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Book edited by Jirí Pribán This collection of essays brings together Zygmunt Bauman and a number of internationally distinguished legal scholars who examine the influence of Bauman's recent works on social theory of law and socio-legal studies. Contributors focus on the concept of 'liquid society' and its adoption by legal scholars. The volume opens with Bauman's analysis of fears and policing in 'liquid society' and continues by examining the social and legal theoretical context and...

While political turmoil is not new to Latin America, the tension between neoliberalism and democracy can help explain present-day turmoil. The current political situation in Latin America is the result of a disconnect between the goals of democracy, in particular, between social justice goals, upon which the legitimacy of democratic government rests, and the neoliberal economic policy of the region. Polanyi's concept of the always-embedded economy states that a market economy must be...

Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today's scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschman's characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. We review recent...

Our understanding of the relationship between globalization and contemporary social welfare systems is heavily influenced by three conventional approaches to studying welfare reform: the political economy, moral economy, and mixed economy approaches.In addition to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches, a central aim of this article is to introduce the social economy approach as an emergent alternative. Drawing from a growing body of work on institutional...

When trying to understand the origins of the collapse of nineteenth-century civilization, Karl Polanyi identified a Great Transformation into a "starkly utopian" Self-Regulating Market (SRM). This shift entailed 2 elements: a wide-ranging re-regulation of organization and control of production processes, and the development of economic liberalism as a body of thought that provided justification of a new set of public policies that facilitated a transformation of land (nature), labor...

KM: outlines a generic model of political economy based on Polanyi's writings and explores some of its implications.

This paper explores the increasing significance of intellectual property rights for the appropriation of surplus value in capitalism. Building on Marx's analysis of the value form and extending it to the commodification of knowledge, it develops a Marxian critique of informational capitalism based on the basic categories of value theory; inter alia, this looks at the commodification of knowledge from the viewpoint of commodity fetishism, the enclosure of traditional knowledge, the formal...

Questions arise whenever social-scientific models are used in analysis of ancient texts, particularly regarding the feasibility of their application to social and cultural milieux different from those from which they were derived. An essay I authored that assessed the command in Luke 6 to "love your enemies" from the perspective of ancient reciprocity ethics, and that invoked Marshall Sahlins's taxonomy of reciprocity relations (general, balanced, and negative reciprocity), was queried by...

On the terms of Karl Polányi's concept of the "Commodity Fiction" a theoretical conception of poverty is developed, which defines "absolute poverty" as a process, the terminal state of which is "annihilation". Within this process of "totalitarian consumption" consumer goods do not serve human needs in the first line but turn more and more into "consuming goods" which destroy the independence of human actors step by step and finally transform them into "cyborgs", i.e. creatures, whose lives...

In this review, we explore how the concept of embeddedness has shaped-and been shaped by-the evolution of the subfield of economic sociology. Although embeddedness is often taken as a conceptual umbrella for a single, if eclectic, approach to the sociological study of the economy, we argue that in fact the concept references two distinct intellectual projects. One project, following from Granovetter's (1985) well-known programmatic statement, attempts to discern the relational bases of...

The postwar reconstruction of domestic and international orders ushered in a new political economy of capitalism. It entailed a far-reaching reorganization of social relations and economic institutions and accorded to the state an important role in the management of the economy. Many of the institutions of classical liberalism were displaced by interventionist mechanisms. The welfare state consolidated and extended multifarious forms of protection accorded to labor. A new level of...

Pour comprendre La Grande Transformation de Karl Polanyi, il faut la replacer dans le contexte des années 1930 et 1940, époque de contestation générale du vieux libéralisme « manchestérien ». L’article compare les positions de quatre auteurs contemporains : Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek et Walter Eucken. Cette comparaison montre d’abord que Polanyi n’était pas le seul à constater la fin du cycle libéral du capitalisme. Elle montre ensuite que la question portait aussi...

Through an examination of India's National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), the largest social movement alliance resisting neoliberal globalization in India, this paper attempts to theoretically reconstruct Polanyi's theory of (t the double movement" for the neoliberal age. Polanyi famously observed that early twentieth century liberal attempts to "dis-embed" the market from social controls created unprecedented social dislocations, leading to widespread protective (< countermovements...

I will endeavor here to retrace the major stages of life and career of Karl Polanyi and the genesis of his main ideas in the first part of the TWENTIETH century marked both by the occurrence of major disasters and the Effacement of the first market society that had taken shape in the nineteenth century.

"L'hypothèse de l'article est la suivante : il n'est pas possible de parler rigoureusement d'un concept de « marché » en science économique, car ce concept est en réalité une notion floue, au mieux ambivalente. En revanche, le recours à d'autres sciences sociales, comme l'histoire et la sociologie, peuvent aider à la construction d'un concept de marché. Ainsi, le travail de Karl Polanyi et les travaux d'historiens contemporains, notamment ceux d'Alain Guéry, semblent utiles pour mieux...

INTRO: This paper is a plea for greater cognizance of the errors of omission and commission committed by mainstream health economics, and the potential orientation in treating health and health care as (metaphorical) commodities that the unfettered influence of health economics may be prompting. Economic criticisms of mainstream health economics are evident, especially in the collection edited by John Davis (2001), but tend to be rather fragmented and lacking in credibility with our...

Cet article porte sur le « processus économique institué » de Karl Polanyi. Il s’appuie sur certains de ses écrits moins connus, qui précèdent et suivent la publication en anglais de la Grande Transformation, dans lesquels Polanyi insistait en particulier sur la capacité des individus et des collectivités à agir sur leur propre destinée. Ces écrits nous aident à conceptualiser les processus de transformation institutionnelle qui caractérisent la société contemporaine. Cet article s’intéresse...

This paper is an attempt at developing an analytical framework that could be helpful to understand the unstable character of the capitalist society, by drawing upon the work of four important thinkers: Marx, Weber, Schumpeter, and Polanyi. It is argued that all four share a similar vision towards capitalism, and that they are all indispensable for the thesis that the working of capitalism undermines its own institutional structure, and thus make the reproduction of the capitalist society a...

Whereas a largely conveyed standard reading of The Great Transformation lets one think that Karl Polanyi establishes the effective birth certificate of a self-regulated market at the nineteenth century in the West, this text suggests that The Great Transformation makes Polanyi the author of a criticism of the theoretical fiction of the self-regulated market, and the historian of this acting fiction which directs individual behaviors and transforms in-depth the Western societies of the...

The paper explores the relation of different political economic projects and the development of pensions as a social right in three countries: Sweden, Germany and United Kingdom. It comprises three parts. The first part provides the conceptual framework, which combines a Polanyian perspective for the social embeddedness of markets with a three dimensional power theoretical approach in order to analyse modes of governance as practices of socio-economic regulation. The second part identifies...