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The ‘varieties of capitalism’ framework represents an influential methodological innovation in the field of comparative political economy. It seeks to account for enduring spatial variations in national economic performance by recourse to macroinstitutional analysis, drawing ideal-type distinctions between liberal market economies, modeled on USA, and coordinated market economies, modeled on Germany. Moving beyond critiques of varieties literature—for instance, its methodological...

Building on a biopolitical understanding of the economic crisis, this essay contends that the occurrence of the crisis warns that life is not a real commodity but - to put it in Karl Polanyi's terms - a 'fictitious commodity'. This means that life cannot be integrally subsumed within the economy, and therefore the crisis is to be seen as a pathological way in which societies react to the pervasiveness of capitalist relations, showing the illusory character of self-regulating markets and...

This article frames recent problems of the RIO+20 summit, the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15) and the problems of the carbon markets within a broader legitimacy crisis of global governance, consequence of the crisis of the global capitalist socio-ecology. Two mechanisms give rise to the loss of legitimacy: unequal development and mercantilization, or the reconfiguration of the power balance and the destruction of social ties. As a consequence, both winners and...

Using the findings of an intensive case study of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) project in China, this paper argues against the view that CSR and the state's regulations are mutually exclusive. It contests that the theorization of the transnational social movement (TSM) should not ignore the development of the state regime, which in turn is shaped by the power relations in the workplace and the community, and is embedded in the national political history. The findings of this...

In this article, I suggest what an engagement between post-structuralism and the work of Karl Polanyi might look like. I do this by presenting a reading of Polanyi's concept of ‘double movement’ as a form of problematisation through binary opposition. I suggest that the central opposition that the double movement depicts – between economy and society as reflected in processes of marketisation and social protection – presents itself in such a way that the problems emanating from the...

Ideas (of Karl Polanyi and others) that economies and markets are ‘socially embedded’ are central to recent research in economic sociology, closely paralleling socio-legal claims for studying law in ‘social context’. But the concept of embeddedness is imprecise and inadequate: a sociology of law and economy cannot rely on it but must address intellectual and moral-political concerns that its use reflects. Max Weber's writings on law and economy have inspired advocates of a new economic...

This article explores the relationship between law, society, and economy in the context of the contemporary British welfare state. Drawing on themes in Polanyi's The Great Transformation, it identifies the constitutive role of contemporary social policy and law in the creation and maintenance of markets and opportunities for the private sector in the field of welfare, focusing on the institutional mechanisms being put in place to encourage this. What emerges is a reformulation of the...

Bottled water sits at the intersection of debates regarding the social and environmental effects of the commodification of nature and the ways neoliberal globalization alters the provision of public services. Utilizing Polanyi's concept of fictitious commodities and Harvey's work on accumulation by dispossession, this article traces bottled water's transformation from elite niche item to a product consumed by three fourths of U. S. households. Drawing on ethnographic research with...

This article challenges some fundamental propositions of property rights theory by revealing the inability of new institutional economics to fully grasp the notion of property, as reflected in its narrow and problematic definition of property rights. The concept of property relations is proposed as better suited to capture the social and institutional aspects of property. By reconsidering the case of the Montagnais, originally used by Alchian and Demsetz for illustrative purposes, and...

To what extent does the social treatment of workplace injury in Switzerland enable victims to be decommodified in the sense given by Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) to this concept, i.e. enable them to leave the labor market in a way that allows them to uphold a socially acceptable standard of living? After a sociological discussion about the concept of decommodification, we present the results of a qualitative study conducted in Switzerland about workplace accident victims and show that the...

One of the major critical claims of this series is that the social and socio-spatial sciences, in their currently dominant form, cannot, for lack of a de-familiarising agenda, one that leads to an appropriate and continually tested strategy (praxis), effectively counter the normalized and naturalized forms and processes of late capitalist urbanization, normalized by mainstream theory in the service of established power, and their extrapolation into a ‘planetary future’. Critical urban theory...

This article argues that ideational and institutionalist approaches to the study of policy continuity and change should be complemented by research into political ideologies, and with exploration of an 'intermediate' public sphere in which there is extensive intra-ideological dispute. Exploring contemporary left-wing debate about political economy in Britain it is shown that ideational change takes place in the context of disputes rooted in ideological tradition, involving the rearrangement...

The present article is a critical reading of the most important modern interpretations on Aristotle's economic writings. Firstly, the debate between the “primitivists" and the “modernists" (headed by Rodbertus, Bücher and Meyer) will be studied. Then, the readings of Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley, will be analyzed, considering these authors as the most renowned commentators of the Aristotelian economical legacy. (English)

In 1992 the construction of the Urra I hydroelectric begins, one of the most ambitious energy projects in the recent history of Colombia. Located in the inhospitable jungle region of High Sinú -northwest of the Andean territory- the environmental license granted by government entities ignored the ecological and environmental impacts the work would entail, and also failed to recognize the presence of the emberákatio indigenous people, whose constitutional rights were violated. Following the...

This article explores the relationship of globalization to domestic law in the context of privatized welfare services in Indiana. It examines the ways that privatization can affect vulnerable populations such as welfare recipients by, in effect, partially dis-embedding the market from the state. It applies Karl Polanyi's conception of a double movement to illustrate how the political process can, in effect, re-embed the market in the state. Utilizing Indiana's recent experiences with welfare...

As the environmental debate has intensified, post-Keynesians, Regulationists and Polanyians remain relatively silent. All treat time as historical, consider economic issues subordinate to politics and have plenty to say about growth, institutions, uncertainty, and path-dependent events. These concepts seem pertinent to understanding the economic-environment problematic. This article explores the 'environmental potential' of these three heterodox economic traditions. We examine the conception...

Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the coutermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Specifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined "moments": the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the...

Using the work of Karl Polanyi as its axis, this study attempts to sketch a criticism of economicism and of the society that produces it, a society launched on a historical cultural path that may well be understood as a gradual economic totalization of human life. That is the critical path which will be posed here, if only in an embryonic manner.