Retelling The Great Transformation

The final look at labor law and control involves a top-down analysis, examining the ways in which embeddedness at the national level became the stage for significant transformation. One of the signal works that raised the question of how economic activity is embedded in societal institutions and has been the touchstone of many subsequent debates is Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Social scientists of disparate intellectual persuasions credit The Great Transformation and Polanyi’s subsequent work with spurring the examination of the economy as an ‘instituted’ process. The ambiguities in Polanyi’s writings have spawned a series of debates over the intellectual lineage of his vision and its affinities with other macro perspectives on capitalist development, as well as over core concepts such as embeddedness. This chapter engages these issues in so far as they facilitate a rethinking of the narrative of the English Industrial Revolution and its consequences depicted in the The Great Transformation.

Art · Economic system · Economics · Embeddedness · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Labor Movements and Unions · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism