Your search

To grasp what might exist beyond neoliberalism, we need to rethink the history of development before neoliberalism. This article makes two arguments. First, for poorer countries, processes of commodification which are highlighted as evidence of neoliberalism often predate the neoliberal era. Third World development policies tended to make social and economic life more precarious as a corollary to capital accumulation before neoliberalism as an ideology took hold. Second, the intense...

Social scientists have drawn on theories of embeddedness to explain the different ways legal, political, and cultural frameworks shape markets. Often overlooked, however, is how the materiality of nature also structures markets. In this article, I suggest that neo-Polanyian scholars, and economic sociologists more generally, should better engage in a historical sociology of concept formation to problematize the human exemptionalist paradigm their work upholds and recognize the role of nature...

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the...

This article considers Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as part of the projects in ‘new governance and decentred regulation’, which draw social forces towards the regulation of economic behaviour. It uses Karl Polanyi to open up pertinent interfaces between society and economy for observation, and Gunther Teubner to substantiate a ‘regulatory’ view of the company's social relationships. The article finds that CSR combines movements for the recognition of social relationships, on an...

This article analyses the trajectory of Benjamin J. Cohen's work by focusing on his ongoing concern with the nature and governance of world order. It does so by playing out his debt to realism and to Keynesianism. In a first moment, Cohen criticises the economic determinism of dependency scholarship, while turning to political realism, and then to possible Keynesian co-operation under anarchy: agents have the power to affect positive change. Later, Cohen the disillusioned Keynesian, watching...

A recent Aljazeera report on ‘Cambodia’s Orphan Business’ explains ‘how “voluntourism” could be fuelling the exploitation of Cambodian children’. Anti-orphanage tourism movements have emerged to resist the growth of Cambodia’s contested orphanage tourism industry, which is blamed for widespread corruption and the exploitation of children for profit. Taking a Polanyian political economy approach, this article illustrates how the emergence of and response to the orphanage tourism industry...

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial influences have altered traditional practices as a way to manage that which Polanyi labeled as ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money. Land has now become a highly marketable commodity and an intrinsic part of the global economy. Over the past century, Uganda's land rights have evolved from communal rights to that of male-dominated, individual ownership practices that have excluded women. Despite constitutional provisions, which confer title of...

The crisis of the European Monetary Union has revealed the weakness and the fragility of the European integration process. The paper examines the institutional changes which are at the root of the instability. What are the driving forces behind the introduction of the euro? What role do theoretical considerations play in this process? What influence on European integration has been exerted by neoliberal beliefs and convictions? Relying on an approach that combines basic insights of Gunnar...

The concept of marketization denotes the expansion of market coordination into non-market coordinated social domains as well as its intensification in already market-dominated settings. This article sets out to reconstruct an institutionalist theory of marketization. As a point of departure, it critically examines the related contributions of Karl Polanyi and Jürgen Habermas. The analytical strength of Polanyi's theory of marketization lies in the discussion of the contested embeddedness of...

Goody's essay overlaps with his recent work on the “search for metals” and, more generally, with his many books expounding the commonalities of Eurasian history. His critique of Eurocentrism remains invaluable. This review article argues that his emphasis on diffusion can be usefully supplemented with a concept of civilization, to facilitate comparative structural analysis. Goody's perspective might also be enhanced by an engagement with the literature on “Axial Age” cosmologies and with...

Contemporary economic thought is overwhelmingly dominated by the dogma of the neoclassical school and the Austrian neoliberal school, according to which social organization can fully be understood from two hypotheses: the society can be reduced to its economic aspects, and economic activities are exclusively explained by the utilitarist rationality of individuals. This approach makes unnecessary, at least in the economic sphere, the construction of a collective cultural framework based on...

In 1944, two seminal works of political and social theory appeared: F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Both works focused on society's spontaneous resistance to the 'marketization' of life. Yet, the authors arrived at opposite normative conclusions. This article attributes the normative distance to a methodological clash over the role and limits of normative theorizing in the concrete and sometimes uncooperative world of politics. This clash, in...

In the last two decades, Fairtrade International has consolidated as the largest fair trade certifier in the world. Much of its growth has involved the expansion of its practices from exclusively certifying cooperatives of smallholder farmers to regulating agroindustries and nonagricultural companies. In hired labor contexts, Fairtrade claims to improve labor and environmental conditions and promote local development and many researchers praise Fairtrade for "re-embedding" economic relations...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the reasons behind a decade long contestations between the Georgian government and the petty traders over the access to the public space for commercial use. Design/methodology/approach – The paper relies on the repeated ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tbilisi in 2012 and 2013. The ethnographic interviews with legally operating traders and illegal street vendors are supplemented by the in-depth interviews with the...

This article shows, through a detailed examination of Karl Polanyi’s published works and unpublished writings, that Polanyi relies heavily on the neoclassical economics of his time in his conceptualization of the market in capitalist societies. This approach is instrumental to the thesis of The Great Transformation concerning the destructive impact of the market on society. However, such an analytical perspective neglects the social character of the market economy. This perspective is also...

This article attempts to provide a critical understanding of the dual signification of “precarity”. It explores what “precarity” as a concept may potentially offer to studies of the changing contemporary political economy of migration. It discusses shifting trends in global migration and point to tendencies for a possible convergence between “South” and “North”, “East” and “West”. Based on a review of current advances in research, it discusses, with reference to the classical work of Karl...

An essay is presented on the relationship between climate change and capitalism, offering a reading of the argument in "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate" by Naomi Klein through the lens of the analysis in "The Great Transformation" by Karl Polanyi. The author suggests that Klein's argument is not clear on whether capitalism in any form or only the current, neoliberal version of capitalism is incompatible with effective action to address the problem of climate change....

The current scenario in western countries is characterised by a crisis over the last thirty years of class conflict; by the mainly negative consequences of globalisation and of the transformations by production processes of the mobilising strength of work; by the cancellation of the relationship between labour and political representation; by the difficulties of traditional trade unionism; and by the emergence of the social movement unionism (SMU) paradigm. In this article, these phenomena...

This work introduces the concept of spontaneous order, its development through many schools of economic thought and its importance to today's society. This paper gives emphasis to Friedrich Hayek, since he has the most known model of spontaneous order, how he started to elaborate from his research about the role of the information on the economy and his maturation in Law, Legislation and Liberty. As a counterpoint to the Hayekian model, this work includes criticism to the concept and the...