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When looking at definitions and understandings of the social and solidarity economy, one issue stands out as particularly significant. The issue of how it links to organizational (micro and meso level dimensions) and societal specificities. Whereas social enterprise also in the EMES ideal typical version (Borzaga & Defourny, 2001) is only indirectly linked to a Polanyian framework (Gardin, 2006), the notion of solidarity economy can hardly be understood at an elaborate level without...

Capitalist economic development has occurred unevenly, as certain economies began sustained growth relatively early, opening up an increasingly large gap with lagging countries. This well-known fact has encouraged much research on the prospects for undeveloped economies to "catch up" to the earlier developers. Japan and Russia in the late nineteenth century were two of the first countries outside of western Europe to experience substantial catch-up growth. Beginning in the 1860s, political...

This paper addresses what labor movement scholars are calling the "Polanyi-problem" - how societal movements can effectively re-embed neoliberal markets back into society - by drawing upon recent interpretations of Karl Marx writings on primitive accumulation and class formation. The author focuses on the case of Colombia's coffee farmers (cafeteros) - a class of producers whose historically-privileged modality of class reproduction was undermined by the liberalization of the coffee market...

This paper argues that the contemporary efficacy of nationalist politics is a strategic response to neoliberal conditions of state legitimation. Using the double movement as a theoretical framework, I argue that neoliberalism alters the policy alternatives available to state actors by reducing the viability of economic protectionist initiatives once dominant in the embedded liberal era. This policy capacity reduction inhibits some of the key means for state legitimation (e.g., public...

The Polanyian discussion about the embeddedness of the economy in social relations, finds a new stream through the social network analysis, from which is possible to map the cooperation relations that underlie economic ones. From the latter, this article shows the analysis of nine family-based economic entrepreneurships linked to a cooperative of services and agrofood products. Through personal networks analysis we mapped and highlighted the diversity of collaborations, monetary and...

The article reports on a conference on the economic history of the Latène period of the European Iron Age, held in Otzenhausen, Germany, from November 28-30, 2011. Topics discussed included theories of economy and society during this era, particularly that of Austrian economist Karl Polanyi, economic archaeology research, and the trade networks of traditional societies.

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...

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...

European integration is usually studied within the realms of comparative politics. The multitude of empirical studies concerning the topic have been well suited to its numerous methodologies and analytical frameworks. Comparative politics however, usually ignores the question of why European integration has both progressively deepened and widened during the last thirty years. Therefore there is a distinct absence of how developments in the global political economy determine European...

Neoclassical economists posit that the freeing of market forces will lead, ceteris paribus, to a reduction in levels of corruption. There are several mechanisms through which this hypothesized effect is channeled, the most important of which is competition pressure brought by the entry of foreign firms into the domestic market. The empirical leverage of this approach has been strongly challenged by events of recent years. In China and Russia, market liberalization has not had the expected...

Reconfiguring the Terrain of Cultural Governance in Mexico: The Role of the Mexican Film Community in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization Embracing the dominant neoliberal project, many Mexican elites have prioritized economic growth and market logics over broader social goals. The unleashing of market forces globally,and the adoption of neoliberal policies nationally have had a significant impact on local communities and national culture in Mexico. Focusing on Mexican cultural production,...

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...

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...

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...

Karl Polanyi a établi une célèbre distinction entre "all purpose money", caractéristiques des sociétés modernes, et "special purpose money", caractéristiques des sociétés anciennes. C'est la conception polanyienne des monnaies modernes qui est critiquée dans ce texte : non seulement elle conduit à considérer que les sociétés modernes ne connaissent pas de "special purpose money", mais en plus elle ne permet pas de renouveler la conception courante de la monnaie (sous-entendu moderne) qui en...

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...

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...

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...

This article describes a strategy of modeling embeddedness of economic behavior as a process, as opposed to viewing it as a time-independent relationship between behavior and a social factor in which it is subsumed. I first reconstruct Polanyi's classic processual model of embeddedness and derive from it a set of intuitive tests, which are then applied to key modern approaches in economic sociology: structural, neo-institutional, neo-weberian and Fligstein's...

The article focuses on the relevance of economist Karl Polyani's economic theories and tries to analyze if his book titled "The Great Transformation," could be considered as the foundation of current economic sociology and international political economy. The author of the article says that Polayni's theories focuses on contemporary economic sociology, market economy's self-destructive approach and consideration of the market economy as integral part of the society. His work on...