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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...

Recently Claus Offe has raised the question concerning the fate of the European model of social capitalism. Can the model of social capitalism survive European integration amongst current tendencies? Offe assumes that this model has been challenged by the processes of globalisation and by the integration of postsocialist countries into the European Union. The working hypotheses of this article is that a relatively coherent answer to this question may be offered. The article is divided into...

This article proposes a neo-Polanyian theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics within contemporary market societies. It uses this framework to analyze the divergence between the United States and other developed societies that has become more pronounced in the first years of the twenty-first century. The argument emphasizes the shifting political alliances of the business community in the United States and suggests that from 1994 onward, business lost power in the right-wing...

The article examines the renewed interest in heterodox political economy. Institutionalists, post Keynesians, neo-Marxists, and feminists among others, and various sub-groups provide schools of thought on heterodoxy. The guidelines of institutional-evolutionary political economy (IEPE) are offered alongside socioeconomic analysis and complexity theories. The author outlines the conflict of individual v. structure. Other topics covered include social capital, heterogeneous agents, financial...

Karl Polanyi's discussion of the commodification of land, labour, and money is useful in analysis not only of nineteenth century markets but also of twenty-first century social and economic developments. This working paper explores the process of commodification of tanzanite, a gemstone discovered in the 1960s south of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, and actively mined only since the 1980s. More rare than diamonds because the source area is limited to the Mererani hills east of Arusha, the...

I argue that in its adaptation from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the concept of embeddedness has itself undergone a great transformation. In the process, significant meanings of the concept have vanished, while others have been added. First I explore the different meanings the concept of embeddedness has achieved in the new economic sociology. Then I argue that it is not the embeddedness of economic action that should constitute the vantage point of economic sociology, but rather...

Argentina constitutes a revealing textbook case of the link between the liberal utopia of an auto-regulated market, commodity fetishism and economists' theories. How does economic liberalisation, backed by a law on currency convertibility, resolve the crisis of political representation affecting the country since the emergence of Peronism, the «voice of the voiceless», in the 1940s? The liberal utopia of markets' auto-regulation associates taking root in social life with having money, by...

This paper argues for a theoretical approach based on embeddedness which assumes that the economic actor is not an atomized and utilitarian individual, but is in fact positioned within specific historical and institutional contexts in various social networks. This approach is based on Polanyi's critically debated contribution which allows for an empirical study of the diversity of institutional structures and of the significance of configurations of insertion within different social...

This study contends that the various forms of archaic trade that anthropologists have reconstructed on the Northwest Coast of America are explanatory of plot-construction and characterization in Conrad's South-American novel. My thesis is that Nostromo is a figure defined by the practice of potlatch, and that his key presence in the plot entails the representation of a culturally dislocating transition from archaic transactions to modern commerce. The theoretical framework of this chapter...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of rising income inequality on the welfare state in East Asia. Specifically, I explore and test two causal links: 1) the effects of economic globalization on income distribution, and 2) the increase in income inequality on the prospect of socio-welfare policies. Building on Polanyi's politico-economic concept of "double movement," I hypothesize that rapid neoliberalization and financial globalization in East Asia since the early 1990s...

Feminist theory is often articulated as a series of categories of thought: liberal feminism, socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, etc. These categories have aided the recent development of feminist thought, but their prevalence sometimes limits discussion to predicable perimeters. My argument begins from the observation that feminists often have very different responses to the rise of the market economy as a separate institution largely free of control by political...

This article unfolds in three stages. First, it locates the emergence of modern conceptions of social justice in industrializing Europe, and especially in the discovery of the “social,” which provided a particular idiom for the liberal democratic politics for most of the twentieth century. Second, the article links this particular conception of the social to the political rationalities of the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. Finally, the article discusses the...

Using Karl Polanyi's analysis of the separation of politics and the economy, the book argues that the market economy is not a spontaneous process, but a...

Reconfiguring the Terrain of Cultural Governance in Mexico: The Role of the Mexican Film Community in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization Embracing the dominant neoliberal project, many Mexican elites have prioritized economic growth and market logics over broader social goals. The unleashing of market forces globally,and the adoption of neoliberal policies nationally have had a significant impact on local communities and national culture in Mexico. Focusing on Mexican cultural production,...

La pensée de Polanyi peut être vue comme une sorte de lieu géométrique entre des courants de pensée de gauche très divers, de la gauche de gauche au centre gauche. Cet article montre comment, entre 1995 et 1999, le nom de Polanyi a en effet servi de point de ralliement à des dizaines d’intellectuels (sociologues, économistes, philosophes...) connus en France et en Europe, ce qui n’a pas été sans impact politique. Une perspective toujours d’actualité ?, Polanyi’s throught can be seen as some...

Que peut-on retenir de l’œuvre de K. Polanyi en comparaison, notamment, de celles de Marx ou de Weber ? Cet article fait le point à la fois sur les contributions historiques et anthropologiques de Polanyi à l’histoire du marché et sur son aspiration à un socialisme associationniste, et il conclut que, audelà des nécessaires rectifications et actualisations, K. Polanyi reste la source d’inspiration principale pour un socialisme radical à visage humaniste., What must be kept of K. Polanyi’s...

Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great Britain created economic systems during the twentieth century that were by intent neither capitalist nor communist. Unlike fascists, these seekers were committed to democracy and pluralism. Unlike liberal capitalists,...