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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 3 page research paper that investigates the central thesis of Karl Polanyi (1944) in his landmark book The Great Transformation, which is his concept of "embeddedness." The writer defines "embeddedness" and discusses it against the historical backdrop described by Polanyi, which details the effects of the nineteenth century transformation to a self-regulating market economy. No additional sources cited.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_khpoly1.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
thought has been predicated upon the concept of an economy as an interdependent series of markets that adjust automatically to issues of supply and demand through the price mechanism. While
economists acknowledge that governments may be called upon from time-to-time to facilitate matters in overcoming obstacles when markets fail, basically, they still adhere to the concept of an economy as
self-regulating. Polanyis purpose in this text is to demonstrate that this conceptualization differs markedly from reality. Prior to the nineteenth century, Polanyi argues that human economies were embedded within their
societies. Economic theory presents economies as autonomous, but Polanyi argues that this is not the case, but rather that they are subordinated to other social institutions and consideration such as
politics and religion. Polanyi argues that that the thesis for his work is that the "self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia...(and) could not exist for any length of time without
annihilating the human and natural substance of society" (1944, p. 3). Prior to the nineteenth century, Polanyi asserts that human economies were always embedded within their societies. Polanyi writes: Ultimately
that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of
society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system (p. 57). (All references refer to this
source). Polanyi pictures embedded markets, that is, the market pattern before the nineteenth century, as being "absorbed in the social system" and "whatever principle of behavior predominated
in the economy," which was always found to be compatible with this pattern (p. 68). Centralized administration grew up with the presence of expanding markets. "Regulation and markets, in effect,
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