Karl Polanyi Research Articles

Can the Two Karls – Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx Meet? A Critical Examination of Chinese Vocational Education, Internship Regimes, and Labor Forms

Can the two Karls – Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx meet? Sociological debates tend to provide a negative answer and prioritize Karl Polanyi in current education and labor studies. This article poses an alternative approach by examining how the commodification of human life, the central postulation of Karl Polanyi, can be bridged into Karl Marx’s labor process theory where different forms of commodified student-labor will eventually end up in the production sphere, producing variegated internship and labor regimes. Using China’s vast vocational education system as an anchor to ground the theoretical dialogue, I contribute not only to raising an intellectual puzzle, but disclosing complex school-to-work phenomena that internship regimes, namely, the dual-despotic, market despotic or hegemonic, shapes the world’s largest young working class. By studying the complex configuration of the student-labor regimes, I argue that commodification process of human life could hardly escape the class perspective, as Karl Polanyi put it.

Aggravated commodification as a new dimension of precarity in platform economy

The concepts of precariousness that emerged in Western countries from the 1980s onwards highlight uncertainty regarding the form, scope and nature of labour in the near future. In this article, we use the concept of aggravated commodification as a new dimension of precariousness faced by platform workers. This concept is derived from Polanyi’s idea of fictitious commodities and is treated as a form of labour-market expansion. Applying critically evaluated theory of Karl Polanyi, the article argues that platforms transform labour into a commodity, potentially leading to exploitation and societal unrest. Aggravated commodification refers to work arrangements that introduce (three-sided) market mechanisms within the labour process. Moreover, thanks to the technological infrastructure platforms are leading to the commodification of activities previously performed outside the market and free absorption of activities that were previously a part of wage labour. The study contributes a comprehensive framework for understanding and enriching discussions on precarity in the context of platform capitalism, especially within Central and Eastern European countries.

Fictitious Commodities, Social Costs, and Institutional Contradictions. Karl Polanyi’s Critique of Commodification

The articles reconstruct Karl Polanyi’s idea of fictitious commodities with the help of Karl William Kapp’s theory of social costs. According to the proposed argument labour land, and money are social spheres, where major social and ecological costs of a functioning market economy tend to accumulate. Hence, commodity fiction concerning land, labour, and money is crucial for understanding ideological and redistributive conflicts characteristic of contemporary capitalism.

A New Neoliberal Offensive in South Korea: The Conservative Politics of Rollback and the Disciplining of Organized Labor

ABSTRACT This study explores a series of actions undertaken by South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol to prohibit and reshape customary activities in labor unions. It terms this neoliberal offensive a form of disciplining and explains what has motivated the Yoon administration to adopt this method against organized labor. This policy is associated with South Korean conservatives’ strong impulse to roll back former President Moon Jae-in’s progressive legacy by pushing neoliberalism to its limits. This argument is grounded in Karl Polanyi’s illustration of the Speenhamland episode, in which English liberals’ struggle against the Speenhamland system generated the creeds of the self-regulating market and social disciplines. South Korean conservatives prioritize reversing progressive political initiatives because they have been unable to devise alternative policies due to their constrained institutional capacity. They have dismissed the pro-labor policies of the Moon administration as misguided interventionism. The Yoon administration has alleged that labor unions are the support base of the Moon administration and has implemented three disciplinary measures against them: decontextualization, stigmatization, and requirements for increased transparency. This study shows that neoliberalism shifts the locus of class conflict from workplaces to how workers shape their lifestyles and identities.

