Fictitious Commodities Research Articles

Corporate social responsibility (CSR): an institutionalist Polanyian analysis

PurposeThis study aims to focus on the understanding corporate social responsibility (CSR), this “novel” form of corporate engagement, and evaluating its capacity to regulate capitalism. The authors advance the following thesis: CSR constitutes a new variety of regulation of capitalism which, to work efficiently, must be built on collective institutions (through both collective agreements and forms of coercion), instead of strictly contractual forms (based on inter-individual relations and voluntary commitments).Design/methodology/approachTo support this thesis, the authors use Karl Polanyi’s theory, in particular his concept of “fictitious commodities”. Like Polanyi, we contend that CSR is a necessary reaction to the new “great transformation” brought about by the financialisation of our economy which is currently in crisis. Polanyi agrees that this kind of regulation can yield results only when based on collective institutions. In the last section of the study, the authors attempt to determine how a “conventionalist analysis” of CSR could help us to precisely describe this phenomenon and how it could be institutionalised by actors (both inside and outside companies).FindingsThis paper theoretically demonstrates the role of institutions in CSR processes and the need to weigh them theoretically. In this sense, the paper demonstrates the aporia of a strictly contractualist framework, not only for the understanding of the phenomenon, but for its deployment.Research limitations/implicationsThis study proposes a theoretical framework, which is yet to be consolidated by empirical research.Practical implicationsThe paper proposes salient elements of a public policy of responsibility.Social implicationsThe paper proposes a methodological framework to go beyond a bilateral representation of the institutional framework and to produce a collective representation of the negotiation.Originality/valueThis is an original paper in its theoretical positioning and the implications it suggests for economic policy.

On Misunderstanding the Second Contradiction Thesis

ABSTRACTJames O’Connor’s “second contradiction” thesis is widely misunderstood as an ecological crisis theory. Most of the criticisms of the theory derive from this misreading, including those which ignore relations between ecological, personal and communal conditions and those which see the “first” and “second” contradictions as materially distinct. O’Connor himself is partially responsible for the misreading, however. His writings tended to put the ecological out front, and his use of Polanyi’s romantic idea of “fictitious commodities” reinforced that tendency. The defense developed here rejects ecologistic readings, ties the second contradiction thesis backwards and forwards in O’Connor’s work, unpacks the meaning of “conditions” for Marx and O’Connor, and suggests that Neil Smith’s argument that capitalist second natural relations generate qualitatively new processes by which nature, human nature and space are produced would have served O’Connor better.

Decommodification in action: Common property as countermovement

Our purpose is twofold: to contribute to the case for seeing the economy as a rich landscape of practices for producing and distributing livelihood extending beyond the capitalist market and to highlight an important element in the current dynamic of organizational change within that landscape. We focus on a particular set of practices that not only deserve attention as departures from the market model but also exemplify an important interplay in current economic life: the resistance mounted by some elements in economic activity to the hegemony of market capitalism. Our argument sheds light on a form of organizing that is based on a distinctive economic form – common property, and arises in a distinctive setting – the heightened marketization characteristic of neo-liberalism. The factor of commodification binds these two as the force that arouses the organizational reaction. We sketch the neo-liberal environment of current economic life and then outline Polanyi’s notion of ‘fictitious commodities’ in the market economy and the countermovement aimed at protecting and recovering them. We focus on two families of practice that effectively decommodify land and labour – community land trusts and worker cooperatives – and suggest that these represent a widespread interplay of forces in the countermovement. We conclude by outlining a fertile programme of research that flows from our argument.

Integrated commodities in the digital economy

At the heart of the digital economy is the willful imposition of a powerful combination of hardware and software, time and data, surveillance, prediction and behavourial control. This article argues that a central ambition of digital society has been the pursuit of an integrated commodity form. The novelty of this integrated commodity stems not only from the convergence of production and consumption but also from the subsumption of sociability itself. As a consequence, we are required to consider all social actions within digital society as being transactions enshrined within an economy of integrated markets. Our acceptance of these new commodity relations is paving the way for a ‘great integration’ of simultaneous transactions across different social domains. Borrowing from Karl Polanyi’s account of an earlier transformation, this article will propose that the prerequisites of digital society and the integrated commodity form have been established through the constitution of a series of ‘fictitious commodities’.

On Transformations: Past, Present and Future?

In this article, which originated from the keynote address to the conference “Karl Polanyi and the Transformation of the Contemporary World System” in Budapest in 2004, Kari Polanyi Levitt provides a vivid account of her father’s life and work. She shows how Karl Polanyi’s prediction of the fateful consequences of unleashing the destructive power of unregulated market capitalism has assumed new urgency and relevance in times of globalization and financialization, which manifest similarities with earlier penetrations of capitalism into the developing world. We have arrived at a critical moment in history. To gain perspective on possible futures we need to lengthen parameters of inquiry to embrace the history of European hegemony and the evolution of capitalism from its beginnings in mercantilist conquest. Thus, we must turn to the concepts that underlie the narrative of The Great Transformation—the fictitious commodities, the disembedded economy and the double movement—to make sense of past and present transformations and shape them in the future.

Commodity Studies with Polanyi: Disembedding and Re-Embedding Labour and Land in Contemporary Capitalism

This article aims to inform current debates in the field of transnational commodity studies through a Polanyian lens. Polanyi reminds us of the need to pay attention to the “double movements” in which fictitious commodities are disembedded from and re-embedded in society. We focus on two fictitious commodities, labour and land, which are conventionally treated as mere inputs for the production of genuine commodities. Through investigating the disembedding and re-embedding of labour in the garment industry, and of land in the agro-food sector since the 1970s, we gain insights regarding the commodification of fictitious commodities in the context of transnational commodity chains. The developments in both fields imply not just simple double movements, but complex entanglements of disembedding and re-embedding dynamics at the interface of state, business and civil society actors.

A fictitious commodification of local development through development impact bonds?

ABSTRACT This article explores the dynamics of an emerging innovation, the development impact bond (DIB), a contract established among several actors with a development objective. Because there has been limited exploration and questioning of the ideologies behind the DIB, the aim here is to address this issue. This work, based on a literature review, is a contribution to understanding DIBs in the specific context of developing countries but, more generally, the financialization of social initiatives and the implication for the governance of local scales. I show that DIBs can be thought of as “fictitious commodities” exchanged within private–private partnerships. If the local states become a key component of the new modes of local regulation, favoring the supranational and subnational scales, local authorities are not involved in DIBs. The evolution of welfare as a development, through the question of this local scale, with the growing involvement of the private sector is therefore of great importance.

Food self-provisioning as an answer to the metabolic rift: The case of ‘Dacha Resilience’ in Estonia

Agriculture is not only an essential nexus between society and nature but in its current industrial form also a possible threat to ecological stability. This article explores how a supplement to the conventional agrifood system alleviates the negative consequences of the industrial food production system that manifest through the metabolic rift (Marx, 1981). During fieldwork in Estonia ten semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted to analyze the practice of Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) in (peri-)urban dachas – a Russian term for a plot of land with a seasonal allotment house, mostly used for food production.Using McClintock's (2010) three-dimensional framework of metabolic rift that consists of ecological, social and individual dimensions, we demonstrate how FSP not only contributes to mending all these rifts but also increases resilience on various levels. As a region-specific practice of “quiet sustainability” (Smith and Jehlička, 2013) it displays an environmentally friendly alternative to the conventional agrifood system and serves as a strong example of sufficiency and moral economy. Furthermore, by its practice it not only challenges the continuous commodification process of ‘fictitious commodities’, such as land, labor and food (Polanyi, 2001; McClintock, 2010), but it defies market logic in general. Therefore, this article proposes FSP as a viable, but largely underestimated and even stigmatized, model of alternative sustainability, already widely practiced in post-socialist Europe.

