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Reporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of...

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...

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social...

Ariane Fischer, David Woodruff, and Johanna Bockman have translated Karl Polanyi's 'Sozialistische Rechnungslegung' ['Socialist Accounting'] from 1922. In this article, Polanyi laid out his model of a future socialism, a world in which the economy is subordinated to society. Polanyi described the nature of this society and a kind of socialism that he would remain committed to his entire life. Accompanying the translation is the preface titled 'Socialism and the embedded economy.' In the...

Drawing on Polanyian logic, we focus on the gradual institutionalization of capitalism in the Czech Republic and the protests accompanying this process. We hypothesize that different configurations of political economy, or what we term the political economic opportunity structure, trigger different popular responses and are a potent indicator of expected protest forms. To analyze this we chose to carry out a country case study, in which many variables commonly associated with political...

The concept of 'Economic Exchange', taken in the neoclassical economics sense, has traditionally yielded a unilateral direction for business and management studies, that of profit maximization. This paper argues that, the same, when conceptualized from a sociological and anthropological point of view in particular, taking theorization by Polanyi (1946), Weber (1978) and Zafirovski (2001) into cognizance, can generate many alternative and interesting directions. Illustrations for the same...

The aim of this study is to understand how the definition of ethics in finance has steered socially responsible investing (SRI) towards a financial approach where ethics is guided by finance. Following a critical perspective of historical and modern SRI, we advocate a reconceptualization of the SRI paradigm through a framework that re-embeds finance in ethical and social values according to Polanyi's theory of embeddedness. To conclude, we propose an SRI model where impact measurement and...

Polanyi analyzes the historical deployment of a “formal” economic science starting from the “market-scarcity-instrumental rationality triptych.” This triptych, and the knowledge associated with it, is shown to be more than merely a “substantial” economic science’s interest in the triptych “need-nature-institution.” While we must agree with Polanyi that economism is ill-suited to the first triptych, we hesitate to accept his suggested alternative, a heterogeneous mixture of naturalism and...

This paper analyses how the economic actions of water distribution and exchange are embedded in the culture of indigenous communities in the Cordillera highlands of Northern Luzon, Philippines. Such actions are fundamental to water access and provisioning. Data was derived from a series of focus group discussions conducted with various water users, including households, farmers, enterprises and local government officials, and from upstream, midstream and downstream communities along the...

The article argues that, in the last three decades, states have become more preoccupied with, and interventionist in, the regulation of class relations in order to facilitate a broad liberalization of employment relations institutions. Drawing on insights from Regulation theorists and Karl Polanyi, the article examines the market-making role of states during periods of transition from one growth regime to another. The more prominent role of the state follows from the stickiness of...

The article focuses on the case of the largest steel plant in Europe, located in Taranto (Italy), to argue that its current crisis is not simply dictated by technological or managerial failings. Rather, the article contends that its problems stem from a regulatory crisis and, specifically, from the failure of the deregulation model pursued after the industry’s process of privatization. Such a model has hinged upon the logic of a big private firm that, on the one hand, has sought to disembed...

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...

The work of Karl Polanyi has gained in influence in recent years to become a point of reference to a wide range of leading authors in the fields of economics, politics, sociology, and social policy. The volume is a combination of reflections on, and assessment of, the nature of Polanyi's contribution and new strands of work, both theoretical and empirical, that has been inspired by Polanyi's insights. It gathers together the key contributions to the first ever workshop on the work of Karl...

This article surveys the scholarship on the countermovement against the diffusion of capitalism and market economy in the Global South. We identify two streams of analysis in the literature. On the one hand, scholars observe contentious politics instances where the spread of capitalist production relations enables the associational capacity and bargaining power of social classes. On the other hand, there are voluminous studies on contentious politics in the Global South where groups such as...

Karl Polanyi is principally known as an economic historian and a theorist of international political economy. His theses are commonly encountered in debates concerning globalisation, regionalism, regulation and deregulation, and neoliberalism. But the standard depiction of his ideas is based upon a highly restricted corpus of his work: essentially, his published writings, in English, from the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing upon a broader range of Polanyi's work in Hungarian, German, and English,...

The article examines U.S. political and economical history in the context of its impact as well as influence to world affairs. Topics discussed include the Marxist's historical approaches to analysis of capital as in Karl Polanyi's take on American capitalism, "primitive accumulation" with regimes of commodification and the "new history of capitalism" hype. Also mentioned were transnational expansion of humanitarianism, international education sponsorship and Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy.

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...

This paper revisits debates over the labor theory of value in the 1970s and 1980s and proposes an expansion and revision for the neoliberal era. It draws on three empirical cases of social movements grappling with contemporary changes in the societal division of labor and argues that they can best be understood as 'revaluation' projects seeking to bring recognition to aspects of the economy that are necessary for its long-term sustainability but are not 'counted' as important.