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This paper accounts for the initial divergence and subsequent convergence of two types of urban political economy-neoliberal and socialist-in late twentieth and early twenty first century Latin America. Part 1 identifies the ideological differences between the two types of city as well as their implications for public policy. While neoliberal cities prioritize accumulation, and therefore use tax breaks, regulatory rollbacks, and the repression of organized labor to attract and retain...

Purpose - Following Polanyi, this paper aims to suggest that the Industrial Revolution marked a break-point between pre-industrial society (characterised by integration) and industrial society (characterised by differentiation). Design/methodology/approach - As a conceptual paper, the focus is on drawing out the implications of Luhmann's application of the theory of autopoiesis to industrial society. This discussion leads to critical reflection on the state we are in and the active role we...

'Vulnerability' is now a key term in globalisation studies. It is used to describe how globalisation impacts on individual security, local communities and even global flows of trade, finance and investment. Yet there has been little attempt to interrogate the term and what it is trying to express about globalisation.Peadar Kirby examines what is really meant by 'vulnerability' and links it to new forms of violence that have resulted from decreased security and social cohesion. He argues that...

This article previews this edition of "Public Culture" and focuses on Karl Polanyi's theories on capitalism. Polanyi believed in trade liberalization and felt that market regulation is the principal obstacle to collective prosperity. He thought that unregulated markets could bring an end to poverty, and would resolve the chronic dislocation, inequality, and vulnerability that have marked capitalism from its inception. Polanyi demonstrated that market liberalization was only achieved through...

Recently Claus Offe has put the question that concerns the fate of the European model of social capitalism: can the model of social capitalism survive the European integration in the context of certain contemporary tendencies? Offe has presupposed that the mentioned model is challenged by the processes of globalisation and the integration of the post socialist countries into the European Union. The working hypothesis of the article is that there is an opportunity to provide a coherent answer...

The effects of commercialised health care in embedding, exacerbating and legitimating social and economic inequality are at the root of widespread and recurrent resistance to commercialisation in health. In low income developing countries suffering generalised poverty, and notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, liberalisation of largely unregulated clinical provision has created a substantially informalised, fee-for-service primary health sector which is exclusionary, low quality and under stress....

My intention in this paper is to rethink the central contentions of "Globalization Theory" with respect to the relationship of the "state" to the "economy." I will do so via a consideration of recent discussions of the formation of the modern states system within the discipline of International Relations, and Karl Polanyi?s suggestive notion of the "double movement" presently enjoying a revival in sociological studies of the conjuncture of the 1990s. The paper concludes with reflections on...

In the twenty-first century, the Polanyian trinity of fictitiouscommodities (land, labor and money) cannot be realised through thetwentieth-century double movement. The regulation of money is no longervested in the state per se, but in instrumentalities such as the IMF, whosetask has become a generalized imperative to reproduce (corporate) moneythrough expending labor and land across the world with decreasing regardfor their sustainability. The construction of a 'world agriculture,'deepening...

Development in the global order is represented in economically reductionist, and in impoverished, terms. The latter refers to the global reproduction of material inequality through the progressive appropriation of alternative visions of development. We argue that the legitimacy of the global order, while represented in terms of 'economic progress,' depends on the progressive naturalization of its epistemological foundations. Here, solutions to the crisis of development become methods of...

The term world-economy in our title must have already given a hint to the careful reader of our purpose in writing this paper: We intend to bridge institutional economics with world-systems analysis in order to enhance the global applicability of the former. World-economy is a term used by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein and means a space defined by the existence of a single division of labor (coexistent with multiple States) whereas world economy would indicate the arithmetic...

Karl Polanyi’s belief that the greatest threat to freedom was a poorly administered economy led him to an economics that was more existential and human-centered. Part I of this book develops Polanyi’s thinking for its significance today through a selection of papers on re-reading his major work entitled The Great Transformation. Part II looks at the life and work of Ilona Duczynska (Polanyi’s wife), political activist, writer and translator and important influence over Karl and his work....

The creation of a national economic space is the necessary structural condition for the unfolding of the "self-protective" measures of society that Polanyi analyzed for the post-WWI period, and that he saw as more generally arising in response to free market policies. A national economic space is itself the product of specific institutional arrangements, in particular the state agencies that allow the state to centralize the monetary system in its own hands: in the modern period, these have...

KM translate: The volume aims to provide a contribution to the knowledge of the ways of birth and consolidation of the sociological discourse on the economy, at work and their transformations connected to the process of industrialization. The goal, mainly educational, is pursued through the analysis of the contributions that Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo have offered in this regard. The treatment of these authors, whose...

The mention of the great city of Vienna conjures up the many legacies of music, art and philosophy which it nurtured. But as important as any of these is the more prosaic legacy of the Austrian economists ranging from C. Menger to F. von Hayek. And for some, Vienna may conjure up as well, the debate that K. Polanyi had with these economists in the 1920s. However paradoxical it may seem, it was by virtue of this debate, carried on directly and indirectly over a lifetime, that Polanyi was...

In this paper I partly retell Polanyi's narrative of the industrial revolution found in his Great Transformation. I discuss how new labor laws consolidated in the 19th century created a legal structure of coerced contractual labor, that did not fit the ideals of free market economics. My retelling focuses on how capitalists in some industries relied on legal coercion of their workers as a means of discipline and labor process control. Through this retelling I demonstrate that Polanyi was...

The norm has been rapidly moving from the managed markets under the welfare state back to self-regulating market with the rise of contemporary version of globalization. Today?s globalization is characterized by neoliberal economic policies such as privatization, deregulation, and limited government intervention--despite the growth of government--in open economies. In such an environment, social insurance, one of the defining characteristics of the welfare state, has become a great fiscal...

Karl Polanyi's most famous book, The Great Transformation, contains several ideas and theoretical notions which are at the heart of long-lasting controversies throughout the social sciences. Categories such as "double movement," "embeddedness," "disembedding," "market society," or "social freedom" have proved to be fruitful notions not only in anthropology, but also in sociology, political sciences, and economic history. The recent three volume publication of Karl Polanyi's writings during...

This article argues that Israel's 2003 elections are best understood as a deeper embedding of neoliberalism in the Israeli polity. It is argued that the most accurate characterization of the elections is as an articulation of Polanyi's Phase I of the double-movement. The argument is developed in four stages. First, the Israeli elections are understood as a local reaction to the multilayered processes of globalization. The Israeli state and its elections are located in the neoliberal ideology...

In this paper I explore the remaking of globalized standards through harmonization, and its impact upon certified-organic and fair-trade agrofood networks. I focus on certification standards and discuss four shifts associated with globalized standards (an increased importance of multilateral institutions, changes to standards language, displacement of network-specific standards, and a shift away from relational standards). It is then argued, with reference to value-chain rent theory, that...

This article offers an alternative institutional economic approach to the informal sector by interpreting the works of economists Karl Polanyi and Alexander Vasil'evich Chayanov. Far from withering away, the informal sector continues to occupy an important place within economies in general and within the so-called developing economies in particular. Relatively speaking, the informal sector is inferior and more spontaneous, if not actually incomplete. Within the informal sector there are...