Your search

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...

Globalisation can in a polanyian sense be understood as a double movement. Societal reaction to the shortcomings of the corporate driven process of globalisation from above (the first movement) creates a counter movement from below (the second movement). The relations between different actors within the political landscape and the area of tensions between the two movements are characterised by the gramscian war of position and its power struggle over the hegemonic discourse. At times the...

The article presents the conference paper titled "Bridging boundaries and Mending Fences? Finding community in transboundary conservation approaches" prepared for the "Annual Convention of the International Studies Association" held in Honolulu, Hawaii. It discusses the implementation of the Community Based Natural Resource Management in Botswana in early 1990s. It examines the contemporary applications of the idea of embeddedness which was coined by intellectual Karl Polanyi as an...

The  rise  of  the  Social  Forum  phenomenon  has  been  heartily  welcomed,  partly  so  as to unite diverse discourses of anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist resistance under a common  banner.  There  are  debates  worth  flagging,  however,  that  draw  our  attention to  political  philosophies  (typically  binary  statist  versus  anti-statist  disputes),  visions of agency (typically networked movements versus parties), and potentials for revolutionary processes to emerge within...

Recent globalization theory reflected a chain of world historical events since the end of the Cold War. Globalization theories were tools for the making of political alliances between market liberals and political, liberals. From the mid-1990s a broad range of institutionalist social science programs showed that globalization outcomes were often better explained by institutional logics (including cultural ones) than by global flows per se. This is, among others, illustrated by the debate on...

The article analyzes the global economy by subjecting it to an interpretive scheme derived from popular culture Boganism, an Australian colloquialism or street slang used by teenagers. Boganism, the social phenomenon of being both unaware and irresponsible, is the result of a particular type of human abandonment. This abandonment is linked to the new hypercapitalism of globalization. The article will establish the structural roots of boganism, examine the case of the abandonment of U.S....

A one-dimensional view of capitalism inevitably leads to the conclusion that labour is in a state of deep crisis. However, if we examine globalization as a contradictory process, then it is possible to regard its relationship with labour as a transformative one. In this context, the decline of trade union density in developed countries and the rise of new forms of trade unionism in selected countries of the South, illustrate the contradictory relationship between labour and capital. In...

This text was the original second chapter of the author's doctoral dissertation (Escobar 1987); this chapter was never included in the book that eventually grew from the dissertation (Escobar 1995). Although the chapter's contribution to debates on the economy are largely synthetic and certainly not original, the author wanted to publish it for a number of reasons. First, the alleged triumph of neo-liberal ideologies and the increase in depth and scope of market cultures at present make even...

This paper brings together data from 17 OECD countries on scientific publications, patents and production, to explore the relationship between scientific and economic specialisation for 17 manufacturing industries. Since Marx, there has been a fundamental debate in economics about the link between science and the economic system. Marx argued that the needs of production shape scientific developments and that science has become a factor of production, whereas Polanyi argued that developments...

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion in the world today. A number of explanatory theories exist, but in this paper, I hone in on the nexus between economic restructuring and Pentecostalism to explore this extraordinary expansion. Bringing together the work of feminist political economists and of Karl Polanyi, I argue that neo-liberal globalization threatens mechanisms for meeting social reproductive needs. Neo-liberalism cannot meet these needs on its own, and I suggest that...

This article illustrates the continuing salience of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) by employing two of its central concepts, fictitious commodities and the double movement to interpret the globalisation countermovement and one of its most important figures, José Bové. I explain the transformation of José Bové from rural sheep farmer to French folk hero and global activist and analyse the extent to which his rhetoric and political actions are congruent with Polanyi's key...

This article explores Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the institutional separation of politic and the economy in the context of the 19th century market economy. The contribution his analysis could make to the quest for viable alternatives to the contemporary neo-liberal international order depends on how we construe two key concepts in his work, “disembeddedness” and “countermovement”. In this regard the author suggests that: 1) In Polanyi’s work the disembedded economy appears not as a...

This paper is based on the idea that between the 1920s and the mid-1930s in Vienna there were two forms of heterodox economic theory: the Austrian economic school headed by Ludwig von Mises and another interesting form of heterodox economics opposed to the Austrian school (above all politically) and pursued by various social thinkers (Otto Neurath, Karl Polanyi, Otto Bauer, Felix Schaffer, Felix Weil, Jacob Marschak). They were engaged in the debate on the possibilities of a planned economy:...

The rise and fall of the New Middle East (NME) cannot be separated from wider global developments and must therefore be studied in relation to them, in both their ideational and material aspects. The ideological background of the NME has drawn upon the ideology of globalization and shares its underlying tenets of rationality, professionalism and virtues of market economy. In the early 1990s a discourse of globalization was set in motion, highlighting economic and technological development...

Relire K. Polanyi nous affranchit d'une double illusion. Selon la première, l'homme est essentiellement un atome utilitaire exploitant les gains supposés de l'échange, cette vieille « fable du troc » n'étant pas remise en cause par l'économie des « coûts de transaction ». La seconde illusion, construction hétérodoxe voulant s'affranchir de cette fable, attribue à la monnaie les traits d'une institution aussi transhistorique qu'universelle. Certes, de nombreux phénomènes qualifiés de « troc »...

L'article expose la problématique d'un texte peu connu de Polanyi datant de 1959. Prétextant un commentaire de L'ère de l'opulence de Galbraith, il soutient que le naturalisme de l'économie dominante nous interdit de comprendre la signification véritable de la rareté. Polanyi montre alors que les oppositions classiques entre liberté et égalité, économie et démocratie, peuvent être dépassées dans le cadre d'une société nouvelle abolissant la séparation institutionnelle de l'économique et du...