Remittances and Households in the Age of Neoliberal Uncertainty

:International migration and remittance flows have been reframed as catalysts for poverty reduction and development through marketization. Growth, measurement, and promotion of global remittances have emerged against the backdrop of neoliberal structural adjustment programs and financialization. Those processes have paralleled the emergence of the transnational household as a global institution. The article suggests that transnational households characterize a new stage of neoliberal capitalist development. The article revisits Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and discusses how active governance and neoliberal discourse regulate and frame labor and remittances as “fictitious commodities.” Further, it is argued that transnational households take active roles in Polanyi’s “double movement,” by providing social protection amidst narrow public responsibility for provisioning. The article identifies this as a new element of “the great transformation,” and referring to J. K. Galbraith, as a new age of neoliberal uncertainty.

Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentinian soy boom of the 2000s, identifying forms of market extension, redistribution, reciprocity and householding that facilitated this process. We argue for a multi-scalar approach that balances attention to national and extra-local dynamics shaping the combination of these forms, identified through the lens of the “fictitious commodities” of the soy boom: money (credit, currency and cross-border capital flows), land (in the agricultural heartland and frontier regions), labor (transformed and excluded in a “farming without farmers” model) and, we add, knowledge (biotech). Our analysis identifies internal tensions as well as overt resistance and “overflow” that ultimately led to the collapse of postneoliberal regulation of the soy complex, ushering in a wider, market-radical counter-movement. Refracting double-movement-type dynamics through the prism of heterodox institutional forms, we argue, allows for a better grasp of processes that underlie institutional recalibrations of progressive and regressive kinds.

ГОСУДАРСТВО КАК ИНСТРУМЕНТ СОЛИДАРНОСТИ

In modern philosophical theories, the solidarity appears contradictory. If we consider the insurance to be it’s prime phenomenon (distribution of support for the weak on the shoulders of all), then the solidarity, on the one hand, becomes a source of economic stagnation and deficit, moreover, it becomes morally illegitimate and fraught with totalitarian implications. On the other hand, it is clearly connected with loyalty to the interests of the society, which distinguishes citoyen, whose human dignity is intended to be realized through the state, from selfish bourgeois. A state which legitimacy in the era of globalization, in its turn, is called into question, turns out to be a mysterious point of transition from illegitimate solidarity to legitimate one. The ideas of K. Polanyi on the role of the state in functioning of the competitive market help to understand how it happens. Analysis of the issue made it possible 1) to establish the essential affinity of Polanian “fictitious commodities” (which the state should protect against commodification) and the conditions for the possibility of production in general, singled out by K. Marx, 2) to explain there by the origin of “fictitious commodities” and to root the solidarity in the subject-subject relation of production, which constitutes human culture as such. This conclusion allows us to reject the insurance model as improper image of the solidarity and to substantiate it as a constant of reproduction of the social conditions of human production. In capitalist production, that constant is institutionalized in the form of a democratic national state, the dysfunctionality of which leads not only to forbidding the reproduction for the weak market players, but also, as that processmoment, to a conservative revolution with its totalitarian outcomes.

