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Depression-era bank suspensions and failures are conceptualized as products of the first part of what Polanyi (1994) called “The Great Transformation,” which involved an imbalanced institutional arrangement in which the economy dominated other institutions. Relying on Durkheim (1897/1951) and Merton (1938, 1968), it is argued that these banking problems accentuated the type of chronic anomie that Durkheim theorized would create normative deregulation and elevated suicide rates over the...

There now exists a significant body of theoretically informed empirical research into ‘neoliberal environments’. It comprises numerous studies which together explore the connections between neoliberal principles and policies, on the one side, and the biophysical world on the other. However, making sense of them is by no means straightforward, despite their common focus on neoliberal environments. It is currently left to readers of these studies to synthesise them into a wider, joined-up...

The purpose of this paper is to bring class compromise back into the study of South Korean political economy and present it as a possible alternative to the overwhelmingly one-sided neoliberal trajectory in South Korea. The process and conditions under which positive class compromise is acquired are identified in terms of the Polanyi-Gramsci nexus. This perspective suggests that the restoration of state-led developmentalism would be unfeasible under a democratic regime, while the...

This paper reformulates and extends Polanyi's main insights in The Great Transformations (2001 [1944]) and attempts to theorize the societal countermovement against neoliberalism by illustrating the cases of Korea and Japan. Polanyi's main approach was to synthesize three critical domains: the state, market, and society, and his notion of double movement should be understood as such. Predicated on his double movement, I analytically decompose the mechanism of societal countermovement,...

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi problematised the commodity status of labour. He described it as ‘fictitious' and asserted the human aspect of labour necessitates ‘protection’. In bringing Polanyi's mature works to bear on these claims, this article uses the ‘fictitious commodity’ concept to highlight the tension in neoclassical theory between concrete reality and its idealist construction of the economy. This contradiction directly challenges the veracity of the self-regulating...

No contexto da Nova Sociologia Económica, Karl Polanyi é quase consensualmente considerado o “pai” do conceito de incrustação (embeddedness). Todavia, este conceito foi alvo de uma apropriação selectiva por parte da disciplina, sendo negligenciada a sua relação com o restante edifício teórico construído por Polanyi. Pode, com efeito, falar‑se de uma “grande transformação” sofrida pelo conceito de incrustação: se em Polanyi ele está associado a um nível macro(económico) e é utilizado para...

This article contends that decommodification is an appropriate concept for understanding diverse initiatives such as fair trade, microfinance, open source, social enterprises, and the environmental commons as component features of a common process. Decommodification is conceived as any political, social, or cultural process that reduces the scope and influence of the market in everyday life. Given recent transformations in market societies, a more expansive framework for decommodification...

How does the causality between society and the economy run? After examining this fundamental question from the perspective of Polanyian economics, we conclude that the modern national economy is where bargained exchange is institutionalized by society to pre-exist with the aid of discipline over currency issues. However, this discipline is not provided with a proper institutional defense; and potential fragility of the modern national economy owing to this fact was most vividly revealed by...

This paper draws upon the five other papers presented in this volume, along with other presentations made at the 2009 Development Studies Association Conference, to reflect on the relationship between development studies and the 2008–2009 global financial crisis. It first analyses antecedents to the crisis by relating the papers presented by Gore (on long waves of capitalism) and Fischer (on China's integration into the world economy) to a Polanyian analysis. It then considers immediate...

This paper uses Polanyi's 1944 analysis of policy change—in which there are long-term swings from state regulation to markets and back again, as the consequences of one regime lead to political reactions that in turn reverse the policies. It shows how the Polanyi analysis continued to apply throughout the twentieth and early-twenty-first century, well beyond when he wrote, and that the swings also apply to developing country policy-making. It argues that there are new signs of policy...

I present five theses on the common within the context of the transformations of capitalist social relations as well as their contemporary global crisis. My framework involves “cognitive capitalism,” new processes of class composition, and the production of living knowledge and subjectivity. The commons is often discussed today in reference to the privatization and commodification of “common goods.” This suggests a naturalistic and conservative image of the common, unhooked from the...

There has been a qualitative shift in the character of international labour migration with increased temporary labour migration. With circumscribed employment rights, the increased significance of temporary migrant workers underscores arguments that globalisation has engendered a more profound commodification of labour. The instrumentalist approach, especially of international financial institutions in promoting temporary labour migration as a panacea for development, reinforces this...

Enormous new markets in uncertainty and in carbon have been created recently, ostensibly to enhance the cost-effectiveness of both finance and climate action. In both cases, however, creating the abstract commodity framework necessary to make sense of the notion of 'cost-effectiveness' has entailed losing touch with what was supposedly being costed, helping to engender systemic crisis. The new financial markets expanded credit and multiplied leverage by isolating, quantifying, slicing,...

The argument focuses on the corporate state as an increasingly significant political assemblage that has enabled new configurations of power with related social effects. Here the discussion proceeds from Karl Polanyi's thesis in The Great Transformation. A critical idea that Polanyi pursued related to the state production of economism and individualism, which prepared the ground for the expansion of capital in its globalizing form. The essay develops this idea, indicating that the...

‘Constitutionalisation’ is the key concept in the search for legitimate governance in the European Union and in the international system. This paper suggests the revitalising of a discipline which is widely neglected in European law and international law scholarship. It does not, however, recommend a return to the conflict of laws (private international law) in the traditional sense. The new type of conflicts law that the paper advocates is not concerned with selecting the proper legal...

How can a partial, revisable utopia of 'decent society' be used as a yardstick for assessing today's impersonal forms of social integration? In economic life - this essay's focus - Polanyi's hopes that the 'economic system' might cease 'to lay down the law to society' is a start. Recently, financial firms sold commodified promises and obligations on the allure of democratizing credit and providing financial 'choice' to millions. Yet these 'civilities' exploited people's hopes for a dignified...