Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This article offers a critical appraisal Polanyi’s method in studying economic life through a textual analysis of his programmatic writings and empirical work. Although Polanyi has been accepted as a central figure in economic anthropology and sociology, there are few studies looking into the specifics of his methodology. This paper attempts at filling that gap through a close and critical analysis of his method. The first part of the paper seeks to understand the elements of Polanyi’s method, how useful it has been and still is in guiding social scientific research about economic life. The second part of the paper looks at weaknesses in and consistency of Polanyi’s approach. I argue that Polanyi’s main appeal in economic sociology and anthropology has been his call to ground the analysis of economic life on institutions enmeshed in social life. While that call still keeps its urgency, a closer analysis of the way Polanyi conceptualized “institutions” shows several limitations of Polanyi’s method; the main one being that the operationalization of “institution” is circular and occasionally uses functionalist imaginary. The paper concludes with a discussion of why Polanyi’s approach is a promising one for future work and how to address some of the problems in his method for studying economic life.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the contested terrain of the temporal and spatial restructuring of global informational capitalism and, drawing on key concepts from Karl Polanyi and illustrated by evidence from the software industry in Ireland, advances the concept of ‘time space intensification’ to attempt to capture the dynamics of contemporary transitions. There are three main dimensions to time space intensification. First, the experience of time and space are intensified as they are de-normalised with the cracking of the taken for granted 'time space containers' of nation, corporate hierarchy and job. As Biggart and Guillen (1999) point out, globalization does not produce homogenization but greater awareness of difference – time and space become more explicit elements of human experience. Second, time and space are themselves mobilized as key elements of strategic action. While all social practices have a spatial and temporal dimension, explicitly spatial and temporal practices become more critical to social and political action as social actors attempt to mobilize time and space in protection against the pressures of time space compression e.g. 'the region’ becomes a crucial element of economic development policy. Finally, time and space become highly politicized as struggles take place at multiple levels over the temporal and spatial organization of contemporary capitalism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Social scientists have examined how market fundamentalism is influencing national policy debates and how Christian fundamentalism has influenced presidential elections. What has received less attention is how these two types of fundamentalisms have converged in the national ideological milieu. Using variables that reflect Christian and market fundamentalism, we evaluate their independent and interactive effects on voter turnout and voter preference in a presidential election and find significant and robust effects.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For intellectual generations born at the end of the 19th century in Europe, the discourses on rights were to a large measure determined by proponents and detractors of various versions of Marxism. Hence the debates on justice and rights predominantly operated with the conceptual and analytical instruments of European political economy. These debates also were premised on assumptions about the status of the political economy of Europe and North America in the distribution of global space. But the intellectual generations born at the end of the 19th century, and particularly those with interests in the Marxist project -- as Benjamin, Gramsci, and Polanyi were-- were also witnesses to the facts of the Soviet Revolution and its evolution into the Stalinist state. In this paper I will first of all examine the ways in which Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Polanyi elaborated and expanded the concept of transatlantic space inscribed into the Marxist project. I will then investigate to which extent their familiarity with the rights practices of Stalinism impacted their elaboration of new forms of the space of rights: Benjamin’s concept of the historical space of ‘messianism’ that transcends the historical limits of the space of rights of historical materialism; Gramsci’s concept of cultural space as a struggle for rights that expands Marx’s terrain of political economy, and Polanyi’s concept of anthropological space that expands the conceptual space of economic analysis of classical Marxism. The purpose of the paper is to gain a measure of understanding of the links that obtain between conceptual apparatuses of leading intellectuals and global transformations in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly since these intellectuals developed their ideas relatively independently from the structures of organized knowledge production of universities and academies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript