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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...

This article combines two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate among elite transactional lawyers. The stories portray law-yers as ineffective market actors who are uninterested in designing super-ior contracts, who follow rather than lead industry standards, and who depend on governments and other outside actors to spur innovation and correct mistakes. We juxtapose these stories against a dataset...

European economic integration with a minimalist social policy at EU level was in part made possible by strong domestic labour market and social welfare institutions. The main contention of this paper is that EU market liberalisation was embedded within institutions of social citizenship at domestic level, which served to counter the liberalisation of the internal market. But this settlement has been put under strain. In addition to the challenges posed to the sustainability of European...

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...

This article explores the relationship of globalization to domestic law in the context of privatized welfare services in Indiana. It examines the ways that privatization can affect vulnerable populations such as welfare recipients by, in effect, partially dis-embedding the market from the state. It applies Karl Polanyi's conception of a double movement to illustrate how the political process can, in effect, re-embed the market in the state. Utilizing Indiana's recent experiences with welfare...

This paper argues that the relationship between law and politics must be reconfigured within the European Union. Dissecting recent crises in economic, social and political organisation within Europe with reference to the three ‘fictitious’ commodities of Karl Polanyi, we find that law in Europe has contributed to de-legalisation, de-socialisation and disenfranchisement. Moving on to review the potential for law to respond to crisis through new paradigms of conflict resolution as suggested by...

This article applies Karl Polanyi's observation of a double movement of law in the history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe to an analysis of Bali's integration into the global cultural economy. It describes how the increasing disembedding of the island's tourist industry from local norms and institutions, and the parallel disjuncture between Balinese religiosity and Indonesian state religion have created a condition of increasing collective anomie that has in turn provoked...

The expansion of extractive corporations’ overseas business opera-tions has led to serious concerns regarding human rights–related impacts. As these apprehensions grow, we see a countervailing rise in calls for government interven-tion and in levels of socially conscious shareholder advocacy. I focus on the latter as manifested in recent use of the shareholder proposal mechanism found in corporate law. Shareholder proposals, while under-theorized, provide a valuable lens through which to...

This article is a commentary and critique of the concept of 'environmental justice' that lately has become much more prominent in discourses on the environment, especially in the debates and advocacy on climate change. After briefly considering the origins of the concept, it is argued that environmental justice is limited by its liberal democratic roots--it is an extension of a discourse that ultimately is based on atomism, centralization of power, and legitimization of the marginalization...

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...

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...

This paper examines the extent to which one manifestation of neoliberal transnational legality, represented by the investment rules regime, may be vulnerable to critical resistance in the post-recession environment. If the regime was experiencing a crisis of legitimacy before the global recession set in, it might now be portrayed as having broken down entirely. This paper argues, in contrast, that the regime has a constitution-like resiliency that is intended to adapt and last far beyond the...

The judgments of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) of December 2008 in Viking and Laval on the compatibility of national collective labour law with European prerogatives have caused quite a heated critical debate. This article seeks to put this debate in constitutional perspectives. In its first part, it reconstructs in legal categories what Fritz W. Scharpf has characterised as a decoupling of economic integration from the various welfare traditions of the Member States. European...

This paper sketches out some preliminary thoughts on political economy that stem from problematics that emerge from TWAIL. The TWAIL story of international law is one of frustration and disappointment because of the constant exploitation of the Third World despite all the historic changes in international legal ideas and institutions, but it also a story of hope in the moments of resistance. In order to better debate how particular international institutions should be changed or whether...

This paper will cover a wide range of issues. It will start with a reconstruction of the European Community’s ‘social deficit’, arguing that a credible response to this deficit would be a pre-condition for the democratic legitimacy of the deepened integration project. Such a response can be developed in a re-conceptualisation of European law as a new type of supranational/trans-statal conflict of laws – this is the thesis defended in the second section. This vision is contrasted in the third...

Typically when we think of street markets we think of chaotic places full of energy and vibrating with danger and opportunity. Traders or governments create markets to meet existing and emergent demands as well as the unintended consequences of other policy decisions. It is this institutional design, this governance, this regulatory process that provides access to the market and organizes the vending space therein. Public and private entities operating in fiscally constrained environments...

Latin America is currently undergoing Karl Polanyi's "double movement" at full swing, as most governments of the region are currently experimenting with policies that defy the neoliberal orthodoxy that has been reigning there for almost three decades. One of such governments has been the center-left Concertación governments of Chile, which have been elected since the restoration of democracy in 1990. In addition to poverty alleviation programs, Concertación has been in an ongoing process...

This article presents information related to market transactions. As a mode of organization, markets are so pervasive in our own lives that it may be hard to think just how novel and contingent (in geologic time) they may be. It was economist Karl Polanyi who sought to isolate a juncture in this process of "becoming a market", the point at which the idea of the market transaction becomes not just a tool or an instrument, but a central organizing principle of social life. But it is not clear...