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This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for ‘going on’ in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in...

'The Globalization of Addiction' presents a radical rethink about the nature of addiction. Scientific medicine has failed when it comes to addiction. There are no reliable methods to cure it, prevent it, or take the pain out of it. There is no durable consensus on what addiction is, what causes it, or what should be done about it. Meanwhile, it continues to increase around the world. This book argues that the cause of this failure to control addiction is that the conventional wisdom of the...

In this lecture given at the 2009 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal, Gregory Baum reports how moving to Quebec has affected his practical theology. He mentions three issues of great importance to this French-speaking society that demanded new ethical reflection on his part: the character of an ethically acceptable nationalism, the appropriate response to the cultural weight of English in North America, and an acceptable alternative to Canadian multiculturalism. Thanks...

The dominant narrative around the unfolding capitalist crisis is firmly focused on the dominant economies, and in particular the US. This is understandable given that the proximate causes of the crisis lie in the imperial heartlands and crisis resolution measures taken there will have a global impact. But a 'view from the South' is needed to redress the balance and prevent the decimation of global majority likelihoods being presented as mere collateral damage. The first section below tackles...

Despite the core role played by market in economic theoretical frameworks, the market is still little addressed and finally remains a vague type at best equivoque. This thesis aims to contribute to a collective pattern devoted to the diversification of market analysis since the 70s. This collective pattern is the New Economic Sociology, founded and built on a central idea, i.e. the embeddedness. In the perspective of Karl Polanyi and Mark Granovetter’s works, the thesis intends thus to...

Drawing on Karl Polanyi's distinction between formal and substantive theory, this article argues that 'an Australian international political economy' could (and should) be erected on the historical study of Australia's substantive articulations with the global economy.

RésuméDans les années 1930, Hannah Arendt et Karl Polanyi ont partagé l’expérience du déracinement, de la désolation et celle de l’effondrement de la civilisation du xixe siècle. À partir de l’analyse de la société de marché pour K. Polanyi et de la condition de l’homme moderne pour H. Arendt, ils montrent comment l’économisme et la construction d’une société économique au xixe siècle, sont à l’origine de l’avènement de la société de masse qui porte des tendances totalitaires. Leur regard...

Part of what makes the current conjuncture so extraordinary is the coincidence of the massive economic meltdown with the implosion of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, and the reappearance of US liberal internationalism in the guise of “smart power” defined in terms of Diplomacy, Development, and Defence. This essay engages these challenges through a framework that distinguishes between “Development” as a post-war international project that emerged in the context of...

This paper addresses a puzzle: how to account for changes in the routine behavior of groups, organizations and individuals in Britain? Following a detailed analysis of state-market interdependence and the role of the state in creating the market, an analysis drawn from the thinking of Weber and Polanyi, we suggest adapting Weber's notion of bureaucratic revolution: in what we call the British bureaucratic revolution, the state has played an essential role in social change by creating...

Antipode was launched into the firmament of the 1970s. We might reflect upon how well the journal and its contributors fully appreciated the historical gravity and weight of what was surrounding the project to create “a radical journal of geography”. What sort of radicalism was on offer? The language was “social relevance” from “a radical (Left) political viewpoint”. In writing to celebrate Antipode's birthday, this time in another, and similar, firmament there is still the need to confront...

The agri-environmental governance of value chains can favour a Polanyian double movement seeking social protection and control over price setting markets or it can advance a neoliberal logic that strives to overcome the few remaining civic and ecologic obstacles to full market dominance. Coupled with a typology that contrasts corporate social responsibility and social economy Fair Trade models, this theoretical framework elucidates positions in the current policy debates about the minimum...

Abstract:  This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world-scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de-legitimated. My answer is that a “post-neoliberal” future is...

English translation: Karl POLANYI has an indirect understanding of the societies that were part of the Third World in the fifties. From anthropologists he came out with the principle of reciprocity. He then opposed this principle of economic integration to both redistribution and market principles. Reciprocity can neither be viewed as a practice of primitive societies (as in evolutionist approaches) nor as a gift and counter-gift exchange. Reciprocity needs to be understood as a social whole...

Per Google Books: This is a scholarly and erudite work. . . There is a wealth of detail, all illustrated with plenty of fascinating examples. . . It is impossible to give the full flavour of this thoughtful and stimulating book in even a long review, but it deserves to be

The development economist Dani Rodrik recently declared that “the globalization consensus is dead”. The claim has momentus implications, because this consensus has steered economic policy around the world for the past quarter century. It emanates from the heartland of neoclassical economics, and defines the central tasks of the Washington-based organizations which claim to speak for the world. This essay answers two main questions. First, is Rodrik's claim true, and by what measures of...

The main purpose of this paper is to understand Polanyi's research project after The Great Transformation. This includes his developing ideas on economic history and theory of economic institutions after 1947, when he came to Columbia University in New York. This paper deals mainly with Polanyi's new agenda, namely "the place of the economy in society" in the intellectual context of post World War II United States of America.

Recent academic discourse and European social policies highlight the (potential) effectiveness of social economy practices as a means to address social exclusion especially for the more disadvantaged social groups. Apart from terminological debates on the aforementioned troubled concepts, fundamental questions needs to be examined: To what extent social economy practices flourish as a result of policy shifts towards further commercialization of public social services or to what extent...

The crisis of the institutions of liberal capitalism dates back to the last decades of the nineteenth century. Economics was thenceforth forced to radically reconsider its achievements and even its basic presuppositions, to the extent that they were linked to a free-market and perfect-competition model.

Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi's ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the...