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Modernity, or the combination of market economy, liberal democratic polity and a society driven by technological progress, we are led to believe, is the end-state of history; the glorious condition of a fully enlightened society of free citizens equipped with equal rights at which all traditional societies are bound to arrive, after a period of transition which might involve some temporary difficulties or 'sacrifices'. However, and in contrast to this, modernity rather involves an infinite...

Historically, the production of a market society has depended on the commodification of valuables such as land and labour, which has also meant the disembedding of capital from elements of the “primordial,” such as kinship, spiritual relations, and identities. Today we are still witnessing the invocation of such elements of moral economies as a basis for people's collective mobilization against market pressures. The case study in this article refers to Rosia Montana, a semi-urban village in...

Commodification has been and still is one of the key processes within capitalist market economies. Since the 1970s, different forms of knowledge have increasingly been subjected to this process. In this paper the commodification of knowledge in the field of higher education is defined in a broad sense as an example of the intensive enlargement of capitalism. I argue that knowledge shares some features of public goods and can be subjected to commodification both as an educational product and...

After the 1970s the new urban poverty (NUP) ballooned in Japan and the US, and it evoked policy responses that produced new, rescaled regulatory spaces to contain the poor on the fringe of social rights and the capital circuit. The paper illuminates this process through the comparison of Japanese and US trajectories, both of which, evolving through economic crises, have established unique pathways. The author first constructs a theoretical framework based on Marxian, Polanyian, and...

In the first half century of Dissent’s history, Karl Polanyi almost never made an appearance in the magazine’s pages. On one level this is surprising, because Polanyi was a presence in socialist circles in New York City from 1947 through the mid-1950s, the period of Dissent’s gestation. On another level it is unsurprising, in that Polanyi was a heterodox thinker—even among fellow socialists. With some significant exceptions, it has taken decades to recognize the extraordinary theoretical...

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour...

Public sociology and the sacrifices it entails, richly described in the case studies in this monograph, are driven by moral commitment. This is one element of sociology as a vocation. The other element is sociology as a science. The case studies are built on an embryonic sociology of commodification, understood in its historical dimensions and its global consequences. This sociology of commodification examines the disasters created by third-wave marketization and the bleak future for human...

Marketisation of urban service delivery gained renewed intensity in the crisis. Mobilising Polanyi’s concept of double movement, we analyse how marketisation of public services both creates and constrains the potential for urban counter movements in the USA and Europe. We identify three main urban responses: ‘hollowing out’, where cities engage in service cut backs; ‘riding the wave’, where cities attempt to harness the market; and ‘push backs’, where cities and citizen movements oppose...

In this article I discuss Polanyi's intellectual formation in early twentieth-century Budapest and in 1920s Vienna, focusing in particular upon his relationship to Guild Socialist and Marxist theory and to Austrian Social Democracy. It was a period in which Marxism was evolving rapidly, and Polanyi was too. In his twenties, he reacted forcefully against what he saw as the evolutionary and deterministic traits of Marxist philosophy. In his thirties, his relationship to Marxism underwent a...

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of many countries around the world where the relationship between customary land tenure and economic development has been hotly debated for a long time. A commonplace of the debate in PNG is that 97% of the nation's land is held under customary tenure, while only 3% has been alienated, and these proportions have not changed since the country became independent in 1975. This paper shows that the boundary between customary and alienated forms of land or immovable...

Economics and the economy have an uneasy relationship. Economics is akin to the logic of mathematics in contrast to the term "economy," which is an institutional framework to provide for material wants. While they overlap in the modern market economy, economics provides distorted results when applied to tribal societies, the economies of antiquity, or modern state-organized economies. Harold A. Innis and Karl Polanyi both attempted to find a different conceptual framework for a truly general...

In this paper, we critically assess two of the key conceptual foundations for the comparative capitalisms (CC) literatures, neo-pluralist political science and economic sociology, in order to identify more clearly the deep intellectual roots of these literatures. Principally, we focus on how the strengths of neo-pluralism and economic sociology – their attention to detail in considering the huge range of ‘types’ of capitalism that exist across the world – come at a high price. Put briefly,...

This article discusses some alternative or critical theoretical contributions regarding globalization and labor. The main question in this discussion is if there are changes in direction of a possible revitalization of labor movements and if international solidarity can increase due to globalization. This question also relates to discussions of changes in division of work, the concept of work, working class, commodification, decommodification, and new centers of global production--all...

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss group learning in line with economic perspectives of embeddedness and integration emanating from the work of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi’s work defines economy as a necessary interaction among human beings for survival; the economy is considered inextricably linked from broader society and social relations rather than autonomous and driven by self-interest in free market conditions. He specifically outlines three key forms of integration that are crucial to...

Purpose -- This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capi-talist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activ-ities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ). Design/methodology/approach -- This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory -- "embeddedness" and "the informal economy." These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology's engagement with...

This article attempts to combine the Polanyian perspective on the issue of market societies with an the analysis of the institutional foundations of capitalism that is facilitated by the Varieties of Capitalism(VoC) approach. The article departs fromthe argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working ofmodern capitalism, but became entrapped in an overt structuralismwhich considers institutional change as just an interplaywithin a self-odering...

Underpinning this article is the proposition that regional integration with a social dimension has the potential to engender a more equitable pattern of globalisation. The empirical focus of the article is on the ex)tent to which the insights of 'embedded liberalism' associated with regional economic integration between he industrialised nations of the European Union (EU)can be applied to regional economic integration within sub-SaharanAfrica. The article contends that EU market...

This paper examines the declining support for centrist parties in many western countries. Using the seminal ideas of Karl Polanyi, the paper argues this decline is attributable to the rise of neo-liberal free market policies that have resulted in widespread insecurity and led many voters to seek out political alternatives on the right and left. The paper further examines possible reasons why parties of the right, rather than the left, have been more successful at this historical juncture in...

The article discusses the emergence of millennialism, which is considered as one of the outcomes of the spiritual victory of Christianity over the Greco-Roman culture. The formulation of the historical-sociological category of cultural catastrophe by Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi is tackled. The presence of a divine messenger as one of the three elements of a messianic movement is cited. The concepts of revolutionarism, Jacobinism and Marxism are also addressed.