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The popularity of deconstructivist architecture around the world has invited controversy over the sensationalist design of these buildings. New urbanists, in particular, have criticized decon architecture as alienating and disorienting. From a historical perspective, this opposition between deconstructivists and new urbanists is the latest in a long line of debates over what constitutes "good design." Using a political-economy approach based on the work of Karl Polanyi, this article examines...

The article examines the transformation of the moral economy in the book "The Great Transformation," by Karl Polyani. Polyani's work has been criticized for having an anti-democratic, Aristotelian, and aristocratic undertones. However, the author claimed that it has been misinterpreted and a communitarian-liberal debate has been brought to clarify the nature of moral economy.

s essay aims to analyse the most recent acquisitions in economic sociology, setting out from the problem of embeddedness. Firstly, the contribution offered by Mark Granovetter shall be illustrated, demonstrating how the interpretation proposed by this scholar is concentrated on a structural-relational perspective that tends to trace the explanation of economic phenomena to a theory of social networks. In order to enrich and integrate this approach, the contribution offered by the...

Purpose - Following Polanyi, this paper aims to suggest that the Industrial Revolution marked a break-point between pre-industrial society (characterised by integration) and industrial society (characterised by differentiation). Design/methodology/approach - As a conceptual paper, the focus is on drawing out the implications of Luhmann's application of the theory of autopoiesis to industrial society. This discussion leads to critical reflection on the state we are in and the active role we...

This article previews this edition of "Public Culture" and focuses on Karl Polanyi's theories on capitalism. Polanyi believed in trade liberalization and felt that market regulation is the principal obstacle to collective prosperity. He thought that unregulated markets could bring an end to poverty, and would resolve the chronic dislocation, inequality, and vulnerability that have marked capitalism from its inception. Polanyi demonstrated that market liberalization was only achieved through...

Recently Claus Offe has put the question that concerns the fate of the European model of social capitalism: can the model of social capitalism survive the European integration in the context of certain contemporary tendencies? Offe has presupposed that the mentioned model is challenged by the processes of globalisation and the integration of the post socialist countries into the European Union. The working hypothesis of the article is that there is an opportunity to provide a coherent answer...

The effects of commercialised health care in embedding, exacerbating and legitimating social and economic inequality are at the root of widespread and recurrent resistance to commercialisation in health. In low income developing countries suffering generalised poverty, and notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, liberalisation of largely unregulated clinical provision has created a substantially informalised, fee-for-service primary health sector which is exclusionary, low quality and under stress....

My intention in this paper is to rethink the central contentions of "Globalization Theory" with respect to the relationship of the "state" to the "economy." I will do so via a consideration of recent discussions of the formation of the modern states system within the discipline of International Relations, and Karl Polanyi?s suggestive notion of the "double movement" presently enjoying a revival in sociological studies of the conjuncture of the 1990s. The paper concludes with reflections on...

In the twenty-first century, the Polanyian trinity of fictitiouscommodities (land, labor and money) cannot be realised through thetwentieth-century double movement. The regulation of money is no longervested in the state per se, but in instrumentalities such as the IMF, whosetask has become a generalized imperative to reproduce (corporate) moneythrough expending labor and land across the world with decreasing regardfor their sustainability. The construction of a 'world agriculture,'deepening...

Development in the global order is represented in economically reductionist, and in impoverished, terms. The latter refers to the global reproduction of material inequality through the progressive appropriation of alternative visions of development. We argue that the legitimacy of the global order, while represented in terms of 'economic progress,' depends on the progressive naturalization of its epistemological foundations. Here, solutions to the crisis of development become methods of...

The term world-economy in our title must have already given a hint to the careful reader of our purpose in writing this paper: We intend to bridge institutional economics with world-systems analysis in order to enhance the global applicability of the former. World-economy is a term used by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein and means a space defined by the existence of a single division of labor (coexistent with multiple States) whereas world economy would indicate the arithmetic...

The mention of the great city of Vienna conjures up the many legacies of music, art and philosophy which it nurtured. But as important as any of these is the more prosaic legacy of the Austrian economists ranging from C. Menger to F. von Hayek. And for some, Vienna may conjure up as well, the debate that K. Polanyi had with these economists in the 1920s. However paradoxical it may seem, it was by virtue of this debate, carried on directly and indirectly over a lifetime, that Polanyi was...

The norm has been rapidly moving from the managed markets under the welfare state back to self-regulating market with the rise of contemporary version of globalization. Today?s globalization is characterized by neoliberal economic policies such as privatization, deregulation, and limited government intervention--despite the growth of government--in open economies. In such an environment, social insurance, one of the defining characteristics of the welfare state, has become a great fiscal...

Karl Polanyi's most famous book, The Great Transformation, contains several ideas and theoretical notions which are at the heart of long-lasting controversies throughout the social sciences. Categories such as "double movement," "embeddedness," "disembedding," "market society," or "social freedom" have proved to be fruitful notions not only in anthropology, but also in sociology, political sciences, and economic history. The recent three volume publication of Karl Polanyi's writings during...

This article argues that Israel's 2003 elections are best understood as a deeper embedding of neoliberalism in the Israeli polity. It is argued that the most accurate characterization of the elections is as an articulation of Polanyi's Phase I of the double-movement. The argument is developed in four stages. First, the Israeli elections are understood as a local reaction to the multilayered processes of globalization. The Israeli state and its elections are located in the neoliberal ideology...

In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with reference to value-chain rent theory, that...

This article offers an alternative institutional economic approach to the informal sector by interpreting the works of economists Karl Polanyi and Alexander Vasil'evich Chayanov. Far from withering away, the informal sector continues to occupy an important place within economies in general and within the so-called developing economies in particular. Relatively speaking, the informal sector is inferior and more spontaneous, if not actually incomplete. Within the informal sector there are...

Globalisation can in a polanyian sense be understood as a double movement. Societal reaction to the shortcomings of the corporate driven process of globalisation from above (the first movement) creates a counter movement from below (the second movement). The relations between different actors within the political landscape and the area of tensions between the two movements are characterised by the gramscian war of position and its power struggle over the hegemonic discourse. At times the...

The article presents the conference paper titled "Bridging boundaries and Mending Fences? Finding community in transboundary conservation approaches" prepared for the "Annual Convention of the International Studies Association" held in Honolulu, Hawaii. It discusses the implementation of the Community Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana in early 1990s. It examines the contemporary applications of the idea of embeddedness which was coined by intellectual Karl Polanyi as an...