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Pentecostalism is one of the world's fastest growing religions, expanding most quickly in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia. To make sense of this expansion in so many developing regions, I suggest that Pentecostalism fosters norms and behaviors that harmonize with neoliberal economic restructuring. I frame this theoretically with Polanyi's notion of double movement. In our current era of weakened state governance vis-à-vis neoliberal trade and fiscal policy, non-state...

This paper argues that the legitimacy of the global order depends not on economic progress alone, but on the progressive naturalization of its epistemological foundations, through 'new solutions' to old problems by states and development agencies. New solutions become methods of social control through which the dominant visions of what count as viable futures are reproduced. We critique efforts to humanize development (e.g., by the World Bank, Amartya Sen) as evidence of development's...

This article explores the implications of the Federal Reserve’s shift to transparency for recent debates about neoliberalism and neoliberal policymaking. I argue that the evolution of US monetary policy represents a specific instance of what I term the “neoliberal dilemma.” In the context of generally deteriorating economic conditions, policymakers are anxious to escape responsibility for economic outcomes, and yet markets require regulation to function in capitalist economies (Polanyi )....

In this article Polanyi's double move and Wæver's securitisation argument inform an analysis of poverty as a security issue. The inclusion of poverty on the security agenda confirms and complicates, rather than marginalises, the state as a central referent of security. It is argued that analytically and pragmatically qualitative and socially contextualised analysis of poverty offers deeper understanding than quantitative approaches. It is also argued that the rhetoric of inclusion currently...

This reader combines in a single volume the key writings of classical and contemporary thinkers on political economy. The articles provide both a theoretical approach to understanding capitalism and a survey of the varieties of capitalism around the world today, examining the interaction between politics and markets both in theory and practice. Drawing on history, economics, political science and sociology, it emphasizes the ways in which markets are embedded in and influenced by political...

Like a hurricane, third-wave marketisation is picking up velocity and destroying societies in its path, destroying the very grounds upon which sociology grows. Sociology and humanity have a common interest in upholding civil society, and keeping state and market at bay. Working with Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, I diagnose three waves of marketisation associated with the commodification of labour, money and land, generating counter-movements at local, national and global levels. I...

This article discusses a renewed interest in the work of scholar Karl Polanyi and the incorporation of his work into the body of institutional economics. This article discusses the notion of time in Polanyi's work and how it differs from the metaphor of time inherent in neoclassical economics. The author discusses the definition of the word "primitives" and its relationship to social policy, and how Polanyi deployed the actual state of primitives in order to replace the economistic...

This article discusses the relationship among economic constraints, social reform and societal pressures for a humane society, drawing on the insights of scholars Karl Polanyi and Herbert A. Simon. One of the key issues in Polanyi's work is the divergence between economic and societal values in modern capitalism. The divergence leads to a reaction against the rationale of the market and to what Polanyi refers to as the double movement. The distinction between internal consistency and...

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...