IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-60718-7_7.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Knowledge as a Fictitious Commodity: Insights and Limits of a Polanyian Perspective

In: Reading Karl Polanyi for the Twenty-First Century

Author

Listed:
  • Bob Jessop

Abstract

One of Polanyi’s most important contributions to critical social science was his insistence that land, labor, and money were fictitious commodities and that the liberal propensity to treat them as if they were real commodities was a major source of contradictions and crisis-tendencies in capitalist development—so great that society would eventually fight back against the environmentally and socially destructive effects of such treatment. Polanyi wrote during the epoch of industrial and financial capitalism when land, labor, and capital were considered the primary “factors of production.” Contemporary capitalism is widely seen as a knowledge-based economy (or KBE), however, on the grounds that knowledge has become the most important factor of production and the key to economic competitiveness. This raises interesting questions as to whether knowledge is also a fictitious commodity, whether it has been disembedded from wider social relations, and, if so, whether its disembedding and fictitious commodification also entail a “double movement.” This chapter explores these questions and deploys the answers to interrogate Polanyi’s analysis of the other fictitious commodities.

Suggested Citation

  • Bob Jessop, 2007. "Knowledge as a Fictitious Commodity: Insights and Limits of a Polanyian Perspective," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Reading Karl Polanyi for the Twenty-First Century, chapter 6, pages 115-133, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-60718-7_7
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230607187_7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sonja Novkovic, 2022. "Cooperative identity as a yardstick for transformative change," Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 93(2), pages 313-336, June.
    2. Troy, Irene & Werle, Raymund, 2008. "Uncertainty and the market for patents," MPIfG Working Paper 08/2, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    3. Zygmuntowski, Jan J. & Zoboli, Laura & Nemitz, Paul, 2021. "Embedding European values in data governance: A case for public data commons," Internet Policy Review: Journal on Internet Regulation, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin, vol. 10(3), pages 1-29.
    4. Christian Berndt & Marion Werner & Víctor Ramiro Fernández, 2020. "Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(1), pages 216-236, February.
    5. Danielle Guizzo & Iara Vigo de Lima, 2017. "Polanyi and Foucault on the Issue of Market in Classical Political Economy," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 49(1), pages 100-113, March.
    6. Matthew Thompson & Vicky Nowak & Alan Southern & Jackie Davies & Peter Furmedge, 2020. "Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(6), pages 1171-1194, September.
    7. Jun Zhang, 2017. "Commodifying art, Chinese style: The making of China’s visual art market," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(9), pages 2025-2045, September.
    8. Faulconbridge, James R. & Muzio, Daniel, 2020. "Karl Polanyi on strategy: The effects of culture, morality and double-movements on embedded strategy," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-60718-7_7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.