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This article proposes a neo-Polanyian theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics within contemporary market societies. It uses this framework to analyze the divergence between the United States and other developed societies that has become more pronounced in the first years of the twenty-first century. The argument emphasizes the shifting political alliances of the business community in the United States and suggests that from 1994 onward, business lost power in the right-wing...

The article examines the renewed interest in heterodox political economy. Institutionalists, post Keynesians, neo-Marxists, and feminists among others, and various sub-groups provide schools of thought on heterodoxy. The guidelines of institutional-evolutionary political economy (IEPE) are offered alongside socioeconomic analysis and complexity theories. The author outlines the conflict of individual v. structure. Other topics covered include social capital, heterogeneous agents, financial...

Karl Polanyi's discussion of the commodification of land, labour, and money is useful in analysis not only of nineteenth century markets but also of twenty-first century social and economic developments. This working paper explores the process of commodification of tanzanite, a gemstone discovered in the 1960s south of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, and actively mined only since the 1980s. More rare than diamonds because the source area is limited to the Mererani hills east of Arusha, the...

I argue that in its adaptation from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the concept of embeddedness has itself undergone a great transformation. In the process, significant meanings of the concept have vanished, while others have been added. First I explore the different meanings the concept of embeddedness has achieved in the new economic sociology. Then I argue that it is not the embeddedness of economic action that should constitute the vantage point of economic sociology, but rather...

This paper argues for a theoretical approach based on embeddedness which assumes that the economic actor is not an atomized and utilitarian individual, but is in fact positioned within specific historical and institutional contexts in various social networks. This approach is based on Polanyi's critically debated contribution which allows for an empirical study of the diversity of institutional structures and of the significance of configurations of insertion within different social...

This study contends that the various forms of archaic trade that anthropologists have reconstructed on the Northwest Coast of America are explanatory of plot-construction and characterization in Conrad's South-American novel. My thesis is that Nostromo is a figure defined by the practice of potlatch, and that his key presence in the plot entails the representation of a culturally dislocating transition from archaic transactions to modern commerce. The theoretical framework of this chapter...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of rising income inequality on the welfare state in East Asia. Specifically, I explore and test two causal links: 1) the effects of economic globalization on income distribution, and 2) the increase in income inequality on the prospect of socio-welfare policies. Building on Polanyi's politico-economic concept of "double movement," I hypothesize that rapid neoliberalization and financial globalization in East Asia since the early 1990s...

Feminist theory is often articulated as a series of categories of thought: liberal feminism, socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, etc. These categories have aided the recent development of feminist thought, but their prevalence sometimes limits discussion to predicable perimeters. My argument begins from the observation that feminists often have very different responses to the rise of the market economy as a separate institution largely free of control by political...

This article unfolds in three stages. First, it locates the emergence of modern conceptions of social justice in industrializing Europe, and especially in the discovery of the “social,” which provided a particular idiom for the liberal democratic politics for most of the twentieth century. Second, the article links this particular conception of the social to the political rationalities of the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. Finally, the article discusses the...

Using Karl Polanyi's analysis of the separation of politics and the economy, the book argues that the market economy is not a spontaneous process, but a...

Reconfiguring the Terrain of Cultural Governance in Mexico: The Role of the Mexican Film Community in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization Embracing the dominant neoliberal project, many Mexican elites have prioritized economic growth and market logics over broader social goals. The unleashing of market forces globally,and the adoption of neoliberal policies nationally have had a significant impact on local communities and national culture in Mexico. Focusing on Mexican cultural production,...

Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great Britain created economic systems during the twentieth century that were by intent neither capitalist nor communist. Unlike fascists, these seekers were committed to democracy and pluralism. Unlike liberal capitalists,...

Book edited by Jirí Pribán This collection of essays brings together Zygmunt Bauman and a number of internationally distinguished legal scholars who examine the influence of Bauman's recent works on social theory of law and socio-legal studies. Contributors focus on the concept of 'liquid society' and its adoption by legal scholars. The volume opens with Bauman's analysis of fears and policing in 'liquid society' and continues by examining the social and legal theoretical context and...

While political turmoil is not new to Latin America, the tension between neoliberalism and democracy can help explain present-day turmoil. The current political situation in Latin America is the result of a disconnect between the goals of democracy, in particular, between social justice goals, upon which the legitimacy of democratic government rests, and the neoliberal economic policy of the region. Polanyi's concept of the always-embedded economy states that a market economy must be...

Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today's scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschman's characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. We review recent...

Our understanding of the relationship between globalization and contemporary social welfare systems is heavily influenced by three conventional approaches to studying welfare reform: the political economy, moral economy, and mixed economy approaches.In addition to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches, a central aim of this article is to introduce the social economy approach as an emergent alternative. Drawing from a growing body of work on institutional...

When trying to understand the origins of the collapse of nineteenth-century civilization, Karl Polanyi identified a Great Transformation into a "starkly utopian" Self-Regulating Market (SRM). This shift entailed 2 elements: a wide-ranging re-regulation of organization and control of production processes, and the development of economic liberalism as a body of thought that provided justification of a new set of public policies that facilitated a transformation of land (nature), labor...

KM: outlines a generic model of political economy based on Polanyi's writings and explores some of its implications.

This paper explores the increasing significance of intellectual property rights for the appropriation of surplus value in capitalism. Building on Marx's analysis of the value form and extending it to the commodification of knowledge, it develops a Marxian critique of informational capitalism based on the basic categories of value theory; inter alia, this looks at the commodification of knowledge from the viewpoint of commodity fetishism, the enclosure of traditional knowledge, the formal...

Questions arise whenever social-scientific models are used in analysis of ancient texts, particularly regarding the feasibility of their application to social and cultural milieux different from those from which they were derived. An essay I authored that assessed the command in Luke 6 to "love your enemies" from the perspective of ancient reciprocity ethics, and that invoked Marshall Sahlins's taxonomy of reciprocity relations (general, balanced, and negative reciprocity), was queried by...