Natural Embeddedness, Place Attachment, and Local Opposition to Developmental Projects: A Polanyian Analysis of the Origins of Preemptive Environmental Protests in China

This article aims to uncover the underlying social and institutional origins of China’s local preemptive environmental protests against developmental projects with negative externalities, which have not been fully investigated by the extant literature on “NIMBY” (“not-in-my-backyard”) activism in China. Primarily through the perspective of Karl Polanyi’s environmental sociology, this article presents a case study of the 2012 protest in Qidong, Jiangsu province, against an industrial waste disposal pipeline. The case of Qidong shows how local ecology has been deeply embedded in the social context and relations that have historically shaped the economic structures, culinary traditions, and place attachment in the area. Such a nexus between the environment and society in turn significantly impacted the opposition pattern of the local communities, which involved various social strata by triggering their economic and health concerns as well as an emotional response. Moreover, the article finds that the unified cross-class action under the banner of defending public interests was possible in Qidong largely because the actors were all part of the same holistic local ecological system, with shared economic interests, dietary preferences, and cultural identities. This research thus echoes the insights of environmental sociology and argues that it is necessary to take into account the interplay between ecology and locality to understand local environmental politics.

Ex Ante Analysis of a Local Rural Development Policy Using the Gut Matrix

Objective: The objective is to examine the potential and limitations of a local rural development policy at the municipal level, analyzing the feasibility of building paths that can contribute to overcoming the obstacles faced by family farming at the local level. Theoretical Framework: Based on Karl Polanyi's theory, which postulates that agents, in response to the economic context in which they are immersed, adopt a variety of practices aimed at preserving their autonomy and improving their living conditions. Method: The study adopted a qualitative approach, using case study and exploratory methods. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with family farmers and observations. Results and Discussion: It was found that the project analyzed has the potential to meet its objectives. However, there were also some inconsistencies that need to be corrected in order for the project to be more assertive. Research implications: Highlights the importance of ex ante evaluation as a tool for identifying and mitigating potential challenges in social projects before they are implemented. It offers valuable insights for policymakers and project managers, guiding social initiatives. Originality/Value: Adds a contribution to the literature by highlighting the importance of adopting ex ante evaluation in social projects. The relevance of this research is evidenced by the ability of ex ante analysis to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the analyzed project, thus highlighting the importance of this approach to improve the effectiveness and assertiveness of similar initiatives.

Rethinking Sporting Mystification in the Present Tense: Disneylimpics, Affective Neoliberalism, and the Greatest Transformation

While questioning the universalization, naturalization, neutralization, and idealization of sport and physical culture, this paper examines the ultimate mystification process of sport and physical culture by expanding upon two conceptual frameworks: Jules Boykoff’s celebration capitalism and Lawrence Grossberg’s affective landscape. It first analyzes the evolution of the Olympics into a corporatized, commercialized, spectacularized, and celebritized “Disneylimpics” that can consistently evoke an affective reverberation. It then introduces the idea of “affective neoliberalism” to highlight neoliberalism’s affective and ideological aspects. With Grossberg’s concept of affective landscape, this paper explores the internalization and intensification of anxiety and affective isolation within society. Additionally, the paper utilizes Karl Polanyi’s analysis in his influential book, The Great Transformation, to investigate the historical expansion of affective neoliberalism. By highlighting the 11 September 2001, attacks in the United States, it points out provocative militarization and (re)organization of the soul into a fictitious commodity, in addition to labor, land, and money, which triggers the greatest transformation. Lastly, summarizing central arguments, this paper concludes with modest suggestions, mainly focusing on two questions: (1) where are we now? and (2) how can we more effectively respond to the present context?

Assessing Path Dependency in Vietnam's Healthcare Legal Framework: Exploring Public-Private Collaboration in Ho Chi Minh City during the COVID-19 Crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a nudge for public-private cooperation in healthcare to rapidly cope with limited resource. However, Vietnam's historical reliance on a public healthcare system, combined with a traditional emphasis on socialization in the Polanyian sense, hindered the swift integration of the private sector. This research investigates path dependency in Vietnam's public health sector, using theories including path dependency, Karl Polanyi's double movement with legal analysis method to analyze the interplay of historical decisions, and socialist policies in healthcare. Recognizing these institutional and market governance flaws, a deeper understanding of the role of law becomes vital in crafting strategies for a more resilient and sustainable healthcare system in Vietnam. In this article, Ho Chi Minh City is chosen as a case study due to its notable mix of public-private healthcare facilities and its status as a leading area in infection cases during the third COVID-19 wave. The article suggests that there should be a change in the way public and private sectors work together, one that is more in line with market-driven solutions which requires solid legal framework for cooperation beyond merely mobilizing resources.

