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While concentrating on the rise of modern capitalism, Weber’s seminal studies have little to say about the impact of religions on contemporary economic development. The paper comments about recent approaches to find an answer to the questions Weber left open. If one disregards a priori constructions of culturalist and rational-choice-theories, these approaches end up again in restating the circular relationship between ideas and interests showed already by Weber, albeit clearly with a higher...

This special issue asks what role society can play in the regulation of transnational risks, as an alternative to or at least significant addition to reliance on state regulatory activity and the myth of the self-regulatory capacity of markets (Stiglitz, 2001, p. xiii). How can a social sphere contribute to the prevention and management of risks, often transnational in nature, posed by economic activity? Leading socio-legal scholars explore whether and how the idea of harnessing the...

This article identifies a triple crisis of capitalism based on the three fictitious commodities as identified by Karl Polanyi: labour, money and land. This framework is used to integrate the environmental crisis into the wider crisis of capitalism. It argues that international actions required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are going to present major challenges for capitalism with implications for the current dominance of market power and the subservience of state and social power. The...

This paper first explores the notion that the limitlessness of knowledge is a privileged source of the restlessness of capitalism [Metcalfe, J. S. 2001. “Institutions and Progress.”Industrial and Corporate Change10 (3): 561–586; 2002. “Knowledge of Growth and Growth of Knowledge.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics12 (1): 3–13; 2004. “The Entrepreneur and the Style of Modern Economies.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics14 (2): 157–175; 2010. “University and Business Relations: Connecting the...

While struggles over land dispossession have recently proliferated across the developing world and become particularly significant in India, this paper argues that existing theories of political agency do not capture the specificity of the politics of dispossession. Based on two years of ethnographic research on anti-dispossession movements across rural India, the paper argues that the dispossession of land creates a specific kind of politics, distinct not just from labor politics, but also...

Four years into the unfolding of the most serious crisis since the 1930s, Karl Polanyi's prediction of the fateful consequences of unleashing the destructive power of unregulated market capitalism on peoples, nations, and the natural environment have assumed new urgency and relevance. Polanyi's insistence that 'the self-regulating market' must be made subordinate to democracy otherwise society itself may be put at risk is as true today as it was when Polanyi wrote. Written from the unique...

This article aims to show that studies of transnational risk regulation can benefit from Polanyian and neo-Polanyian research agendas in the field of law, economy, and society. Risk regulation would then be under-stood as a corrective force within the market society. Drawing on the relevant literature in the field, Karl Polanyi's work is contextualized both in the past ("scholarship before and beside Polanyi") and in the present ("scholarship after and beyond Polanyi"). The review considers...

This introduction unpacks the key question that informs the articles in this special issue. How does a social sphere inform regulation and, more specifically, how can the regulatory capacity of a social sphere be har-nessed, as an alternative or significant complementary force to state reg-ulation and reliance on the self-regulatory capacity of markets? This question is salient and topical also in light of the search for new regula-tory strategies and perspectives in the aftermath of the...

This article starts from the assumption that economic sociology, including Karl Polanyi's work, can contribute fresh perspectives to regulation debates because it opens up new understandings of the nature of economic activity, a key target of legal regulation. In particular this article examines Polanyi's idea that society drives regulation. For Polanyi the "regulatory counter-movement" is society's response to the disembedding -- in particular through the proliferation of markets -- of...

Whereas much of the renewed interest in Polanyi's Great Transform-ation speculates that the rebalancing of economy and society he foresaw might now be emerging in the context of the financial crisis, the systems theory perspective adopted in this article concludes that there are good reasons to believe that such a shift may be no closer. From an examina-tion of credit default swaps and corporate bonds, the article suggests that finance may best be understood as an internally differentiated...

This article develops Polanyi's (2001) theme of harnessing the regula-tory capacity of a social sphere by focusing on trust as an emotion for framing risk regulatory regimes. Using the global mining sector as its focus, it explores the role of trust in the regulation and corporate man-agement of social and environmental risk Sociological perspectives on trust are employed to identify and analyze dynamics of trust in the mining industry. The article draws on data col-lected between 2004 and...

This article looks at corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a discur-sive social practice that attempts to interrogate the global market econ-omy and its neoliberal underpinnings and that reflects as well as frames and shapes domestic and global politics and institutions. Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's notions of reciprocity and redistribution while also emphasizing the normative content of the concept, the article inquires into the position that the CSR discourse occupies in addressing the...

In this study author will try to make comparative analysis of Adam Smith and Karl Polanyi's ideas about market. According to Smith market is a mechanism which allocating resources through invisible hand. Contrary to Smith, Polanyi, asserts that a market is a intervention style to economy. Intervention is an inherent property of market. In the first part of this study Adam Smith's opinions about market which assings limited duty to state and defends social interest will come true through...

This paper aims to clarify the logical structure of Karl Polanyi's concept of institution, especially with regard to his most important contribution to political economy—the conception of self-regulating markets as institutions. Although Polanyi did not provide a well-developed concept of institution, this article argues that such a concept exists in his work. Moreover, there is in Polanyi's work a sophisticated institutionalist account of the self-regulating market that has been largely...

Faced with the twin challenges of anthropogenic climate change and ‘peak oil’, the need for an urgent and radical transformation of transport energy has been widely recognised. Adopting a neo-Polanyian economic sociology approach, this article asks what conditions European governance capacity to respond to these challenges, at either national or regional levels, using biofuels as a case study. It asks if the complexity of its political institutions, and the heterogeneity of interests and...

Reflecting a developing trend towards interdisciplinary research in economics and law, this agenda–setting volume makes the case for economic sociology of law  an emerging field that draws on empirical, analytical and normative insights from sociology to investigate relationships between legal and economic phenomena. It locates this novel subject in a wider socio–legal tradition and identifies common ground between Polanyian and Weberian approaches to the law, economy, and society,...

Ideas (of Karl Polanyi and others) that economies and markets are ‘socially embedded’ are central to recent research in economic sociology, closely paralleling socio-legal claims for studying law in ‘social context’. But the concept of embeddedness is imprecise and inadequate: a sociology of law and economy cannot rely on it but must address intellectual and moral-political concerns that its use reflects. Max Weber's writings on law and economy have inspired advocates of a new economic...

This article explores the relationship between law, society, and economy in the context of the contemporary British welfare state. Drawing on themes in Polanyi's The Great Transformation, it identifies the constitutive role of contemporary social policy and law in the creation and maintenance of markets and opportunities for the private sector in the field of welfare, focusing on the institutional mechanisms being put in place to encourage this. What emerges is a reformulation of the...

Bottled water sits at the intersection of debates regarding the social and environmental effects of the commodification of nature and the ways neoliberal globalization alters the provision of public services. Utilizing Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities and Harvey's work on accumulation by dispossession, this article traces bottled water's transformation from elite niche item to a product consumed by three fourths of U. S. households. Drawing on ethnographic research with...

To what extent does the social treatment of workplace injury in Switzerland enable victims to be decommodified in the sense given by Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) to this concept, i.e. enable them to leave the labor market in a way that allows them to uphold a socially acceptable standard of living? After a sociological discussion about the concept of decommodification, we present the results of a qualitative study conducted in Switzerland about workplace accident victims and show that the...