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This article discusses some alternative or critical theoretical contributions regarding globalization and labor. The main question in this discussion is if there are changes in direction of a possible revitalization of labor movements and if international solidarity can increase due to globalization. This question also relates to discussions of changes in division of work, the concept of work, working class, commodification, decommodification, and new centers of global production--all...

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss group learning in line with economic perspectives of embeddedness and integration emanating from the work of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi’s work defines economy as a necessary interaction among human beings for survival; the economy is considered inextricably linked from broader society and social relations rather than autonomous and driven by self-interest in free market conditions. He specifically outlines three key forms of integration that are crucial to...

This article examines from a care approach the social and institutional responses to the development of the market economy in the European context. Studying this long period -which Polanyi called the double movement- is relevant because it constitutes the historical process by which the interests of the market, the logic of profits and its social and scientific naturalization come to dominate. Since then, the importance of care work in people's life, the reproduction of the labour force, and...

Karl Polanyi's critique of market society is a very powerful tool for understanding our current social reality. It helps us to formulate a creative and purposeful proposal that contributes to build a just, equitable, and more humane society, that would be committed to the future life on the planet. A comparison between the society criticized by Polanyi and ours, leads us to discover the validity of his basic concepts and his method for the preparation of a new critical discourse that not...

The article presents selected aspects of the discussion about the conditions and consequences of global economic crisis in Polish sociology. The author argues that the relatively limited debate on the nature of the current crisis can be explained by two factors. Firstly, it is the consequence of the dominance of modernisation paradigm in the analysis of the Polish social transformation as well as the marginalisation of two sociologies: critical labour sociology and economic sociology....

Purpose -- This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capi-talist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activ-ities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ). Design/methodology/approach -- This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory -- "embeddedness" and "the informal economy." These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology's engagement with...

El artículo se centra en la vida y obra del historiador Karl Polanyi, quien escribió el libro "La Gran Transformación", en 2014 y también discute la investigación realizada sobre la vida económica de las sociedades primitivas por Polanyi.

This article attempts to combine the Polanyian perspective on the issue of market societies with an the analysis of the institutional foundations of capitalism that is facilitated by the Varieties of Capitalism(VoC) approach. The article departs fromthe argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working ofmodern capitalism, but became entrapped in an overt structuralismwhich considers institutional change as just an interplaywithin a self-odering...

Using Karl Polanyi's analytical instrument, I argue that the current withdrawal of the industrialized powers and the emergence of alternative policies in Latin America are determined by the crisis of the neoliberal model. The polarity between democracy and the market, observed since the beginnings of liberal capitalism, has deepened since the inter-war period due to the appearance of so-called "mass democracy." Since that period, foreign policies of industrialized countries have derived from...

Underpinning this article is the proposition that regional integration with a social dimension has the potential to engender a more equitable pattern of globalisation. The empirical focus of the article is on the ex)tent to which the insights of 'embedded liberalism' associated with regional economic integration between he industrialised nations of the European Union (EU)can be applied to regional economic integration within sub-SaharanAfrica. The article contends that EU market...

This paper examines the declining support for centrist parties in many western countries. Using the seminal ideas of Karl Polanyi, the paper argues this decline is attributable to the rise of neo-liberal free market policies that have resulted in widespread insecurity and led many voters to seek out political alternatives on the right and left. The paper further examines possible reasons why parties of the right, rather than the left, have been more successful at this historical juncture in...

The article discusses the emergence of millennialism, which is considered as one of the outcomes of the spiritual victory of Christianity over the Greco-Roman culture. The formulation of the historical-sociological category of cultural catastrophe by Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi is tackled. The presence of a divine messenger as one of the three elements of a messianic movement is cited. The concepts of revolutionarism, Jacobinism and Marxism are also addressed.

The paper examines Nancy Fraser’s Polanyian reading of the current capitalist crisis and her expansion of Polanyi’s notion of the ‘double movement’–social forces struggling for marketization and social protection– into a ‘triple movement’ by adding the struggle for emancipation as a third factor. In its first part, the paper reviews Fraser’s central arguments with a special focus on her reading of Polanyi’s idea of the “fictitious commodities” land, labor, and money. Second, the authors...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of civil war during the Thirties (1929-1939). To this purpose, the work analyses the development of the Civil War discourse in the thought of Carl Schmitt and Karl Polanyi, trying to focalize on the relationship between its consequences on the civil war and the conflicting ideologies which characterised that period. Hence, the Civil war is described, through these different narrations, showing two different sides of modernity: the destructive...

While concentrating on the rise of modern capitalism, Weber’s seminal studies have little to say about the impact of religions on contemporary economic development. The paper comments about recent approaches to find an answer to the questions Weber left open. If one disregards a priori constructions of culturalist and rational-choice-theories, these approaches end up again in restating the circular relationship between ideas and interests showed already by Weber, albeit clearly with a higher...

In contemporary political economic analyses of development processes, Hernando De Soto'sThe Mystery of Capital, has been one of the most discussed, albeit controversial, books. Although well received by global development agencies such as the World Bank, a key exponent of De Soto's work, positing that the creation and institutionalisation of individual property in housing and land revives “dead capital” and creates the conditions that will enable the poor to emerge from abject poverty, has...

This article argues that thinking about entrepreneurship as a potential instrument for relief from endemic poverty and disadvantage, especially among the Indigenous, has all too often been captive to a concept of entrepreneurship that is built out of constrained economic and cultural assumptions. The authors develop this argument from a critical discussion of contributions by Karl Polanyi and Robert Heilbroner. The result is that approaches to venture have been encouraged that are sometimes...

This article identifies a triple crisis of capitalism based on the three fictitious commodities as identified by Karl Polanyi: labour, money and land. This framework is used to integrate the environmental crisis into the wider crisis of capitalism. It argues that international actions required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are going to present major challenges for capitalism with implications for the current dominance of market power and the subservience of state and social power. The...