Your search

The Polanyian problematic presents us with a unified, complex, and dialectical means to interpret globalization and its social contestation by diverse social and political forces. For Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), globalization as we know it would probably be conceived of as an extension of the ‘one big self-regulating market’ he discerned in his day, while his belief that ‘simultaneously a counter-movement was afoot’ provides an interpretative lens to examine the various facets of the...

The popularity of deconstructivist architecture around the world has invited controversy over the sensationalist design of these buildings. New urbanists, in particular, have criticized decon architecture as alienating and disorienting. From a historical perspective, this opposition between deconstructivists and new urbanists is the latest in a long line of debates over what constitutes "good design." Using a political-economy approach based on the work of Karl Polanyi, this article examines...

The article examines the transformation of the moral economy in the book "The Great Transformation," by Karl Polyani. Polyani's work has been criticized for having an anti-democratic, Aristotelian, and aristocratic undertones. However, the author claimed that it has been misinterpreted and a communitarian-liberal debate has been brought to clarify the nature of moral economy.

This paper accounts for the initial divergence and subsequent convergence of two types of urban political economy-neoliberal and socialist-in late twentieth and early twenty first century Latin America. Part 1 identifies the ideological differences between the two types of city as well as their implications for public policy. While neoliberal cities prioritize accumulation, and therefore use tax breaks, regulatory rollbacks, and the repression of organized labor to attract and retain...

'Vulnerability' is now a key term in globalisation studies. It is used to describe how globalisation impacts on individual security, local communities and even global flows of trade, finance and investment. Yet there has been little attempt to interrogate the term and what it is trying to express about globalisation.Peadar Kirby examines what is really meant by 'vulnerability' and links it to new forms of violence that have resulted from decreased security and social cohesion. He argues that...

The effects of commercialised health care in embedding, exacerbating and legitimating social and economic inequality are at the root of widespread and recurrent resistance to commercialisation in health. In low income developing countries suffering generalised poverty, and notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, liberalisation of largely unregulated clinical provision has created a substantially informalised, fee-for-service primary health sector which is exclusionary, low quality and under stress....

My intention in this paper is to rethink the central contentions of "Globalization Theory" with respect to the relationship of the "state" to the "economy." I will do so via a consideration of recent discussions of the formation of the modern states system within the discipline of International Relations, and Karl Polanyi?s suggestive notion of the "double movement" presently enjoying a revival in sociological studies of the conjuncture of the 1990s. The paper concludes with reflections on...

In the twenty-first century, the Polanyian trinity of fictitiouscommodities (land, labor and money) cannot be realised through thetwentieth-century double movement. The regulation of money is no longervested in the state per se, but in instrumentalities such as the IMF, whosetask has become a generalized imperative to reproduce (corporate) moneythrough expending labor and land across the world with decreasing regardfor their sustainability. The construction of a 'world agriculture,'deepening...

Development in the global order is represented in economically reductionist, and in impoverished, terms. The latter refers to the global reproduction of material inequality through the progressive appropriation of alternative visions of development. We argue that the legitimacy of the global order, while represented in terms of 'economic progress,' depends on the progressive naturalization of its epistemological foundations. Here, solutions to the crisis of development become methods of...

Karl Polanyi’s belief that the greatest threat to freedom was a poorly administered economy led him to an economics that was more existential and human-centered. Part I of this book develops Polanyi’s thinking for its significance today through a selection of papers on re-reading his major work entitled The Great Transformation. Part II looks at the life and work of Ilona Duczynska (Polanyi’s wife), political activist, writer and translator and important influence over Karl and his work....

The norm has been rapidly moving from the managed markets under the welfare state back to self-regulating market with the rise of contemporary version of globalization. Today?s globalization is characterized by neoliberal economic policies such as privatization, deregulation, and limited government intervention--despite the growth of government--in open economies. In such an environment, social insurance, one of the defining characteristics of the welfare state, has become a great fiscal...

This article argues that Israel's 2003 elections are best understood as a deeper embedding of neoliberalism in the Israeli polity. It is argued that the most accurate characterization of the elections is as an articulation of Polanyi's Phase I of the double-movement. The argument is developed in four stages. First, the Israeli elections are understood as a local reaction to the multilayered processes of globalization. The Israeli state and its elections are located in the neoliberal ideology...

The article presents the conference paper titled "Bridging boundaries and Mending Fences? Finding community in transboundary conservation approaches" prepared for the "Annual Convention of the International Studies Association" held in Honolulu, Hawaii. It discusses the implementation of the Community Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana in early 1990s. It examines the contemporary applications of the idea of embeddedness which was coined by intellectual Karl Polanyi as an...

The  rise  of  the  Social  Forum  phenomenon  has  been  heartily  welcomed,  partly  so  as to unite diverse discourses of anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist resistance under a common  banner.  There  are  debates  worth  flagging,  however,  that  draw  our  attention to  political  philosophies  (typically  binary  statist  versus  anti-statist  disputes),  visions of agency (typically networked movements versus parties), and potentials for revolutionary processes to emerge within...

The article analyzes the global economy by subjecting it to an interpretive scheme derived from popular culture Boganism, an Australian colloquialism or street slang used by teenagers. Boganism, the social phenomenon of being both unaware and irresponsible, is the result of a particular type of human abandonment. This abandonment is linked to the new hypercapitalism of globalization. The article will establish the structural roots of boganism, examine the case of the abandonment of U.S....

A one-dimensional view of capitalism inevitably leads to the conclusion that labour is in a state of deep crisis. However, if we examine globalization as a contradictory process, then it is possible to regard its relationship with labour as a transformative one. In this context, the decline of trade union density in developed countries and the rise of new forms of trade unionism in selected countries of the South, illustrate the contradictory relationship between labour and capital. In...

The Global Resistance Reader provides the first comprehensive collection of work on the phenomenal rise of transnational social movements and resistance politics: from the visible struggles against the financial, economic and political authority of large international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to the much less visible acts of resistance in everyday life. The conceptual debates, substantive themes and case studies have been...

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion in the world today. A number of explanatory theories exist, but in this paper, I hone in on the nexus between economic restructuring and Pentecostalism to explore this extraordinary expansion. Bringing together the work of feminist political economists and of Karl Polanyi, I argue that neo-liberal globalization threatens mechanisms for meeting social reproductive needs. Neo-liberalism cannot meet these needs on its own, and I suggest that...

This dissertation considers the status of citizenship in an era of neo-liberal globalization. Citing increased labor migration and the retreat of domestic social policies throughout the world as intersecting processes, I argue that narratives of national citizenship lie at the heart of this intersection, transformed by rapidly changing geopolitical conditions. Despite challenges, national citizenship remains a relevant political category, though reformulated along the lines of neo-liberal...