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Public service labour’s distinctiveness is insufficiently understood or recognised; and in its ad hoc growth under liberal ideologies of state intervention (those of Mill and Keynes), it has been treated both as if it were and were not public service labour. This paper teases out some of the crucial links between liberal ideologies of state intervention and the social praxis of public service unionism, outlining the latter’s historical struggle against this paradoxical treatment, which...

This paper first explores the notion that the limitlessness of knowledge is a privileged source of the restlessness of capitalism [Metcalfe, J. S. 2001. “Institutions and Progress.”Industrial and Corporate Change10 (3): 561–586; 2002. “Knowledge of Growth and Growth of Knowledge.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics12 (1): 3–13; 2004. “The Entrepreneur and the Style of Modern Economies.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics14 (2): 157–175; 2010. “University and Business Relations: Connecting the...

This paper outlines a ‘substantivist’ approach to the regional economy of the Pilbara in Western Australia, inspired by a constructive reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi's methodological legacy. Beyond the metaphor of embeddedness, it makes the case for a more wide-ranging methodological engagement with Polanyi's brand of substantivist socioeconomics, in dialogue with the empirical investigation of actually existing and variegated socioeconomic formations. A Polanyian optic, amongst other...

In this article, we compare recent innovative union campaigns: the ‘sans papiers’ campaign in France and the ‘Justice for Cleaners’ campaign in the United Kingdom, both based on a sustained grass-roots mobilization of immigrant workers. Rather than focusing on the ‘usual suspect’ explanatory factors, such as contrasting national settings, union power structures or traditions, our cross-national comparison highlights important underlying similarities in unions' strategic responses to a...

The housing of low-income groups in Greater Cairo has always been difficult. However, the general shortage in housing supply is contrasting with the low occupancy rate of newly constructed public housing units. In contrast, despite their bad living conditions, informal settlements have a high occupancy rate. In order to analyse the reasons behind this contradiction, the paper compares four neighbourhoods ranging from formal and semi-informal to informal housing production and including one...

While struggles over land dispossession have recently proliferated across the developing world and become particularly significant in India, this paper argues that existing theories of political agency do not capture the specificity of the politics of dispossession. Based on two years of ethnographic research on anti-dispossession movements across rural India, the paper argues that the dispossession of land creates a specific kind of politics, distinct not just from labor politics, but also...

This article discusses a case of popular social response to imposed austerity and recession in Greece. It focuses on the anti-middleman movement in an Athens suburb. It also addresses the broader picture of the current Greek crisis, explaining how participants in this grassroots response extend their activity beyond food distribution, beginning to imagine modes of economic conduct and interaction different from those currently dominant in Greece. I explore their efforts to turn the food...

The University of Pretoria's Human Economy project began at the end of 2010. To date it has involved eighteen post-doctoral fellows, drawn from around the world, and eight doctoral candidates, all from Africa. This paper reviews the project's progress, drawing attention to how its participants have come to construe the notion of a 'human economy' and the main social theorists on whom they have drawn in doing so. The development of our thinking regarding a human economy is explained by...

Drawing on a Polanyian analysis of the land question, this article aims to analyse both Western and Indigenous cosmologies of Abya Yala—the name that indigenous peoples give to the American continent—to understand the relationship between human beings and land and nature. These cosmologies are at the heart of the way in which two distinct societies construct their regional space, one from ‘above’, the other from ‘below’, and they are therefore key to understanding today’s climate change...

This article aims to show that studies of transnational risk regulation can benefit from Polanyian and neo-Polanyian research agendas in the field of law, economy, and society. Risk regulation would then be under-stood as a corrective force within the market society. Drawing on the relevant literature in the field, Karl Polanyi's work is contextualized both in the past ("scholarship before and beside Polanyi") and in the present ("scholarship after and beyond Polanyi"). The review considers...

This introduction unpacks the key question that informs the articles in this special issue. How does a social sphere inform regulation and, more specifically, how can the regulatory capacity of a social sphere be har-nessed, as an alternative or significant complementary force to state reg-ulation and reliance on the self-regulatory capacity of markets? This question is salient and topical also in light of the search for new regula-tory strategies and perspectives in the aftermath of the...

This article starts from the assumption that economic sociology, including Karl Polanyi's work, can contribute fresh perspectives to regulation debates because it opens up new understandings of the nature of economic activity, a key target of legal regulation. In particular this article examines Polanyi's idea that society drives regulation. For Polanyi the "regulatory counter-movement" is society's response to the disembedding -- in particular through the proliferation of markets -- of...

Whereas much of the renewed interest in Polanyi's Great Transform-ation speculates that the rebalancing of economy and society he foresaw might now be emerging in the context of the financial crisis, the systems theory perspective adopted in this article concludes that there are good reasons to believe that such a shift may be no closer. From an examina-tion of credit default swaps and corporate bonds, the article suggests that finance may best be understood as an internally differentiated...

This article develops Polanyi's (2001) theme of harnessing the regula-tory capacity of a social sphere by focusing on trust as an emotion for framing risk regulatory regimes. Using the global mining sector as its focus, it explores the role of trust in the regulation and corporate man-agement of social and environmental risk Sociological perspectives on trust are employed to identify and analyze dynamics of trust in the mining industry. The article draws on data col-lected between 2004 and...

The social protests ort the streets of indebted sovereigns in crises across the Eurozone have made debt restructuring an imperative. Further delay in achieving this expeditiously and equitably significantly exacerbates the social costs of crises from which current and future generations will struggle to recover. This article examines the feasibility of the drastic and widespread debt restructuring needed to resolve the problem in the face of existing private law sanctions that protect...

This article looks at corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a discur-sive social practice that attempts to interrogate the global market econ-omy and its neoliberal underpinnings and that reflects as well as frames and shapes domestic and global politics and institutions. Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's notions of reciprocity and redistribution while also emphasizing the normative content of the concept, the article inquires into the position that the CSR discourse occupies in addressing the...

This article combines two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate among elite transactional lawyers. The stories portray law-yers as ineffective market actors who are uninterested in designing super-ior contracts, who follow rather than lead industry standards, and who depend on governments and other outside actors to spur innovation and correct mistakes. We juxtapose these stories against a dataset...

The concept of the ‘counter-movement’ has had a significant impact within studies in International Political Economy (IPE). In the light of the credit crisis and the growth of growing resentment to the notion of the free market, the idea of the counter-movement has been utilised to understand social reaction to neoliberalism. This article argues that whilst the counter-movement has been used in unique and innovated ways, Karl Polanyi himself used the term largely to refer to a specific...

It is a truism that environmental management has experienced a significant change in the locus of governing, in which centralised forms of steering have been gradually replaced by more collaborative management approaches organised at the ecosystem scale. Whereas much research capital has been expended on informing their design and promoting their uptake, surprisingly little systematic comparative empirical research exists on the precise nature and extent of what is often described as a...

This essay puts into context the debate between Michael Jacobs and Ian Mulheirn, exploring the theories and themes underpinning their arguments, published in issue 84 1 of the Political Quarterly. It discusses, firstly, the roots of Mulheirn's approach in European neoliberalism and, secondly, the roots of Jacobs' approach in a range of sources currently contending for authority over debates within the Labour party. These include themes drawn, broadly, from Polanyi, Keynes, Schumpeter and...