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Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine offers a weak analysis of ‘neoliberalism’ linked to a defeatist ideology. If we wish to move beyond the global economic crisis, we should borrow ideas from Mauss, Polanyi and Keynes; but the political level for an appropriate response is not obvious.

The purpose of this essay is to provide the historian with a generic understanding of the term economy by examining some aspects of the work of the Hungarian “economic historian” Karl Polanyi (1886–1964). It does not seek to explain Polanyi's economic ideas to economists nor does it seek to locate his ideas within the discourses of the academic discipline of economics; there is abundant academic literature which carries out those tasks. This essay is intended to help fill a void in the...

This article originated with a puzzle : how best to account for changes in the behavior of groups, organizations and individuals in Great Britain ? A detailed analysts of what Weber and Polanyi identified as interdependencies between state and market, and of the state's role in creating the market, led to the decision to adapt the notion of bureaucratic revolution put forward by Weber. We argue that the British bureaucratic revolution is reflected in the fact that the state plays an...

In January of 2001, the TimberWest Corporation permanently closed its Youbou sawmill facility near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada laying off 220 workers. On the surface, the Youbou mill closure reinforced a pervasive sense that workers and communities in the province are increasingly vulnerable to an ever more globally integrated and footloose forest industry. But a funny thing happened in Youbou; the workers fought back. While the mill was completely dismantled and scrapped, with no...

This article argues that two different manifestations of rational behavior can coexist and collide in a relatively homogeneous society. In the Ticuna community of Arara in the Colombian Amazon; on the one hand, the majority of villagers tend to reach relatively lower levels of material wealth, following Polanyi's idea of the pre-modern man (1968a; 1968b; 1968c), and also Sahlins' (1972) idea of the original affluent man. On the other hand, community leaders and schoolteachers tend to...

This article relates contemporary Austria's much-discussed and internally contested identity politics to transnational socio-economic transformations and their far-reaching local/national effects. A qualitative analysis of (wide-ranging contributions to) current debates on the environment, food production, climate change, social inequality and welfare, higher education, art, migration, and unemployment reveals a recurring pre-occupation with expanding/encroaching markets, their advocated...

This article analyses the involvement of the Dalits (formerly 'untouchables') in the World Social Forum (WSF) processes. The focus will be on one networked organization in particular, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) as a key organization which served as a catalyst for linking the Dalit struggle against neoliberal globalization and casteism with the social forum process and the global justice movement. The article argues that the Dalit struggle, domestically and...

KM: a review article on Nafissi's book.

The traditional ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm suggests that resource mobilization based on ethnic group membership and the particular structural conditions of the economy and society combine to facilitate ethnic enterprise. Yet, this model remains largely descriptive and imprecise with respect to how and why class and ethnic resources and structural opportunity matter. Furthermore, this approach neglects to consider the likelihood that other non-ethnic social groupings distinct from...

While Polanyi argues that all economies are embedded and enmeshed in social relations and institutions, he tends to see market economy as disembedded, which reveals a tension in his thought. The main motivation for this paper is to understand the origins of this tension. On the basis of a systematic formulation of Polanyi's work, it is argued that Polanyi employs embeddedness in a dual manner: (a) as a methodological principle akin to methodological holism, and (b) as a theoretical...

The overarching question raised in this special issue is whether societies can, do or indeed should steer new and emergent science and technological development and its management on to trajectories construed as more or less 'desirable'. It therefore sits at the interface of two arenas. These are governance: processes of shaping/steering emergent technologies and markets; and sustainability: normative agendas incorporating a range of potentially competing conjectures and internally...

Based on the unpublished Kapp-Polanyi correspondence, the paper analyzes the relationship between the two economists, as well as the meaning and origin of substantive economics, i.e. one of the key concepts of institutional economics with distinctly European roots. The correspondence shows how both economists influenced each other in their similar understanding of the substantive economy, and reveals that these similarities and the mutual influence date back to the 'planning debate' of the...

The purpose of this work is to analyze the Karl Polanyi’s conceptions about the pre-capitalist-markets, especially his revision of the categories of trade, money and market. In first place, we present a critical examination of the fundamental ideas of The Great Transformation, where his later reflections about pre-industrial societies are ground. Using some basic categories of the critique of political economy, we treat to show certain methodological and conceptual limits of his proposal....

Inspired by Karl Polanyi’s writings on three allocation modes, namely reciprocity, exchange and redistribution, we first tested a reciprocity ring with ten players. The baseline treatment, with no possibility of socialisation, displayed very low levels of allocative efficiency. Consistently with the Polanyian approach to reciprocity, we found that inducing the notion of symmetry among the players increased efficiency levels significantly. We then simulated a market exchange, with significant...

The aim of this contribution is to analyze the dynamic of social innovation of home-care services. Based on the works of Polanyi which analyse socio-economic dynamics and on feminist theories in the field of care, we develop an original grid of analysis developing criteria to grasp the processes of social innovation and to highlight the peculiarities of gender relationships at stake in these services. We also suggest normative criteria to evaluate the quality of social innovation. We apply...

Two of the most salient aspects of the recent shift towards financialisation and neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s have been the restructuring of global production towards China, and the growing threat to workers’ livelihoods posed by increased capital mobility. Both of these trends can be seen as capital’s response to the crisis of profitability that has arisen from the unsustainable global social accord between workers and capital that was inherent in post-War US hegemony....

For intellectual generations born at the end of the 19th century in Europe, the discourses on rights were to a large measure determined by proponents and detractors of various versions of Marxism. Hence the debates on justice and rights predominantly operated with the conceptual and analytical instruments of European political economy. These debates also were premised on assumptions about the status of the political economy of Europe and North America in the distribution of global space. But...

Karl Polanyi's views on the nature of "pre-market" society are influential not only among historians but also among economists concerned with present-day transitional and developing economies. This paper examines Polanyi's arguments about the "Great Transformation" from traditional to market society in the light of recent advances in economic theory and empirical evidence from a range of European and non-European societies. These theoretical and empirical considerations provide little...

Within the field of critical political economy exists a literature urging a re-conceptualization of democracy (Munck 2002, Cox 1997, Webster and Adler 1998). Liberal, particularly neo-liberal, political systems are critiqued for their binary separation of economics and politics leading to substantive disenfranchisement and elitest governance. Robert Cox (1997) has called this ‘limited democracy’ and argues that consumer choice and infrequent elections cannot be equated with democratic...

The article offers a critical reappraisal of Karl Polanyi's claim that the restructuring of the economy based on the ideals of the self-regulating market inevitably leads society to reassert itself against the commodification of land, labour and money. Dubbed as the "double movement," the author focuses his reappraisal on the two aspects of the movement. The first refers to the push for free market reforms by various groups in society, and the second refers to the counter-movements that he...