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It is no exaggeration to say that Fred Block and Margaret Somers are almost singlehandedly responsible for reviving interest in Karl Polanyi’s intellectual and political legacy in American sociology. Their contribution has consisted not only in reminding sociologists of the power of Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of market society to make sense of our troubled times but even more importantly in resolving many of the difficult theoretical tangles that Polanyi gets himself into in the course...

The economic value of art to cities and regions has recently been vigorously pursued and actively studied. The rapid ascendance of China as a superpower in the global art market and associated transformation of China’s art space, however, are yet poorly understood. This paper develops a Polanyian framework to interpret the spatial and institutional evolution of China’s art market, seeing the (de)commodification of art as a cumulative process embedded in geo-historical interplays of triple...

The cardinal role of complexity in Friedrich Hayek’s theory of the market has hardly gone unnoticed. Indeed, there is now a considerable corpus of literature that has established the importance of spontaneity as a central concept around which neoliberal economic theory revolves. However, as William Connolly analyzes, its closed conception of economic processes simplifies real economic volatilities and ignores both modes of self-organization and creativity found in democracy and social...

The vote for Brexit is not an isolated event, but part of a wave of populist, anti-elite revolts: a new 'anti-system' politics Western democracies are experiencing, shaking the existing consensus around economic integration, free markets and liberal values. This wave takes a variety of forms, but has in common a robust, even violent, rejection of the mainstream political elites and their values, and a demand for governments to act on the sources of social and economic distress and...

In his seminal 1944 book The Great Transformation, Polanyi describes the rise and fall of liberal capitalism during the long nineteenth century. Many have realised that Polanyi has a lot to tell about the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The paper begins with an overview of Polanyi's historiography of the failure of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism and his account of the four elements that helped liberal capitalism thrive, while precipitating its collapse-the...

Land reform was one of the most important policies introduced in Latin America in the twentieth century and remains high on the political agenda due to sustained pressure from rural social movements. Improving our understanding of the issue therefore remains a pressing concern. This paper responds to this need by proposing a new theoretical framework to explore land reform and providing a fresh analysis of historical and contemporary land struggles in Ecuador. Drawing on the pioneering work...

Discusses the relevance of Polanyi’s double movement in light of increasing support for far-right, authoritarian and neo-fascist movements in Europe and North America. The author quotes The Great Transformation on how fascism “was rooted in a market system that refused to function” (21), however, he chooses to center his analysis on an unpublished essay of Polanyi’s entitled “The Fascist Virus”. From this, he extrapolates that fascism operates like a disease within liberal capitalism,...

With the advance of economic neoliberalization along with the green economy paradigm that aims to alleviate rapid climate change, discussions of the rationale of cooperative organization of food production have come to the fore. This paper contributes to the scholarly understanding of motivations for cooperative organization of production by taking up empirical illustrations from the European North of Russia, where despite expectations of privatization after the dissolution of the Soviet...

Over the past twenty years, a widening gulf has appeared between the increasingly internationalized financing arrangements of the world’s leading corporations and the persistence of nationally compartmentalized approaches to the study of corporate control. In lieu of direct empirical evidence on corporate control at the global level, the most widespread assumption is that the globalization of ownership has taken the form of an expansion of arm’s-length, market-based arrangements...

This article draws attention to issues about the institutional matrices theory (IMT) as perceived by and raised in the article by F. Gregory Hayden. To clarify the “controversial” points, I structure my response narrative along two lines. First, I present the prehistory of IMT, or X- and Y- theory, including earlier work by scientists related to the concept of institutional matrix. I connect the development of the actual IMT with the period of “perestroika” and the associated market...

Drawing on ethnography of the World Bank's private sector development program, this paper explores the ways in which discussions of export competitiveness emerged in the past decade or so and how they interacted with larger discourses on solidarity and development. The immediate context within which this idea emerged was that of the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which had maintained that the public regulation of the private economy compromises on industrial productivity (and by...

Structural changes in Norwegian and Danish food industry since the 1990s is analysed as a path dependent response to the neo-liberal turn. Norway entered the 1990s as a protected market and Denmark as case of an export oriented industry. These developmental strategies are rooted in early 20th century industrialisation and influenced by institutional transformations in the 1990s, such as EU and WTO. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are studied in the context of changing political environments....

Unconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) has spurred an unprecedented boom in onshore production in the US. Despite a surge in related research, a void exists regarding inquiries into policy outcomes and perceptions. To address this, support for federal regulatory exemptions for UOGE is examined using survey data collected in 2015 from two Northern Colorado communities. Current regulatory exemptions for UOGE can be understood as components of broader societal processes of...

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has incorporated sustainable development as one of their objectives. This objective gives companies an increasing motivation to contribute to sustainable development through their corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, perceived profitability of companies with carbon commodification were negatively associated with CDM projects. This paper aims to identify CSR activities in CDM in three Latin American countries, namely, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru and...

The article uses a case study of the American Manufacturing Extension Partnership to explore economic and industrial policy in the contemporary USA. Extensive quantitative and qualitative data are mobilized to show that: (a) the agency is pressured politically to limit its activities to 'blunt' remedies for identifiable 'market failures'; even as (b) regional centers in fact often orient also, and sometimes instead, toward 'coordination-oriented' policies to mitigate 'network failures'; and...

M. Sornarajah's recent analysis of investment arbitration as an offshoot of 'neoliberalism' is basically correct. But it attaches too much importance to the bias of the arbitrators and the procedural problems in arbitral practice. The controversy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and investment arbitration generally is not about the niceties of arbitral procedure, the discretion of arbitrators or the pros and cons of the...

This paper explores the nexus of religion, space, and development. It sheds light on the role of faith-based organizations (FBOs) as partners in sustainable development and key actors for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Applying and building on the theoretical framework of Polanyi’sThe Great Transformationindicates that FBOs with value-laden agendas have formed new state spaces during the age of globalization, where state capacities are transferred to...