Critical scholarship often presents corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a reflection or embodiment of neoliberalism. Against this sort of sweeping political characterization we argue that CSR can indeed be considered a liberal concept but that it embodies a “varieties of liberalism.” Building theoretically on the work of Michael Freeden on liberal languages, John Ruggie and Karl Polanyi on embedded forms of liberalism, and Michel Foucault on the distinction between classical liberalism and neoliberalism, we provide a conceptual treatment and mapping of (...) the ideological positions that constitute the bulk of modern scholarly CSR debate. Thus, we distinguish between embedded liberalism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and re-embedded liberalism. We develop these four orientations in turn and show how they are engaged in “battles of ideas” over the meaning and scope of corporate responsibilities—and how they all remain relevant for an understanding of contemporary debates and developments in the field of CSR and corporate sustainability. (shrink)

Zelizer’s work may be read as an attack on the central Polanyian thesis: that the market system threatens social life by the undue prominence it lends the economy in the organization of modern society. The recent publication of Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy (2005a) is therefore an excellent opportunity to review the general trend of her work Zelizer 1979, 1985, 1994, and contrast her leading ideas to the central thesis that gives Polanyi’s work its particular flavor: the danger encapsulated (...) in the use of modern money and the functioning of the market system. (shrink)

Hannes Lacher’s article misrepresents and then denounces both the substance and the spirit of our book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique. Lacher claims his interpretation of Polanyi to be the only acceptable one, and vociferously alerts readers to beware the dangerous influence of our work. Because we continue to believe that familiarity with Polanyi’s theoretical framework is valuable for those resisting the depredations of neoliberalism and authoritarianism, we restate our commitment to interpreting Polanyi’s work in the most (...) capacious way possible, treating it not as Scripture but as a body of work multidimensional enough for varying perspectives. In our reply to Lacher, we revisit several themes central to our book, including Polanyi’s complex use of “utopianism”; the “always-instituted economy”; the gold standard’s attack on the “democratic virus” and the rise of fascism; and Polanyi’s socialist commitment to democratizing the economy. We also suggest that by exploring several apparent puzzles in the text of GT it is possible to derive a more fruitful and powerful interpretation of Polanyi’s thinking. (shrink)

Polanyi analyzes the historical deployment of a “formal” economic science starting from the “market-scarcity-instrumental rationality triptych.” This triptych, and the knowledge associated with it, is shown to be more than merely a “substantial” economic science’s interest in the triptych “need-nature-institution.” While we must agree with Polanyi that economism is ill-suited to the first triptych, we hesitate to accept his suggested alternative, a heterogeneous mixture of naturalism and institutionalism, essentialism and historicism.

This article develops and defends a theory of "network failure" analogous to more familiar theories of organizational and market failure already prevalent in the literature on economic governance. It theorizes those failures not as the simple absence of network governance, but rather as a situation in which transactional conditions for network desirability obtain but network governance is impeded either by ignorance or opportunism, or by a combination of the two. It depicts network failures as continuous rather than discrete outcomes, shows (...) that they have more than one cause, and pays particular attention to two undertheorized—if not undiscovered—types of network failure. It thereby contributes to the development of sociology's toolkit for theorizing networks that are "neither market nor hierarchy.". (shrink)

Growing interest among historians and social scientists in the work of Karl Polanyi has yet to produce detailed historical studies of how Polanyi's work was received by his contemporaries. This article reconstructs the frustration of Polanyi's attempts to make a name for himself among English socialists between his arrival from Vienna in 1934 and his departure for New York in 1947. The most obvious explanation for Polanyi's failure to find a following was the socialist historians’ rejection of his unorthodox narrative (...) of the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in The Great Transformation. But this disappointment was anticipated in earlier exchanges revealing that Polanyi's social theory, specifically his conception of the self and its social relations, differed markedly from the views prevailing among socialists of R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole's generation. As well as casting new light on the intellectual history of English socialism and variegating our understanding of the contexts in which conceptions of the human person were invoked in the interwar period, this article seeks to illuminate by example the importance of deep-seated, often tacit, commitments to particular conceptions of the self and its social relations in structuring mid-century intellectual life. (shrink)

This article seeks to subject Fred Block and Margaret Somers’ influential reconstruction of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation to a systematic review. I show that Block & Somers’s central claim—that Polanyi’s thinking underwent a “theoretical shift” as he wrote his seminal book—is not supported by archival evidence. I demonstrate that all the narrative keys that Block & Somers advance to lend plausibility to their discovery of a “theory of the always-embedded market economy” in The Great Transformation, wither under critical probing. (...) While this article does not advance a comprehensive alternative reconstruction of Polanyi’s main work, the essential continuities it uncovers in his social thought suggest that Polanyi’s book is best understood as the culmination of his long-standing efforts to rebuild a radically transformative socialism on non-Marxist foundations. The recognition that Polanyi’s political purposes extend far beyond regulated capitalism or social-democracy, I conclude, makes it possible—and indeed necessary—to read The Great Transformation as an internally coherent work of social theory. (shrink)

When the Global Financial Crisis hit, major political economists were able to boast that they had long warned that "crazy times" were coming. By contrast, leading sociologists seem to have been wrong footed. Totalizing narratives of a new "risk society", "second modernity" and the like appeared to have sacrificed the grounds for weighing up the costs and damages of contemporary capitalism. Made famous by Karl Polanyi, the concept of the embedded market suggests a differentiated diagnosis of our times that should (...) allow sociology to re-enter the discussion as a critic of an ideological attempt to block public discussions about losses and dam ages of contemporary capitalism. The following paper will explore several readings of this concept and will evaluate their capacity to revive sociology's critical powers. (shrink)