Karl Polanyi and the Anti-Antimonies of Embeddednesss

(Gemici 2008) reiterates much of the literature surrounding Polanyi's ‘embeddedness’, suggesting that there exists, within its conceptual grammar, an untenable contradiction: a contradiction between its dualistic usage as, on the one hand, a methodological principle to affirm all economic processes as ‘socially instituted and organized’ (hereafter ‘embedded embeddedness’), and, on the other hand, as a historical variable to describe the unprecedented relation between economy and society that market capitalism had brought about (hereafter ‘disembedded embeddedness’). It is argued here that there is only a semantic contradiction between these two ‘embeddednesses’, and in fact, substantively, they together constitute an incredibly powerful analytical apparatus through which to understand market capitalism. We demonstrate this first by tracing the genealogy of both variants of embeddedness to two, entirely legitimate, observations Polanyi made about the ontology of market society — that it is imperialistic vis-a-vis the surrounding organic order, by dint of its drive towards the commodification of the ‘fictitious commodities’; and that it is not a ‘natural’ social formation, but rather one that had to be politically ‘constructed’ right from the beginning. Next, we apply the insights that were herein conceived to an explication of contemporary neoliberalism. In doing so, not only is the immense intellectual utility of both variants of embeddedness realized, but also certain long-standing ambiguities in the embeddedness literature are solved. Neoliberalism as interpreted by embeddedness comprises of two elements, each illuminated by a different ‘embeddedness’, both which fall under the overarching telos of the restoration of elite class power. First, disembedded embeddedness elucidates the ‘weaponization’ of the market's endogenous commodity logic under neoliberalism — its brutal intensification as a means to subsume the fictitious commodities, nature and human beings, under the logic of capital accumulation at the behest of capitalist class prerogative. Second, embedded embeddedness elucidates the ‘re-embedding’ of market economy in ‘bad embeddings’ under neoliberalism — institutional configurations that seek to entrench domination by ‘protecting’ certain privileged interests from the exigencies of market forces, and by denying ‘others’ the liberative opportunities presented by the ‘radical leveller’ that is money. We conclude that, in this capacity — textual minutia aside — embeddedness is of immense analytical efficacy.

Karl Polanyi’s environmental sociology: a primer

ABSTRACTDrawing upon The Great Transformation (1944), we outline Karl Polanyi’s environmental sociology by providing a primer for emerging and other scholars with little exposure to this major work. While best known for his critique of laissez-faire/liberal economics, particularly reflecting upon the works of the Austrian School of Economics, we believe his unique and broad insights give particular grounding to environmental sociology itself. In addition to illustrating Polanyi’s more well-known concepts of economic substantivism, fictitious commodities and the double movement, we highlight Polanyi’s deeper argument for morality in society-environmental affairs. Polanyi offers a critique of the market that is not Marxian. Rather, he focuses explicitly on the unnaturalness and immorality of an economy that does not place the needs of full society and the environment at its centre. Hence, Polanyi does not reflect on the growth or the eventual collapse of capitalism, but rather the importance of an activist government and alternative forms of organizing that protects people, society and the environment. We include a brief discussion on how the current US politics and the Trump Administration’s actions illustrate some of Polanyi’s insights. We also apply Polanyian thinking to current research on the new sharing economy, connecting it with a theoretical foundation. To conclude, we present new lines of inquiry for environmental sociologists to consider.

Fictitious Freedom: A Polanyian Critique of the Republican Revival

AbstractProminent republican theorists invoke anonymous orders such as the market as mechanisms that secure freedom as non‐domination. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's account of fictitious commodities and demonstration of the impossibility of a just and rational market society, this article critically scrutinizes neo‐republican assumptions regarding the market, develops an alternate social theory within which to situate the ideal of non‐domination, and illustrates the importance of this reconfiguration for the kind of collective agents and political strategies that can be expected to advance republican freedom in the economy.

REDD+ as ‘inclusive’ neoliberal conservation: the case of Lindi, Tanzania

ABSTRACTIn recent years, market-based conservation has emerged as the ‘panacea’ to the environmental crises we face today. A prominent example of this trend is REDD+, which turns terrestrial carbon in the global South into fictitious commodities that can be sold for profit. In this paper, we conceptualise REDD+ as a form of ‘inclusive’ neoliberal conservation, highlighting how neoliberalism has embraced notions of good governance, local ownership, social safeguards and active citizenship when promoting global conservation markets. While demonstrating the genuine efforts by project proponents to practice ‘inclusion’, we highlight their limits due to larger structural inequalities and demonstrate how the commodification of carbon inevitably causes new forms of inclusion and exclusion to local forest users. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two forest-dependent villages in the Lindi Region of Tanzania, where two different REDD+ projects were underway, we show how material and discursive powers shaped ‘inclusive’ strategies to market forest-carbon. We then locate these strategies, concerned with the commodification of forest-carbon, within a historical field of power struggles and local politics over forest resources, strongly evidenced in contestations around establishing community-based forest management. We argue that a sharp disjuncture operated between the ‘inclusive’ strategies to market forest-carbon and the historical dimensions and power relations within the area; resulting in new forms of inclusions and exclusions, both in and outside rural villages.

