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This article focuses on the discursive construction in Britain of a middle-class moral panic occasioned by the distress caused to self-styled ‘responsible mortgage borrowers’ by falling house prices. In the context of the move towards asset-based welfare the sub-prime crisis manifested itself most obviously in the popular consciousness as a threat to housing market wealth. The Labour government used the political space opened up by the narrative of middle-class moral panic in order to...

The article explores the potential roots of the unsustainability of the intersectoral dynamic. Political economist Karl Polanyi stresses that excesses of globalisation led to the unsustainability among the private, public and civic sectors. The backlash against globalisation and the private sector has its roots in the imbalance among the three sectors. The impact of the absence of regulatory regimes on globalisation's frontiers on the private sector is discussed, as well the process by which...

Class relationships are amongst the fundamental drivers of development, and it is argued here that over the next 30 years a major influence on the pattern and path of development will be exerted by the rise of the ‘new middle classes’ of Asia. At the same time, in the context of the blocked transition of the present, it seems unlikely that those who are marginalised and excluded will be able adequately to organise resistance, much less change structures of power, but poverty will be managed...

This Special Issue comes from the Development Studies Association (DSA) 30th Anniversary conference in 2008. The theme was ‘Development's Invisible Hands’, focusing on the forces likely to influence global change and re-shape development agendas over the next 30 years. The first section comprises brief invited thinkpieces mainly from DSA past presidents. Interestingly, while some focus on Adam Smith's original ‘invisible hand’ analogy and others discuss a range of non-market issues, several...

Abstract:This essay explores the connections between Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) and midcentury social theory in the United States. It argues that Polanyi shared with his U.S. colleagues a critique of market society. In particular, Polanyi's work bears close resemblance to the early thought of management theorist Peter Drucker, with whom Polanyi lived while writing his celebrated book. By comparing Polanyi to his contemporaries who advanced similar ideas, one gains a...

This paper examines and analyses the organization and functioning of subaltern peasant sanghams (grassroot associations of the poor) and their place-based as well as network-based strategies in building autonomous local communities that challenge the consequences of neoliberal globalization in general and the commodification of agriculture and food in particular. The major objective of the counter-hegemonic organizational strategies is to build self-protective and subsistence communities, to...

This paper explores an explanation which elaborates how individuals effectively enact and sustain trust in the sphere of social economy and the capability. I discuss how value employed by actors and the strategies and power relation in the socio-economic value sphere and focus on the function of ‘trust’ as the key mechanism of the interaction. This paper examine South Korean consumer cooperative Hansalim as a case of social economy which successfully institutionalize their system in...

This paper is based on an ethnography of ‘alternative’ consumption practices in the inner city of the former East Berlin. Non-monetary exchange networks (Tauschringe) and ‘free shops’ (Umsonstläden) have been examined. In Umsonstläden, the contemporary ideology of the ‘pure’ gift (Parry 1986; Carrier 1995) is at play: objects are freely given and totally alienated from their owners. In turn, Tauschringe sometimes induce gift-giving practices entailing mutual obligation, as a result of...

This paper investigates political-economic backlash to economic globalization in industrialized polities. It analyzes data on the content of party platforms to develop measures of party support for, or opposition to, political-economic closure, anti-democratic nationalism, and xenophobia in all party platforms of 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for all national elections between 1960 and 2003. These allow broader judgments of trends in autarky and autarchy...

Purpose – This paper sets out to investigate the potential contribution of the inter‐disciplinary field of ecological economics to the explanation of the current economic crisis. The root of the crisis is the growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance. Design/methodology/approach – The authors trace the epistemological origins of this disjuncture to the myths of economism – a mix of academic, popular and political beliefs that served to...

Polanyi (1944, [1957]1968) has distinguished three “patterns of social integration,” namely, “reciprocity,”“redistribution,” and “exchange.” This triad has provided the starting point for most subsequent discussion. Our purpose is to introduce a further type of coordination, the “destructive mode of coordination.” This mode achieves coordination by intimidation, threat, and the use of non-institutionalized coercive means. Resources and human efforts are allocated in order to appropriate what...

AbstractA major thinker and inspiring teacher, Karl Polanyi's contributions have long been influential in a variety of disciplines, notably economic sociology and economic history. Two of his innovations, substantivist economic anthropology and the “double movement thesis,” are recognized as seminal. All of the works for which he is known, however, were written late in life, when in exile, and very little is known of his Hungarian writings, virtually none of which had, until now, been...

The recent period of intensive and extensive development of global economic integration, or globalization, has reached a crossroads. The regime of the neoliberal Great Capitalist Restoration is not sustainable and fundamental governance changes must be made. This paper adds perspective to the choices that must be made at this critical juncture of the global social economy by applying the master concepts of Schumpeter's Creative Destruction and Polanyi's Protective Response.

This article discusses the evidence of markets in the Ancient Near East. The major points are (1) the shortcomings of the misguided application of the Polanyi model and (2) the ensuing implications of the failure to integrate economic history into modern economic theory. The analysis concentrates on Ancient Egypt, as it presents the most significant problem for economic history and theoretical modelling. Detailed criticism of the means by which the Polanyi model is upheld is coordinated with...

The growth of precarious work since the 1970s has emerged as a core contemporary concern within politics, in the media, and among researchers. Uncertain and unpredictable work contrasts with the relative security that characterized the three decades following World War II. Precarious work constitutes a global challenge that has a wide range of consequences cutting across many areas of concern to sociologists. Hence, it is increasingly important to understand the new workplace arrangements...

This paper intervenes in the Granovetter-Polanyi debate by reassessing the level of embeddedness of social and economic relations under conditions of systemic transition. Using panel data collected in Poland, this analysis examines this relationship for three distinct periods of transition: initial (1988-1993), advanced (1993-1998), and post-transitional (1998-2003). This paper shows that during transition from communism to capitalism economic relations tended to disembed from social...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Towards a Green Republicanism: Constitutionalism, Political Economy, and the Green State John Barry (bio) The republic is threatened—who will stand by the republic? Introduction The range of threats to modern society ranging from growing environmental stresses (water shortages, deforestation, soil erosion to climate change), food and energy insecurity, peak oil, rising poverty and inequalities within and...

The judgments of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) of December 2008 in Viking and Laval on the compatibility of national collective labour law with European prerogatives have caused quite a heated critical debate. This article seeks to put this debate in constitutional perspectives. In its first part, it reconstructs in legal categories what Fritz W. Scharpf has characterised as a decoupling of economic integration from the various welfare traditions of the Member States. European...

Zelizer’s work may be read as an attack on the central Polanyian thesis: that the market system threatens social life by the undue prominence it lends the economy in the organization of modern society. The recent publication of Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy (2005a) is therefore an excellent opportunity to review the general trend of her work Zelizer 1979, 1985, 1994, and contrast her leading ideas to the central thesis that gives Polanyi’s work its particular flavor: the danger...