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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...

Karl Polanyi’s belief that the greatest threat to freedom was a poorly administered economy led him to an economics that was more existential and human-centered. Part I of this book develops Polanyi’s thinking for its significance today through a selection of papers on re-reading his major work entitled The Great Transformation. Part II looks at the life and work of Ilona Duczynska (Polanyi’s wife), political activist, writer and translator and important influence over Karl and his work....

The creation of a national economic space is the necessary structural condition for the unfolding of the "self-protective" measures of society that Polanyi analyzed for the post-WWI period, and that he saw as more generally arising in response to free market policies. A national economic space is itself the product of specific institutional arrangements, in particular the state agencies that allow the state to centralize the monetary system in its own hands: in the modern period, these have...

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...

In this paper I partly retell Polanyi's narrative of the industrial revolution found in his Great Transformation. I discuss how new labor laws consolidated in the 19th century created a legal structure of coerced contractual labor, that did not fit the ideals of free market economics. My retelling focuses on how capitalists in some industries relied on legal coercion of their workers as a means of discipline and labor process control. Through this retelling I demonstrate 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...

This article describes a strategy of modeling embeddedness of economic behavior as a process, as opposed to viewing it as a time-independent relationship between behavior and a social factor in which it is subsumed. I first reconstruct Polanyi's classic processual model of embeddedness and derive from it a set of intuitive tests, which are then applied to key modern approaches in economic sociology: structural, neo-institutional, neo-weberian and Fligstein's...

The article focuses on the relevance of economist Karl Polyani's economic theories and tries to analyze if his book titled "The Great Transformation," could be considered as the foundation of current economic sociology and international political economy. The author of the article says that Polayni's theories focuses on contemporary economic sociology, market economy's self-destructive approach and consideration of the market economy as integral part of the society. His work on...

The  rise  of  the  Social  Forum  phenomenon  has  been  heartily  welcomed,  partly  so  as to unite diverse discourses of anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist resistance under a common  banner.  There  are  debates  worth  flagging,  however,  that  draw  our  attention to  political  philosophies  (typically  binary  statist  versus  anti-statist  disputes),  visions of agency (typically networked movements versus parties), and potentials for revolutionary processes to emerge within...

Recent globalization theory reflected a chain of world historical events since the end of the Cold War. Globalization theories were tools for the making of political alliances between market liberals and political, liberals. From the mid-1990s a broad range of institutionalist social science programs showed that globalization outcomes were often better explained by institutional logics (including cultural ones) than by global flows per se. This is, among others, illustrated by the debate on...

The article analyzes the global economy by subjecting it to an interpretive scheme derived from popular culture Boganism, an Australian colloquialism or street slang used by teenagers. Boganism, the social phenomenon of being both unaware and irresponsible, is the result of a particular type of human abandonment. This abandonment is linked to the new hypercapitalism of globalization. The article will establish the structural roots of boganism, examine the case of the abandonment of U.S....