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The ecological crisis has intensified in many respects. Prominent proposals to deal with the crisis are discussed under the header 'sustainability transformations' or even 'Great Transformation'. We argue that most contributions suffer from a narrow analytical approach to transformation ignoring the largely unsustainable dynamics of global capitalism and the power relations involved in it. Thus, a 'new critical orthodoxy' of knowledge about transformation is emerging which runs the danger to...

Karl Polanyi is arguably one of the most significant economic sociologists. At first glance the links between Polanyi’s ideas about markets, society and institutions and strategy may not be obvious. However, there is a hereto unrecognised link between recent writing about institutions and strategy and Polanyi’s work. In this paper we, therefore, chart how, when recognised, these links reveal that Karl Polanyi’s work might provide new ways of thinking about strategy. Our over-riding claim is...

Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally...

Twenty-first-century Brazil’s political evolution is a window on the dynamics of contemporary political transitions. The inability of Brazil’s Workers’ Party to sustain its social democratic project and the subsequent rise of the reactionary regime of Jair Bolsonaro are, in turn, part of a global pattern of political change. Karl Polanyi’s vision of the ‘double movement,’ in which the dominance of the market vies with the countervailing movement for social protection, offers an analytical...

Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisation both within and between city regions across advanced capitalist economies. At the same time, austerity urbanism, particularly in the UK, presents challenges for urban authorities facing reduced budgets to meet increased demands on public services. Municipalities are beginning to experiment with creative responses to these crises, such as taking more interventionist and entrepreneurial roles in...

The welfare system was meant to reduce the 9 vulnerability of citizens to the market, thereby containing the consequences of the market economy and labor commodification. [...] As an adaptation to the consequences of the market, the welfare system is an effort to cushion the effects of the market, not a change its underlying logic of commodification. [...] From this perspective, the political debates about the rules to be applied to the operations of the platform economy are part of the...

The conventional way of producing and distributing food is based on the use of agrochemicals, fertilizers, industrial fertilizers and other techniques from the Green Revolution, with increasing dependence on financial-industrial capital, which implies the intensification of the agriculture commodification. The object of this study was the emergence of modes of organization resisting this trend. Based on the theoretical reference of Karl Polanyi (2012a, 2012b), a case study was developed in a...

As factors of production, labor, money, and land play a role in economics that is rarely understood. The difficulty of deriving the contribution of the individual factor of production to the value of jointly produced final commodities (the famous “problem of imputation”) occupied generations of Austrian economists (Hayek 1984) and inspired Ludwig Mises to produce his 1920 article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (Mises 1935). Any attempt at rational socialist planning is...

The importance of the work of Karl Polanyi to social enterprise scholarship is often maintained. However, explanations as to how and why his ideas are so relevant to the field are still relatively scarce. In this essay, we argue that engaging with Polanyi’s work directly, and Polanyian scholarship more widely, can provide a deep understanding of the underlying assumptions within current social enterprise conceptualizations, and provide insights into how the relative positioning of market and...

In North America, uranium workers are fighting for their right to participate in a free-market system that provides them with small personal benefits. These workers experience powerlessness, instability, and unpredictability – or social dislocation – by living amidst capitalism’s polluted ecosystems, unstable economies, and disintegrating communities. However, they feel reliant on uranium for their livelihoods and strongly support the industry’s renewal and form sites of acceptance to...

ABSTRACT A reading of Karl Polanyi’s work gives us a broader and more plural view of the development process beyond the exclusively economic dimension. This scientific text aims to recover the theoretical contribution of Karl Polanyi and its contribution to the understanding of the development process from a plural and substantive conception of economy. The key lesson learned in this research is that regardless of a country’s economic system, one should pay attention to the existing...

In a recent article for this journal, Stuart, D., Gunderson, R., and Petersen, B. [(2017). Climate change and the Polanyian counter-movement: carbon markets or degrowth? New political economy, 1–14. doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417364] discuss solutions to climate change in terms of Karl Polanyi’s concept of the double movement. They set up their argument as a critique of my own article on the topic to make the point that carbon markets do not constitute a genuine form of such countermovement....

Drawing on a detailed analysis of Grabher and König’s study of platformization (Grabher & König, 2020), this essay develops a revision of Actor-Network Theory by proposing how a Device, Representation, Actor and Network or a DRAN Approach can be more helpful in making sense of platform economic processes. First, it locates the ways in which Grabher & König’s article approach platforms from an updated Polanyian perspective. Second, it elaborates on how the aforementioned article...

Synthesizing material derived from Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, in Part I the concept of “national character” is delineated as a special case of “habitus” relating to the socio-spatial scale of the nation state. In relation to problems of state-formation, national character is shown to be a figurational and co-developmental function of the system of nation-states in which patterns of mutual identification and “imagined...

In an age of egregious inequality and rising authoritarian, many call for a new “moral economy” and turn to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation for inspiration. Yet Polanyi’s great insight is that those who cannot reckon with the moral economy of “market justice”—the claim that market outcomes, however unequal, are morally just—fail to understand the power of capitalism. Justified by its original claim to rest on natural science, market justice laid the predicate for democracy as mortal...