Karl Polanyi against postcolonial theory: beyond Eurocentric anti-Eurocentrism

AbstractPostcolonial theory has been at the forefront of attempts to remedy the problem of Eurocentrism. This article argues that postcolonial theory has not progressed far enough in successfully treating the problem of Eurocentrism, for it has not sufficiently abided by its own methodological underpinnings, i.e., it has not satisfactorily developed its own critique of the “presentist” conceptions of history. More precisely, postcolonial theory has not shown how to make a complete departure from the methodologically presentist conceptions of capitalism, which, in turn, limits our ability to overcome hierarchical readings of global modernity. To problematize and fill this gap, I take an unconventional tack, turning to a seldomly cited figure in debates on Eurocentrism: Karl Polanyi. I contend that although Polanyi places the origins of capitalist modernity in Europe, his historical sociology provides an alternative and more definitive solution for presentism and Eurocentrism. Polanyi’s rejection of the “economistic” and “dualistic” understandings of human life, his insistence on the commonality and diversity of human degradation in the face of capitalist modernity, and his historically specific conception of the “counter-movement” enable a decidedly non-presentist, non-triumphalist, and non-hierarchical narrative of the genesis and development of the modern present.

The moral economy of the English football crowd: The European Super League and the contingency of football fan activism

On 18 April 2021, six of the most storied clubs in English football – Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur – announced they would be joining a new breakaway European Super League. These proposals triggered vehement opposition from football fans, which catalysed the intervention of the UK government in the form of a fan-led review of football governance. The reaction to the European Super League – which collapsed within 48 hours – demonstrates that the commodification and globalisation of football is contested. This article applies the lens of moral economy to analyse the contemporary mobilisations of football fans in England counter to these processes. The novel application of a moral economy framework provides a fresh perspective within the extant literature on football fan activism. This article represents the first systematic application of a moral economy approach to the political sociology of contemporary sport and its fandom. Employing an expanded understanding of moral economy, the article extends its application beyond the analysis of pre-modern food riots popularised by E.P. Thompson, incorporating the insights of Karl Polanyi and Andrew Sayer. Adopting this broader meaning, the concept of moral economy enables us to explore emergent and dynamic forms of fan activism, which seek to contest the commodification of football. The supporter mobilisations against the European Super League are examined to illuminate this perspective. Through an exploration of the contingency of the moral economy of football fandom, this article expands, in conceptual terms, the literature on football-based social movements, connecting it to the wider commodification and financialisation of football (as an important aspect of everyday life) and the internal contradictions and crisis of advanced capitalism.

New views on price-making markets and the capitalist impulse: beyond Polanyi

Anthropologists have persistently diminished the importance of the market and marketplace exchange in premodern, preindustrial times. This strident anti-market mentality, derived largely from the writings of Karl Polanyi, underpins an ideological and politicized argument that neither sets useful guideposts to advance anthropological research, nor does it yield the necessary insights or empirically valid foundations to comprehend the deep historical origins of modern economies or polities. In fact, by envisioning the past that is categorically caged from the modern, the school of thought crystalized through Polanyi's perspectives circumvents the role of diachronic processes that are at the heart of a truly historical social science. Although it is not our principal aim to relitigate the vast literature pertaining to the rise and fall of Polanyian thought, our approach expands on prior arguments about his project both by highlighting critical perspectives on capitalism that long predated Polanyian thought and by identifying a veritable bounty of new evidence and theory concerning premodern and contemporary marketplace economies that enable us to transcend these now-entrenched claims. The scheme we present that distinguishes between open and competitive marketplaces, on the one hand, and the capitalist impulse, on the other, we believe, adds depth and breadth to the analysis of price-making markets and their divergent social and economic outcomes across time and space.

