratic strands in the current reform agenda, drawing on sociological conceptions of embeddedness and on theories of reflexive governance. Building on a Polanyian account of the disembedding effects of the increasing commercialization of health services, we consider the prospects for re-embedding economic...

The notion of “fictitious commodities” is not simply a convenient heterodox slogan to criticize the radical limits of any trade system and the analytical limits of the dominant theory. It is rather the foundation of the institutional perspectives that underlie all Karl Polanyi’s sociohistoric analyses. This article explains and articulates both the theoretical level using the institutional approach to commodities and a philosophical level using a broad definition of the economy. There is,...

Attempting to revitalize the substantive approach to economics in the tradition of K. Polanyi, this paper revives the neglected substantive theory of money's origins by Bernhard Laum and thus disputes the formal approaches that see the origins of money in the context of trade. A wide range of evidence, from archeological to etymological, is utilized to demonstrate that relations between men and God, carried out through the intermediary of state-religious authorities, played a causal role in...

Since the 1980s, much debate has revolved around Karl Polanyi's concept of the 'dis/embedded economy,' generating some light and not a little heat. This paper looks at three reasons that account for part of the 'heat.' It begins by tracing the sources upon which Polanyi drew. They include Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber, along with anthropology of the inter-war period, and German and American Institutionalist economics. After exploring the differing ways in which these varying...

In the aftermath of the 1930s Great Depression, and as the Second World War was drawing to a close, Karl Polanyi concluded a critical analysis of market capitalism on an optimistic — and with the benefit of hindsight we can add premature — note, remarking that the ‘primacy of society’ over the economic system had been ‘secured’. Eighty years later, amidst the unresolved turmoil of another comparable global capitalist economic crisis and accumulating signs of a growing environmental crisis,...

Karl Polanyi is the author of a modern social science classic, The Great Transformation, as well as a number of well-known and widely debated essays collected in Trade and Market in the Early Empires and Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies. These texts were researched and written either during his second exile in 1930s Britain or in wartime or post-war North America. Not so well known, however, are his Hungarian writings from the 1910s. Until recently, very few of these had been...

Most analyses of the US financial crisis of 2007–2009 focus on the proximate causes. This article sees the crisis as a consequence of the decline of a long-term pattern of accumulation in the USA and seeks to outline the requirements for a new period of dynamic economic growth. Drawing on work done by the French Regulation theorists and the US analysts of Social Structures of Accumulation, the paper attempts to describe the types of institutional changes that would be needed to spark a new...

The coexistence of border-enforcement policies such as Operation Gatekeeper and economic liberalization programs such as NAFTA is arguably paradoxical given the simultaneous push towards afree flow of products but curtailed flow of labor. This paper presents a critical review and reassement of existing accounts of neoliberal statehood to make sense of this apparent puzzle. While some have argued that the state is eroding under neoliberal globalization, a more sophisticated analysis has...

The article offers information on the features that contribute to the modernization in Russia. It discusses various value structure theories from various persons. It says that from the analysis of world survey statistics, Yevgeny Yasin concluded that Russians are more conservative compared to other western countries. Details regarding the mentality of Russian people are discussed including Russians' high score on cycloid scale and their tendency to fulfill their task at the last moment....

This paper turns Karl Polanyi's concept of the "double movement" back on Polanyi and his intellectual contemporary, Friedrich Hayek, as a means to insight into the structural conditions of counter-movement in the second half of the 20th Century. After elaborating on the double movement concept, I contrast the trajectory of Polanyi and his greatest work, The Great Transformation, with that of Friedrich Hayek and his contemporaneous Road to Serfdom--treating each as protagonists in the...

In this paper I propose that role of law in Karl Polanyi's concept of the 'always embedded economy' (Block 2003) can be enriched by the application of the lens of community (Perry-Kessaris 2008) developed by Roger Cotterrell (1996-present). I begin with Polanyi's suggestion that economic action and interaction are always 'embedded' in wider social life. Reading through the lens of community, we can be more specific: any actor is at once engaged, to different degrees (from fleeting to...

The dominant approach of CSR is based on the concept of "stakeholders" (R. E. Freeman). More than a theory, it is a slogan which irrigates as much the scientific discourse as the manager and political discourses. We can make two readings of this slogan. The first one, which is very reducing for us, consists on the deconstruction of the firm as institution and its replacement by a market representation based on bilateral exchanges between rational individuals. The second one, more promising...

Sociologists have examined the ways in which capitalism contributes to environmental degradation as well as how, in selected circumstances, it increases efficiency while reducing pollution and human injustices. In this review, we draw on Polanyi's concept of the double movement to illustrate how self regulating markets give rise to environmental degradation and inequities and, in response, how these conditions often stimulate the emergence of collective action in pursuit of regulatory and...

O ensaio aborda a importância da redescoberta do pensamento de Karl Polanyi e de sua crítica à "sociedade de mercado" na retomada dos estudos e debates sobre o desenvolvimento (rural). Após uma apresentação geral do quadro teórico e analítico de Polanyi, buscamos utilizar seus conceitos para interpretar a dinâmica da mercantilização dos meios de vida e das formas sociais de trabalho e produção no espaço rural, bem como dos sistemas agroalimentares no capitalismo contemporâneo. Com base...

Karl Polanyi and Douglass North hold totally opposite views on the understanding of the industrial revolution.The former analyses the formation of market society within the framework of mutual benefit,reallocation and market analysis,while the latter is interested in the essential importance of transaction cost and institutional transition to the industrial revolution.This paper attempts to rediscover the implication of modern society and the sense of freedom which is closely related to it...