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This short piece suggests that the roots of the successful Brexit vote can be found in the free market purity that was implicit within the ideals behind Thatcherism. Whilst the rhetoric of populist and British (or in many parts English) nationalism were utilised in order to win support, the ideological driving force implicit within many Brexit figureheads rested in the belief that the EU watered down their visions of a harder neoliberal reality. Yet, by stimulating right-wing reactionary...

This article provides a critical overview of the theoretical perspective developed by Karl Polanyi, in particular his 1944 book The Great Transformation. What does this approach offer to economic theory, especially heterodox economic theory? Three elements vital to his work are in focus: (1) “embeddedness” of the market in society, (2) fictitious commodities (labor, nature and money) and (3) the “double movement”, i.e. the political imposition of the self-regulating market and the protective...

The article focuses on author Karl Polanyi and his works including "Origins of the Cataclysm," "Freedom from Economics" and "The Liberal Utopia." It mentions the role Polanyi and his works during the Great Recession and in the analysis of the social movement in the age of Porto Alegre and Seattle as they can be compared to a totem for social democracy such as Karl Marx for communism and Hayek for neoliberalism. It adds that during the Great Recession, Polanyi was considered a master theorist...

Following recent calls for a more self-aware and historically sensitive sociology this article reflects on the concept of deindustrialisation and industrial change in this spirit. Using EP Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class and his examination of industrialising culture with its stress on experience, the article asks how these insights might be of value in understanding contemporary processes of deindustrialisation and work. Drawing on a range of sociological,...

This article explores the recent rise of populist politics from the perspective of Karl Polanyi's theory of the ‘double movement’. It firstly introduces Polanyi's understanding of interwar populism, and relates this to his broader critique of liberal economic thought. This framework is then used to analyse three prominent explanations for populism which emerged in the wake of the UK's 2016 EU referendum: globalisation; cultural reaction; and social media. I show how each of these...

This paper attempts to ‘put in their place’ (Sum and Jessop 2013) some key issues that frame the question of ‘the more-than-economic dimensions of co-operation’. In particular, it asks why capitalism deconstructs socio-natural reality into the ‘common-sense’ and discrete institutional spheres of ‘economy’, ‘society’ and ‘environment’, an institutional constellation in which the ‘economy’ is usually afforded pre-eminence. Building on this, the paper further asks: why does the organization of...

Un examen de la « marchandisation » montre qu’elle s’accompagne d’un processus inverse de dé-marchandisation, en particulier du travail, des ressources naturelles, du corps et des échanges, sous l’impulsion de l’État-Providence, du droit et de la société civile. ENG: "Commodification" is accompanied by the opposite movement of de-commodification, in particular for labor, natural ressources, bodies and exchanges, under the impulse of the Welfare state, law and civil society.

This article examines how advocacy think tanks have sought to influence the remaking of the English planning system. Pressure for planning reform has come particularly though not exclusively from the political right, which has sought to portray planning as a form of bureaucratic regulation, out of touch with the needs of modern, global economies and the needs of society. This research involved 27 interviewees, the majority of whom have worked in think tanks, whilst others worked in...

This article argues that the original thrust of the moral economy concept has been understated and attempts to cast it in a new light by bringing class and capital back into the equation. First, it reviews the seminal works of Thompson and Scott, tracing the origins of the term. It deals with the common conflation of moral economy with Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness, differentiating the two concepts and scrutinizing the ways in which these perspectives have been criticized. Second, it...

Discussing the case of institutional change and its discontents in the Georgian context, this article critically engages with one of the most influential perspectives on informal economic practices, namely the new institutionalist perspective. The examination of the responses to the new-institutionalist remedies reveals counterintuitive outcomes to allegedly successful market-enhancing reforms. The reforms were resisted and they failed to deliver the promise of improved entrepreneurial...

Despite growing evidence of significant impacts from human-induced climate change, policy responses have been slow. Understanding this policy inertia has led to competing explanations, which either point to the need to build a consensual politics separated from economic partisanship, or which encourage solidarities between environmental and social movements and issues. This article analyses a recent successful mobilisation, leading to the passage of the Clean Energy Act in Australia, to...

There has been an increase in literature on a growing field recently termed, "Political Consumption" (Baumann et al., 2015). Political consumption is defined as the choice or avoidance of products or brands with the aim of changing ethically or politically objectionable institutional or market practices (Shah et al., 2007). The following paper posits a theoretical model for the conceptualization of political consumption. Specifically, the author presents Karl Polanyi and his "Double...

Reporting on the origins and directions of social movement strategy on climate and energy issues in the last decade, the shifts in ‘climate movement’ practice are discussed using a neo-Polanyian account of the political economy of climate change combined with sociological analysis of the strategic decisions campaigners reported making. Since the mid-2000s, Australia’s climate movement has been engaged in three concurrent arenas of political contestation. The longest-standing arena of...

The study proposes a network-based methodology linking Polanyi's ideal types of coordination and deductive blockmodeling to identify different forms of coordination within an economy. Using the proposed methodology, the economy of rice in postsocialist Vietnam is interpreted as a double movement responding to market liberalization. Qualitative and relational data were collected from 323 households and firms in two communes of the Mekong River Delta of Vietnam. Results show that in one case...

Tourism embodies flows of tourists, capital and information, as well as migration, including migrants who operate businesses. How do migrant entrepreneurs negotiate social ties and economic activities in their destinations? To answer this question, the paper draws on Polanyi’s work on embeddedness to explore migrant tourism entrepreneurs (MTEs) and their modes of integration in the practice of social and economic life. We argue that MTEs are situated in a complex matrix in which they must...

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social...

Ariane Fischer, David Woodruff, and Johanna Bockman have translated Karl Polanyi's 'Sozialistische Rechnungslegung' ['Socialist Accounting'] from 1922. In this article, Polanyi laid out his model of a future socialism, a world in which the economy is subordinated to society. Polanyi described the nature of this society and a kind of socialism that he would remain committed to his entire life. Accompanying the translation is the preface titled 'Socialism and the embedded economy.' In the...