Modern Capitalism and Its Future from Karl Polanyi’s Perspective

Modern Capitalism and Its Future from Karl Polanyi’s Perspective

Polanyi, Piketty, and the Twenty-First Century Market Economy

Both Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation and Thomas Piketty in Capital and Ideology make use of the long historical roots of our current high levels of inequality and disappearing safety net, in an effort to understand the ideological basis of, and turmoil within, market societies. Both Polanyi and Piketty decry the erosion of the social institutions that maintained social stability and their replacement by market institutions. In this article, we provide brief overviews of the arguments of both Polanyi and Piketty and then use their framework to analyze current economic and social developments.

Polanyi and the Other Alternative Food Network: What San Francisco‐Based Multi‐Level Marketers of “Healthy” Food Tell Us About Values in Market Societies

AbstractRecent decades have witnessed the proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) in the US and Europe. While social scientists classify heterogenous practices as AFNs, their participants share the desire to work against the existing food system, and efforts to access food from outside this system. Many analysts have captured these features of AFNs by using concepts from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Yet while Polanyi's framework has been productive, it has also contributed to binary representations of alternative food movements as either advancing non‐market values or in service to commodification and hegemony. We scrutinize San Francisco‐based independent contractors who sell food alternatives and health supplements produced by a multi‐level marketing company we call NatureRise. The marketers of NatureRise products are committed to working against an industrial food system that they consider corrupt. They promote food alternatives that they regard as more natural than food in the conventional system, and embed sales in face‐to‐face relations in which a family‐like concern for human wellbeing is expressed. Yet, they also engage in sales for what Polanyi calls “the motive of gain.” Our case highlights a shortcoming in Polanyi's thought, one that characterizes many social analyses, while supporting the continued relevance of his work.

Framing the Market: The Unexpected Commonalities between Karl Polanyi and the Ordoliberals

Abstract There has been a resurgence in scholarship on Karl Polanyi in recent years, against the backdrop of rising populism and critiques of globalization and financialization. In these works, Polanyi is typically portrayed as critic of the contested notion of ‘neoliberalism’. In this paper I demonstrate that, to the contrary, Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944) shares many of the themes central to the contributions of the early neoliberals, specifically the ordoliberal thinkers. Polanyi and the ordoliberals did not only seek to analyze the origins of the same social crisis of the 1930 s and 40 s, but their analysis of the deficiencies of nineteenth-century liberalism as well as the subsequent disintegration through rapidly growing interventions in favor of powerful groups in society has much in common. This paper explores these similarities and demonstrates that they also extended to the way they perceived the responsibility of scientists as well as the interdependence of the various orders in society. It is argued that the ordoliberals, their fellow-traveler F. A. Hayek and Karl Polanyi all perceived the interdependence between the state, civil society and the market somewhat differently, but agreed on the need to conceptualize the relationship between the three. Finally, it is suggested that even the normative ideal of Karl Polanyi, the realization of ‘freedom in a complex society’, has important commonalities with the ordoliberal program: the protection of individual freedom from concentrated forms of power in society.

Embedding the land market: Polanyi, urban planning and regulation

How land markets should be regulated is a fraught political question. This paper argues that the heterodox political economy of Karl Polanyi – underutilised in urban studies and planning scholarship – provides a useful language to analyse the role of urban planning in development land markets. We ground our analysis in the concept of embeddedness, building on Polanyi’s core contention that economic behaviour is not, and cannot be, distinct from social, political and cultural relations. We juxtapose an account of the institutionalisation of urban planning in England during the mid-20th century with contemporary neoliberal reforms, analysing the dynamic reconfigurations in how development land markets have been differently embedded via the planning system in relation to a shifting political, ideological and economic environment. The paper foregrounds the co-constitutive nature of state regulation and markets, moving past the simplistic regulation-deregulation dichotomy frequently adopted to frame government intervention via the planning system.