Swedberg's two-volume collection of essays covering New Developments in Economic Sociology contains some excellent material, worthy of study by both economists and sociologists. However, there are definitional and conceptual problems in the whole project of "economic sociology" exacerbated by the disappearance of any consensus concerning the boundaries between the disciplines of sociology and economics. Neither has "economic sociology" acquired an adequately clear identity through the use of distinctive concepts or theories. Its future prospects are further questioned by recent changes within (...) economics itself, including greater attention to institutional structures, and the abandonment of strictly self-interested and context-independent rationality. Key Words: economic sociology • economics • disciplinary boundaries • social sciences. (shrink)

Although Karl Polanyi is best known for his theorization of market regulation and the double movement, democratizing the economic was one of his core concerns. He believed societies need to bring labor, land, and money under collective oversight to displace the logic of market fundamentalism with the logic of human needs. In this article, the author draws on Polanyi’s vocabulary to shed light on the denial of money politics and the possibility of democratization. The author illustrates these dynamics through an (...) analysis of long-term dynamics of (de)politicization in British colonial America and the United States through the 1930s. The author developed this approach hoping that it can contribute to nudging public debates beyond regulation and monetary policy techniques and toward popular involvement and knowledge. (shrink)

Ariane Fischer, David Woodruff, and Johanna Bockman have translated Karl Polanyi’s “Sozialistische Rechnungslegung” [“Socialist Accounting”] from 1922. In this article, Polanyi laid out his model of a future socialism, a world in which the economy is subordinated to society. Polanyi described the nature of this society and a kind of socialism that he would remain committed to his entire life. Accompanying the translation is the preface titled “Socialism and the embedded economy.” In the preface, Bockman explains the historical context of (...) the article and its significance to the socialist calculation debate, the social sciences, and socialism more broadly. Based on her reading of the accounting and society that Polanyi offers here, Bockman argues that scholars have too narrowly used Polanyi’s work to support the Keynesian welfare state to the exclusion of other institutions, have too broadly used his work to study social institutions indiscriminately, and have not recognized that his work shares fundamental commonalities with and often unacknowledged distinctions from neoclassical economics. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo queremos explorar las líneas maestras de las principales interpretaciones que han sido conjugadas en torno a un problema decisivo, a saber, la comprensión del significado histórico del advenimiento de la sociedad industrial capitalista desde el punto de vista de las clases populares o trabajadoras. Habremos de exponer la interpretación burguesa o liberal que se ha dado de semejante proceso secular; también la interpretación marxista de sus consecuencias y, como hilo conductor y problematizador del propio trabajo, la (...) interpretación puesta en juego por el historiador y antropólogo Karl Polanyi. Pero habremos de tener en cuenta, además, que esa diversidad de interpretaciones en torno al significado de la sociedad industrial y de mercado responde a una divergencia más profunda que refleja, en última instancia, diferentes concepciones del sentido general de las sociedades humanas en su devenir histórico. (shrink)

William Booth's 'On the Idea of the Moral Economy' (1994) is a scathing critique of the economic historians labelled as 'moral economists', chief among them Karl Polanyi, whose The Great Transformation is the groundwork for much of the later theorizing on the subject. The most devastating of Booth's criticisms is the allegation that Polanyi's normative prescriptions have anti-democratic, Aristotelian and aristocratic undertones for being guided by a preconceived notion of 'the good'. This article presents an attempt to rescue Polanyi from (...) this charge by reinterpreting his view of the relationship between the economic and the political, while elucidating the practical meaning of a moral economy. (shrink)

Resumen En el presente trabajo nos acercaremos a las reflexiones aristotélicas sobre lo económico, desde la perspectiva de Karl Polanyi, precisamente porque éste acude al filósofo griego con el ánimo de obtener elementos útiles para construir una profunda crítica de la moderna sociedad de mercado. Aristóteles intuyó el futuro incierto de un orden social devorado por relaciones económicas en hipertrófica expansión. En su época, desde luego, tal amenaza sólo era potencial y jamás vio la culminación efectiva de nada semejante. No (...) obstante, a pesar de ello, fue capaz de visualizar el significado último de lo que estaba en juego, además pudo comprender que un crecimiento desmedido y descontrolado de las relaciones mercantiles acabaría trastocando irremediablemente el equilibrio cívico; entendió que la extensión irrestricta del deseo de ganancia a todos los lazos humanos supondría una potente amenaza contra la médula misma de la comunidad política.This study approaches Aristotelian reflections on economy through the eyes of Karl Polanyi, as he resorts to the Greek philosopher to find useful elements when building a profound criticism of the modern market society. Aristotle intuited the uncertain future of a social order devoured by economic relations expanding at a hypertrophic rate. In his time, indeed, this was only a potential threat -he never saw the effective culmination of anything like what we are seeing today-. But he was nevertheless able to see the ultimate meaning of what was at stake, and to understand that the unmeasured, uncontrolled growth of market relations would irremediably affect the civic balance. He understood that the unrestricted extension of the desire for profit to all human ties would be a powerful threat to the heart of the political community. (shrink)