Fictitious conservation in Canadian parks and protected areas

ABSTRACTSince 1987, sustainable development has become popular in Canada. During this same time, capitalism has shifted from post-Fordist to financialization regimes for capital accumulation. Using data from environmental non-government organization websites, think tank reports, government websites, media stories and consultant papers from 2009 to 2016, we examine how neoliberal conservation practices have evolved to include fictitious commodities (e.g. biodiversity credits and protected in situ resources used by ecotourism) and financialization tactics (e.g. speculative financing, and derivatives and futures trading). These tactics suggest conservation practice in Canada is changing to reflect a monetization of nature that divorces conservation from specific places, allowing capital to produce more capital without the need for actual conservation. The more Canadian parks and protected areas adopt financialization, the less sustainable they will be.

From Morality to Commodity

This study aims to understand how CSR is defined in Japan and Korea, both in terms of its conceptualization and the guiding rationale and factors that influence its formation. This study utilized economic sociology perspectives in order to explain the nature of CSR in Japan and Korea in terms of gift exchange, conspicuous consumption, and fictitious commodities. Comparative study of institutional arrangements and CSR in Japan and Korea reveals that although these two countries may share similar historical backgrounds with regard to industrialization, the form and function of their CSR institutional arrangements may differ in terms of how businesses adopt and respond to them: in Japan, companies have tried to implement strategic CSR as a means of gaining profit (based on the logic of commodity), while in Korea, companies remain in a stage of a conspicuous CSR consumption for the sake of legitimacy.

Contradicciones y tensiones en las políticas de desmercantilización de la Revolución Ciudadana en Ecuador

The article analyzes the extent to which economic and social policies implemented between 2007 and 2015 by the Government of the Citizen Revolution in Ecuador can be considered as a process of de-commodification work, money and land, as fictitious commodities, in Karl Polanyi terms, in a country with informal employment, officially dollarized and dependent on oil. To do this, the main labor and financial policies, as well as the management of oil revenues, are described. Furthermore, the lack of coherence and the limits that the institutions of global capitalism impose on the sovereignty of the economic policies will be discussed. The main hypothesis of this work is that the Good Living, which originally appeared in the margins of the State and political power, was instrumented by the Citizen Revolution (CR) to articulate a political project of de-commodification of labor, money and natural resources. However, this project, embraced by Ecuadorian society, showed limited autonomy and coherency -and this is the subordinate hypothesis- because it heavily depended on the upward trend of oil prices, as the return to the neoliberal program -that never lost its hegemony at global level­- demonstrated, when oil price fell. One of the conclusions is that the Government of the CR can be considered as a post-neoliberal one.

Shared Social License: Mining and Conservation in the Peruvian Andes

AbstractOver the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú's contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners—usually indigenous communities—to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the “social license” is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together.

Cucumbers and Courgettes: Rural Workfare and the New Double Movement in Hungary

The paper is an application of the economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi to contemporary rural Hungary. After addressing the influence of Polanyi’s critique of market society and his standing in the discipline of anthropology, the main focus is the community of Tazlar on the Danube-Tisza interfluve. The paper traces the history of the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land and labour in this relatively isolated settlement, which was not fully integrated into the national society until the socialist era. The innovative symbiosis of household and cooperative farming was destroyed in the 1990s. In the depressed economic climate of today, workfare schemes are popular because they treat villagers as human beings rather than as commodities to be exploited for maximum profit. The workfare initiatives of populist power holders can be interpreted as one facet of a complex ‘double movement’ in which postsocialist society seeks to defend itself against the domination of the market.