Between commodification and data protection: Regulatory models governing cross-border information transfers in regional trade agreements

Abstract The subject of this analysis is the role that regional trade agreements (RTAs) play in balancing between personal data commodification and protection of privacy and personal data, approached from the perspective of Karl Polanyi’s theory of double movement. We analyse provisions on cross-border information transfers and data protection in order to establish the models for balancing between the ideas of personal data commodification and social protection, understood as allowing for the use of measures that ensure privacy and personal data protection. Our analysis indicates that there are two general models concerning the liberalization of cross-border information transfers: one model restricts states’ ability to restrict data flows while the other is more open to such measures. Next, we identify three primary models governing how data protection is treated in the agreements that liberalize data flows: one that is based on the inclusion of substantive standards of protection in the content of the given agreement; one that uses international standards as a proxy for establishing certain level of protection; and one that is based on national data protection laws. Combining identified models of liberalizing data flows with identified models of ensuring data protection allows us to show that the inclusion of seemingly similar provisions on cross-border data transfers in various RTAs has resulted in developing several different models for balancing between commodification of personal data and data protection.

From “Socialist Accounting” to the “Livelihood of Man”: The Viennese and the Columbia Polanyi

Abstract Recent commentary on Karl Polanyi’s oeuvre has argued that the émigré scholar abandoned his earlier concerns of working out a (socialist) alternative to liberal market society when delving into the institutional study of ancient economies at Columbia University from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. This article reconsiders Polanyi’s late work through the lens of his 1920s efforts to theorize socialist accounting and a socialist economy in the context of the early Viennese socialist calculation debate. While many interpretations have been provided of Polanyi’s early and late work, the gradual—for some even “great”—transformation that led to his focus on ancient economic history has neither been reconstructed in detail nor fully understood. Focusing on how Polanyi’s socialist agenda of the earlier years laid the grounds for his institutional approach to economic history, this article draws attention to certain authors who have only rarely been taken into account, in particular, to Otto Neurath and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Polanyi’s late work sits ambiguously between Austrian School economic theory on the one hand and economic history in a “substantive” key, first outlined by Neurath, on the other hand. This Viennese heritage bequeathed both an implicit naturalism and an implicit socialism in Polanyi’s late studies.

Bringing Money to the Market: The Ambiguity in Polanyi’s Third “Fictitious Commodity”

The contribution examines Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the fictitiousness of the commodity description of money, and its suitability as a reference for the analysis of the commodification of money within contemporary markets for credit and finance. Any critique of the commodification of money that draws on Polanyi’s influential argument should distinguish between two fundamentally different meanings of the occurrence of money as a commodity: the institutional system that makes some commodity money versus the commercial practice that turns money into a commodity. Only a particular strand of Polanyi’s analysis provides a point of reference for a comprehensive critique of the commodification of money, rather than the monetization of some type of commodity. Departing from the aspects of Polanyi’s analysis that are specific to the political economy of the gold standard, the article draws on Polanyi’s material account of the essential contributions of public organization and social convention in the constitution of money. On these grounds, the commodification of money is potentially objectionable as the social disembedding of a common public institution.

Amartya Sen, Karl Polanyi, and Universal Basic Income

ABSTRACT This paper develops a Polanyian capabilitarian framework to understand and justify the universal basic income. I combine Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach with Karl Polanyi’s substantive view of economy to mount a normative case for basic income. Using this approach, I also ground the basic income debate in a relational ontology, the idea that the self and society are mutually constituted. By doing so, I problematise hegemonic assumptions underlying much of the basic income discourse and call for ontological and epistemic diversity. The paper both provides a critique of individualist ontology and offers an affirmative modification centred on relationality and interdependence.