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The ecological crisis has intensified in many respects. Prominent proposals to deal with the crisis are discussed under the header 'sustainability transformations' or even 'Great Transformation'. We argue that most contributions suffer from a narrow analytical approach to transformation ignoring the largely unsustainable dynamics of global capitalism and the power relations involved in it. Thus, a 'new critical orthodoxy' of knowledge about transformation is emerging which runs the danger to...

Karl Polanyi is arguably one of the most significant economic sociologists. At first glance the links between Polanyi’s ideas about markets, society and institutions and strategy may not be obvious. However, there is a hereto unrecognised link between recent writing about institutions and strategy and Polanyi’s work. In this paper we, therefore, chart how, when recognised, these links reveal that Karl Polanyi’s work might provide new ways of thinking about strategy. Our over-riding claim is...

This paper consists of a systematic review of the literature on territorial economic development from the perspective of Karl Polanyi's works. For this, a protocol was created to order the selection of scientific articles, after this step, an analysis of the main works that used Karl Polanyi ideas, on the perspective from territorial development, in a central way in their approaches was performed. The main databases used were SCOPUS, WEB OF SCIENCE and SCIELO, from 1990 to 2018. About 100...

Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally...

Twenty-first-century Brazil’s political evolution is a window on the dynamics of contemporary political transitions. The inability of Brazil’s Workers’ Party to sustain its social democratic project and the subsequent rise of the reactionary regime of Jair Bolsonaro are, in turn, part of a global pattern of political change. Karl Polanyi’s vision of the ‘double movement,’ in which the dominance of the market vies with the countervailing movement for social protection, offers an analytical...

Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisation both within and between city regions across advanced capitalist economies. At the same time, austerity urbanism, particularly in the UK, presents challenges for urban authorities facing reduced budgets to meet increased demands on public services. Municipalities are beginning to experiment with creative responses to these crises, such as taking more interventionist and entrepreneurial roles in...

The welfare system was meant to reduce the 9 vulnerability of citizens to the market, thereby containing the consequences of the market economy and labor commodification. [...] As an adaptation to the consequences of the market, the welfare system is an effort to cushion the effects of the market, not a change its underlying logic of commodification. [...] From this perspective, the political debates about the rules to be applied to the operations of the platform economy are part of the...

The article explores recent contributions that rely on the combination of ideas from Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi to conceptualize social struggles. Two approaches are presented: selective perspectives, which highlighted the differences between class struggles as defined by the Marxist tradition and social reactions theorized by Karl Polanyi’s double movement, and inclusive viewpoints, that emphasized the potential convergence between these different expressions of contestation. Thus, we seek...

The conventional way of producing and distributing food is based on the use of agrochemicals, fertilizers, industrial fertilizers and other techniques from the Green Revolution, with increasing dependence on financial-industrial capital, which implies the intensification of the agriculture commodification. The object of this study was the emergence of modes of organization resisting this trend. Based on the theoretical reference of Karl Polanyi (2012a, 2012b), a case study was developed in a...

본 논문은 최근 대중적 관심을 불러일으키는 사회적경제를 주목하여 그 이론적 기원을 탐색하기 위한 목적을 가지고 있다. 이 작업은 다수의 연구자들과 활동가들에게 사회적경제에 대한 이해의 지평을 넓히고 보다 풍부하게 사회적경제에 대한 접근의 근거를 제공할 것이다. 다양한 분야에서 어려움에 직면하고 있는 우리 사회의 현실을 감안할 때, 새로운 대안경제로 사회적경제의 타당성 차원에서도 필요한 작업이다. 실제로, 기존 경제학은 합리적인 인간을 전제로 자기조정적인 시장메커니즘에 의한 이윤 극대화논리를 발전시켜 왔다. 가격을 매개로 시장의 무오류적 완결성을 고착해 온 것이다. 그러나 시장이 적절하게 기능하지 못하고 정부의 개입에 의해 해결되지 못한 다양한 사회문제들에 직면하면서 인간의 발전과 자연의 성숙을 도모하는 새로운 사회적경제의 가능성이 중시되고 있는 실정이다. 이러한 관점에서 본 연구는 주류경제학의 오류와 현대 경제에 대한 폴라니의 비판을 근저에 두고 그가 주목했던 두 명의 혁신적...

