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In the article, the author examines the social science theories of Fred Block, particularly on such topics as capitalism, finance, markets, and government. Other topics include Block's opinions on Polanyian socioeconomics, his thoughts on economic diversity and capitalist transformation, as well as the universalist model of capitalism as free-market globalism.

The most important historical work on the Anthropocene to date is J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke’s The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (2016). The authors argue that the Anthropocene began in 1945, not in the eighteenth century, as some scientists have proposed. They single out unintentional “human actions” as the driving force behind the significant changes in biogeochemical processes unfolding since the middle of the twentieth century (McNeill...

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentinian soy boom of the...

A remarkable transition to a renewable energy economy (also known as the Energiewende) with ambitious climate protection and sustainable economic development is taking place in Germany, with many German cities exemplifying best practices in effective climate leadership to attain ambitious climate goals, such as Munich (1.4 million) moving steadily to its targets of 100% renewable energy by 2025 and 100% renewable heat by 2040. Similarly, the former coal city of Bottrop in West Germany won...

Economic geographers have recently taken up the study of markets after a long period of inattention. This growing literature has highlighted the diverse spaces, scales, and fields where markets are present, as well as the ways in which markets vary in form. However, the study of markets in economic geography still exists in tension between neoclassical and Marxist conceptions of markets as predictable and approaches like the social studies of economization/marketization which emphasize their...

The ‘spatial’ turn in political economy has re-invigorated Marxian analysis, allowing for new research programmes into urbanization, geopolitics, and social movement activity amongst other topics. This tendency emerged through a critical re-reading of Marx and Gramsci, amongst others, uncovering spatial analyses embedded in the logic of their arguments. Conversely, Karl Polanyi’s interlocutors have tended to add geographical analysis as an additional layer of theory, reading space ‘in’ to...

O conhecimento e o território são estudados principalmente por duas ramificações teóricas: pelo enraizamento, baseado em Karl Polanyi e pelo conhecimento tácito, desenvolvido por Michael Polanyi. O objetivo desse artigo é, a partir de uma revisão das duas teorias, propor o uso delas como ferramenta de análise de indicações geográficas e aplicar esta análise ao caso da produção do Queijo Minas Artesanal.  A metodologia utilizada foi o levantamento bibliográfico primário e pesquisa de campo na...

Information policy has become one of the key instruments for the commodification and marketization of goods in contemporary capitalism. However, the spatializing role of this and other legal regimes has not been explored in depth. Among the categories of goods whose production and circulation is shaped by information policy, geographic information is increasingly salient in the digital economy due to the strategic and economic value derived from its integration of location and context. This...

It seems with the ever more complex instituting of aggressive neoliberal renewal policies comes an intensified effort to use the language of consensus and civic unity. The post‐political debate frames this discussion, and it is from this perspective that we propose a fuller consideration of urban renewal policy, and how these forces are embedded within the narrowing of what has been called the “properly political”. In bringing together accounts of the dynamic political life of communities...

Gentrification as an urban strategy pivots upon the dual mediation of the city as a site for aesthetic consumption and pleasure, and as a space of potential ground rent. The recent rise of urban regeneration programs that assist small scale cultural entrepreneurs into disused commercial property – ‘pop-up shops’ – is one example of the convergence of the urban cultural economy and gentrification. This article presents a preliminary explanation of the function of such urban programs through...

The economic value of art to cities and regions has recently been vigorously pursued and actively studied. The rapid ascendance of China as a superpower in the global art market and associated transformation of China’s art space, however, are yet poorly understood. This paper develops a Polanyian framework to interpret the spatial and institutional evolution of China’s art market, seeing the (de)commodification of art as a cumulative process embedded in geo-historical interplays of triple...

Over the past twenty years, a widening gulf has appeared between the increasingly internationalized financing arrangements of the world’s leading corporations and the persistence of nationally compartmentalized approaches to the study of corporate control. In lieu of direct empirical evidence on corporate control at the global level, the most widespread assumption is that the globalization of ownership has taken the form of an expansion of arm’s-length, market-based arrangements...

This paper explores the nexus of religion, space, and development. It sheds light on the role of faith-based organizations (FBOs) as partners in sustainable development and key actors for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Applying and building on the theoretical framework of Polanyi’sThe Great Transformationindicates that FBOs with value-laden agendas have formed new state spaces during the age of globalization, where state capacities are transferred to...

Farm subsidies have become increasingly maligned in agricultural policy debates, but the merits of subsidies are a distraction from deeper political, economic, and ecological problems in agriculture. Drawing on a history of the U.S. Farm Bill, this paper argues that a fixation on farm subsidies ignores why they came into being, and more generally glosses over the imperative for modern states to intervene into agricultural economies. Karl Polanyi's 'double movement' framework is used to...

This article examines how advocacy think tanks have sought to influence the remaking of the English planning system. Pressure for planning reform has come particularly though not exclusively from the political right, which has sought to portray planning as a form of bureaucratic regulation, out of touch with the needs of modern, global economies and the needs of society. This research involved 27 interviewees, the majority of whom have worked in think tanks, whilst others worked in...

The study proposes a network-based methodology linking Polanyi's ideal types of coordination and deductive blockmodeling to identify different forms of coordination within an economy. Using the proposed methodology, the economy of rice in postsocialist Vietnam is interpreted as a double movement responding to market liberalization. Qualitative and relational data were collected from 323 households and firms in two communes of the Mekong River Delta of Vietnam. Results show that in one case...

Tourism embodies flows of tourists, capital and information, as well as migration, including migrants who operate businesses. How do migrant entrepreneurs negotiate social ties and economic activities in their destinations? To answer this question, the paper draws on Polanyi’s work on embeddedness to explore migrant tourism entrepreneurs (MTEs) and their modes of integration in the practice of social and economic life. We argue that MTEs are situated in a complex matrix in which they must...

The involvement of private sector actors in low carbon urban transitions is a neglected element of geographical analysis. Drawing on Polanyian, cultural economic geographies and the non-capitalocentric ethics of JK Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies perspective, the paper engages with the wider literature on the engagement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in environmental action, corporate social responsibility and low carbon transitions to develop a substantivist account of the...

This paper outlines the emergence of a New Washington Consensus associated with leading philanthropies of the new millennium. This emergent development paradigm by no means represents a historic break with the market rationalities of neoliberalism, nor does it represent a radical departure from older models of early 20th century philanthropy. Rather, it is new in its global ambition to foster resilient market subjects for a globalized world; and new in its employment of micro-market...

With the aim of helping to revivify a stalled geographical literature on the place of land in capitalist political economies, this article presents a critique of the popular idea that land can be usefully conceptualised as a ‘fictitious’ form of capital or commodity. The critique is based primarily on a close and critical consideration of the grounds on which the identifiers and theorists of such fictitiousness – Marx/Harvey in the case of capital, Polanyi in the case of the commodity –...