This edited volume explores the rise of regulatory initiatives that are catalyzed by citizens in association with business, often in transnational contexts that cross multiple levels of governance and that work in ways that confound traditional distinctions between state and market. The volume characterizes this as “the rise of a social sphere that regulates at the interstices of states and markets” (p. 3). The key concern that threads the collection is an exploration of “how social norms, practices, actors and institutions frame economic transactions, and thereby regulate economic and social risks generated by and for business, states and citizens” (p. 4). The sub-title of the book—“rethinking economy-society interactions”—alludes to the extended engagement undertaken by the book with the recent revival of scholarly interest in Karl Polanyi's work on these interactions, beginning with a long introductory chapter exploring this literature and bringing it into a nuanced dialogue with literature on regulation.
As this overview suggests, the book makes two key contributions to the literature on regulation. First, it places civil society (which is defined to include private, commercial actors) at the conceptual centre of its analysis of regulation. Second, it explores the ongoing relevance of (including challenges to) Polanyian approaches to political economy, given the rise of both risk regulation and transnational governance. Together these two lines of contribution bring into sharp relief across all the chapters two particular facets of the process of embedding economic relationships in social ones: political contestation, and institutional path-dependence. In line with these conceptual emphases, the resulting book is detailed, nuanced, and contextual, rewarding a close reading and transmitting considerable learning about some quite highly technical policy areas.
After the introduction, the remaining chapters are organized in three sections. The first has two chapters devoted to conceptual and theoretical issues. Alexander Ebner's stimulating contribution is important for the book as a whole, providing a historically sensitive, detailed account of Polanyi's thought and its relevance to transnational economic activity in the present time. Christopher Decker unpacks the methodology of contemporary economics to mount an argument that the discipline has evolved to address at least some of Polanyi's critique, primarily through developments in behavioural economics. Some of the later chapters, such Elen Stokes’ chapter on nanotechnology regulation, illustrate ways in which this has occurred, while noting (as Decker does too) the limitations that remain.
Part Two of the book contains two chapters that focus directly on the capacity of a “social sphere” to regulate corporate actors. Fiona Haines and Samantha Balaton-Chrimes explore the regulatory role that export credit agencies play in relation to human rights abuses in host countries, while Kate Macdonald and Shelley Marshall's chapter analyses private systems of transnational risk regulation with particular attention to global supply chains in fair trade and ethical clothing. The third and largest section of the book, although possessing a separate heading, is effectively a collection of case studies on cross-border trade in a range of contemporary policy areas: food safety, carbon markets, blood products, sovereign debt, and nanotechnology.
All seven of these chapters from one angle or another effectively explore what it means in a particular policy setting to harness the regulatory capacity of a social sphere. It is a strength of the book that all the chapters engage with Polanyi directly, though a few do so rather superficially. Many also complement their engagement with Polanyi with additional theoretical resources, ranging from nodal governance literature (Haines and Balaton-Chrimes on export credit agencies) to Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory (Bettina Lange's chapter on EU carbon markets), and from Michel Callon's account of the performativity of expertise (Liz Fisher's chapter on WTO law and transnational food safety standard-setting) to Robert Cover on narratives (Dania Thomas’ chapter on sovereign debt).
While the density of both empirical and conceptual material presented across the book makes it no easy task to draw broad conclusions, the chapters share a common thread of using their conceptual resources to overcome a key shortcoming of Polanyi's embeddedness metaphor: that is, the tension between the notion that economic activity is distinct from social action and on the other hand, always embedded in social norms and interactions. All the chapters complicate this relationship in their own way. For example, Haines and Balaton-Chrimes add nuance and complexity to the Polanyian conception of a “double movement.” The authors pluralise the notion of the “social,” pointing out that over time, tensions between promoting capital accumulation and “national interests” (often relating to domestic employment) have been complicated by the addition of human rights as a regulatory responsibility of export credit agencies. Each of these three goals has developed extended regulatory networks which obscure any simple divide between “social” and “economic.” Haines and Balaton-Chrimes also complement their engagement with Polanyi with nodal governance literature that accounts for the multi-level and networked array of regulatory actors and levels of governance that prevails in their case study.
This valuable book has a largely sociological and in places legal tone, melding the two deftly, and addressing largely European-based scholarship with assumptions of the desirability and (mostly) broad feasibility of “embedding the social” into regulation. There is little hint of deregulatory pressures in the broader political economy, or of broader disruptive forces from technology and beyond. In this sense the ‘transformations’ alluded to in the title are mainly incremental. Although the collection does challenge many assumptions about the boundaries between economy and society, there is one under-explored aspect of Polanyi's original writings (although Ebner's chapter highlights this), that could extend the transformative range of changes in contemporary regulation. That aspect concerns the way in which democratic production can contribute as much to a re-embedding counter-movement as a focus on social regulation more traditionally understood.
As just one example in this book hints at, the fair trade case study in Macdonald and Marshall's chapter highlights distinctive governance objectives that go beyond the enforcement of minimum standards more typical of the regulatory initiatives explored in this book. They show the importance in fair trade schemes of redistribution and capacity-building goals that are deployed to support broader socio-economic development and empowerment for marginalized producers. The importance, according to Ebner, in Polanyi's thinking of “a corporatist systems of industrial democracy with communal property of the means of production” (p. 49) may be in renaissance today with ‘new economy’ developments from the collaborative, solidarity and commons-based perspectives. The organisational dimensions of cooperative, user-owned production, and the regulatory frameworks that support them, could be seen as fertile extensions to the ongoing confounding of economic and social spheres in the context of regulation. A collection of essays such as this provides an ideal springboard for engaging with not only this, but the ongoing complexities of regulation in a transnational risk society.