Una pregunta clave que surge de la pandemia de coronavirus es qué se requiere para hacer de esta fase temporal un camino hacia el cambio transformador. O, como sucedió en gran medida después de la crisis financiera de 2008, ¿volverá la sociedad a una economía dominada por el crecimiento y cargada de carbono basada en una ética del individualismo radical y el consumismo desenfrenado, informada por recetas neoliberales? Este artículo se basa en el trabajo de Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) para...

Les analyses de Felix Schafer, alors le plus proche collaborateur de Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), permettent de comprendre un débat entamé en 1922 à Vienne entre Polanyi et Ludwig von Mises (qui était alors le représentant le plus célèbre de l’école autrichienne). Les enjeux de leur opposition devaient structurer la pensée polanyienne en son entier. Dans les décennies suivantes, notamment les années 1940-1950 aux États-Unis, c’est en esquissant une approche de type sociologique que Polanyi...

As factors of production, labor, money, and land play a role in economics that is rarely understood. The difficulty of deriving the contribution of the individual factor of production to the value of jointly produced final commodities (the famous “problem of imputation”) occupied generations of Austrian economists (Hayek 1984) and inspired Ludwig Mises to produce his 1920 article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (Mises 1935). Any attempt at rational socialist planning is...

The importance of the work of Karl Polanyi to social enterprise scholarship is often maintained. However, explanations as to how and why his ideas are so relevant to the field are still relatively scarce. In this essay, we argue that engaging with Polanyi’s work directly, and Polanyian scholarship more widely, can provide a deep understanding of the underlying assumptions within current social enterprise conceptualizations, and provide insights into how the relative positioning of market and...

In North America, uranium workers are fighting for their right to participate in a free-market system that provides them with small personal benefits. These workers experience powerlessness, instability, and unpredictability – or social dislocation – by living amidst capitalism’s polluted ecosystems, unstable economies, and disintegrating communities. However, they feel reliant on uranium for their livelihoods and strongly support the industry’s renewal and form sites of acceptance to...

ABSTRACT A reading of Karl Polanyi’s work gives us a broader and more plural view of the development process beyond the exclusively economic dimension. This scientific text aims to recover the theoretical contribution of Karl Polanyi and its contribution to the understanding of the development process from a plural and substantive conception of economy. The key lesson learned in this research is that regardless of a country’s economic system, one should pay attention to the existing...

Der Artikel untersucht kollektives Interessenhandeln in der (Klein-)Kinderbetreuung in Deutschland und Österreich. Mit der Polanyi’schen Figur der Doppelbewegung werden die Dynamiken der aktuellen Aushandlungen im Feld der Sorge und Sorgearbeit aufeinander bezogen und analytisch gefasst. Die Bewegung in Form einer (Quasi-)Vermarktlichung steht im Spannungsverhältnis zum ausgeprägten Berufsethos der ErzieherInnen, um das sie durch Proteste (Österreich) und Streiks (Deutschland) kämpfen.

In a recent article for this journal, Stuart, D., Gunderson, R., and Petersen, B. [(2017). Climate change and the Polanyian counter-movement: carbon markets or degrowth? New political economy, 1–14. doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417364] discuss solutions to climate change in terms of Karl Polanyi’s concept of the double movement. They set up their argument as a critique of my own article on the topic to make the point that carbon markets do not constitute a genuine form of such countermovement....

Drawing on a detailed analysis of Grabher and König’s study of platformization (Grabher & König, 2020), this essay develops a revision of Actor-Network Theory by proposing how a Device, Representation, Actor and Network or a DRAN Approach can be more helpful in making sense of platform economic processes. First, it locates the ways in which Grabher & König’s article approach platforms from an updated Polanyian perspective. Second, it elaborates on how the aforementioned article...

The concept of “Polanyi’s momentµ should be applied not only to point out some general analogy between today’s economic and social crisis and the one which occurred between the two World Wars and provoked the breakdown of European liberal society. In fact, Polanyi’s work allows us to hypothesize a much deeper continuity between the two crises, where both represent different stages of the same interregnum, the same process of institutional metamorphosis. It hereby helps us to decode the deep...