Karl Polanyi’s Forms of Integration as Ways of Mapping

Abstract

Karl Polanyi's of integration-redistribution, reciprocity, and exchange-have been much used to describe and explain various economies. Confusions have arisen because institutional and emotional or attitudinal content has been attributed wrongly, we will argue, to the forms: e.g., generosity to reciprocity, authoritarian power to redistribution, and selfishness to markets.1 An additional confusion arises when a form is treated as an inherent part of a system as viewed by participants in the system, rather than as a way to convey aspects of the system to outsiders. In this paper we propose that the forms of integration be viewed as ways to map the flow of material means through a society.2 Such mapping presents information about the sources and destinations of the flows of material means in each society in ways that are easily correlated with the variables that most thoroughly and simply account for the flows of material means in different societies. Our purpose is to describe the mapping, to argue its advantages, and-importantly--to explain what is not involved in such mapping. With this last, negative task we seek to clarify some issues that have bedeviled scholarship based on Polanyi's work.