Your search

Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology addresses the battle between primitivism and modernism over the ancient economy, focusing especially on the contributions of three major figures, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley. Finally, a short Epilogue returns to the examination of Marx's puzzle and his manifestly unsuccessful attempt to resolve it. Mohammad Nafissi uses this discussion to put this dispute out of its misery by advancing his own resolution of the primitivist-modernist dispute....

The originality of Karl Polanyi's (1886-1964) work in the interwar period and his work in the 1950's has gained increasing recognition in recent years, during which time the major debate on modernity has erupted. In order to link Polanyi's work with this debate, the article first discusses his legacy on the controversial concept of progress and then relates his position to this debate. Polanyi's position combines the better aspects of the two rival approaches to modernity. The article then...

This paper is based on the idea that the early debate on economic calculation in a planned economy conducted in Vienna among Neurath, Mises, and Polanyi (1919-1925) was the starting point for the development of a particular form of heterodox economic theory propounded by liberal thinkers like Mises and by socialists like Neurath and Polanyi. Mises claimed that solving the problem of calculation was impossible, and consequently that a centrally planned economy was not theoretically feasible....

This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail,...

Voluntary food labels that express ecological, social, and/or place-based values have been posed as an important form of resistance to neoliberalization in the Polanyian sense of protecting land, other natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market. At the same time, these labels are in some respects analogs to the very things they are purported to resist, namely property rights that allow these ascribed commodities to be traded in a global market. After reviewing the Polanyian...

Abstract: Mirowski''s justification for replacing the foundational principles of neoclassical economics – methodological individualism and rational choice theory – with a theoretical framework informed by cybernetics, information theory, and computational biology, is subject to a critique informed by the work of Karl Polanyi, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Mirowski''s proposed alterative is called into question on the basis of two crucial weaknesses. First there is Mirowksi''s penchant...

Hardly anywhere is the trend towards a perfection of transnational governance arrangements and their “legalization” more visible than in international trade. Governance arrangements established through and alongside WTO law are both practically important and theoretically challenging. They do not just organise international trade relations. They also affect national and regional (European) regulatory policies partly directly, partly more indirectly. How can we explain and how should we...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the consequences of globalization, in particular the increasing disparity between the wealth of nations and individuals in society. It discusses mechanisms which lead to perpetuation and reinforcement of the situation in which, despite being characterized by inequalities and fragmentation, societies remain by and large cohesive and stable. This article engages with the so-called “Polanyi problem” and with Polanyi’s and other...

This article analyses the key features and origins of three variants of transnational capitalism emerging in Central-Eastern Europe: a neoliberal type in the Baltic states, an embedded neoliberal type in the Visegrád states, and a neocorporatist type in Slovenia. These regimes are characterised by their institutions and performances in marketisation, industrial transformation, social inclusion, and macroeconomic stability. Explanations for regime diversity are developed at two levels. First,...

Building on Karl Polanyi's theory of a societal reaction to the unregulated exchange of what he called fictitious commodities—labour, money and land—this paper links the history of sociology to the history of the market. If the first wave of marketization in the nineteenth century dwelt on the commodification of labour, prompting utopian sociologies, and the second wave of marketization of the twentieth century was provoked by the commodification of money, generating national policy...

This ambitious volume explores the politics of recent changes in corporate governance regulation and the transnational forces driving the process. Corporate governance has in the 1990s become a catchphrase of the global business community. The Enron collapse and other recent corporate scandals, as well as growing worries in Europe about the rise of Anglo-Saxon finance, have made issues of corporate governance the subject of political controversies and of public debate. The contributors...

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...