The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. Catherine J. Turco. Columbia University Press. 2016.

‘Empowered workforce’, ‘flat organisation structures’: we’ve all heard the empty buzzwords and latest fads to improve office productivity. When new initiatives are implemented there is often little change at the coalface for employees and minimal rewards to a company’s bottom line. Refreshingly, Catherine J. Turco’s study of a US social marketing company (which retains anonymity throughout the book as ‘TechCo’) reveals a business operating in a radical manner through its use of social media to discuss decisions and plan work. Building on ten months of fieldwork diligently interviewing and observing workers both in and out the workplace, Turco vividly writes in The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media about the unique problems of pursuing radical openness, such as not having a Human Resources (HR) department and publishing details of executive pay packages.

What does it mean to be a ‘conversational firm’? TechCo uses multiple communication channels (chat forums, a wiki, large open meetings) to leverage collective wisdom from its hundreds of employees to confront market and internal challenges. A vocal culture pervades TechCo, in which employees feel emboldened to speak out. This is most notably demonstrated in employees posting ideas and critiquing others’ thoughts on the company’s collaborative web-based forum (the wiki). There, the lowest-rung employees comment on executives’ posts and proposals, whilst high echelon employees reciprocate.

It is critical to understand nonetheless that in a conversational firm such as TechCo, communication rights do not correlate to decision-making rights, and employees at TechCo in general understand and are happy with this arrangement. As one employee states: ‘Ideally, I want a decision to come from the top down but with input having been encouraged and elicited from throughout the chain.’ Interestingly, Turco proposes that this could be a quirk of middle-class millennials brought up to be vocal on instant messengers, but with a ‘highly structured upbringing designed to advance their personal and professional development’.

Image Credit: (verlaciudad CC BY SA 2.0)

Desire for structure is also the backdrop to an engrossing chapter in Turco’s study: the pursuit of operating without a HR department. When Turco met Eric and Anil (TechCo’s founders) for the first time, Anil declared, ‘I have a visceral hatred of HR.’ About six months before Turco commenced her fieldwork, TechCo hired a professional HR manager to build much-needed HR functionality. Eric and Anil did not compromise on their post-bureaucratic vision easily: TechCo operated until it was five years old with nearly 400 employees without a HR manager, department or formal processes. This meant employees were plagued by issues such as a lack of standardisation in performance reviews and no consistent maternity leave policy. TechCo’s open culture of surveys, meetings and wiki discussions eventually won the day in persuading Eric and Anil of the need for HR.

Although not fully acknowledged by Turco, there are areas where communication and decision-making rights can significantly overlap. This passage is particularly powerful as Turco explores different perspectives of TechCo’s growing pains. While ethnographies of workplaces can become hamstrung by focusing on one segment of a workforce (frequently either upper management or workers) in a bid to not appear as a ‘double-agent’, Turco avoids this false dilemma well in giving understanding to the hopes and fears of TechCo’s founders, management and general employees.

A particularly intriguing mode of distributing decision-making rights is the policy of ‘use good judgment’. Shortened to ‘UGJ’, this means the distribution of broad freedoms and avoidance of micro-management. UGJ has become applicable to many areas of employees’ work, whether it be answering calls from clients (usually a receiver of a call in a normal company would be given a script; instead, at TechCo, it is UGJ that is the defining mantra), taking as much holiday time off as desired or smaller (but delectable) liberties, such as free (and always available) beer in the office for employees to drink whenever they want.

However, two novel problems occur with this policy – the first being a disparity in decision-making between different employees over work matters (one person’s UGJ may well be the opposite of another’s UGJ), with managers using UGJ to pass off difficult decision-making to other employees. As one manager candidly admits: ‘UGJ is a way for people at my level to avoid making decisions.’ The second quandary is that some employees are able to live more UGJ than others: for example, engineers with prior technical experience were able to exercise UGJ to greater levels.

TechCo’s idiosyncratic environment also requires a very specific type of person to succeed (millennial, extrovert, thick-skinned, obsessive), making hiring a critical process. It is perhaps churlish, but I am fascinated to hear more insights on recruitment and integration from the TechCo hiring manager who explains: ‘We rarely hire people from other places, and when we do, their experience is discounted. I have to coach people not to talk about their experience.’ The frequently cult-like atmosphere of TechCo could potentially make transition from the wider world to TechCo life difficult, or perhaps not if young recruits have little experience and are therefore more malleable. This transition is certainly ripe for further exploration; equally, more questions could be asked of how work-life balance is managed, if at all, at TechCo. The reader sees hints at potential failure in achieving this balance with the failing maternity leave standardisation as well as the relegation of some employees to ‘second-class citizens’ – a term used directly by several TechCo employees – when it came to control over time and schedules. The latter phenomenon has occurred because some roles in TechCo allow for more flexibility over work schedules than others: customer support and entry-level sales reps cannot by the nature of their work get the same level of flexibility in vacations as engineers. The openness of the conversational firm makes this inequality hard to ignore as vacation requests are available for all TechCo personnel to see on the company wiki and employees discuss their vacation plans in TechCo chat rooms.

The book is an excellent addition to the field of publications like Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations, gaining an empathetic understanding of how grand communication ideas like a conversational firm can affect employees in the smallest ways. Turco accompanies this emotional analysis with rigorous academic context, but this does not impede accessibility for more lay readers. A particular gem of the book is the methodological appendix at the end: here, the reader learns about the dilemmas of writing – for example, should TechCo ever be de-anonymised post-publishing? – and Turco brings to life her experience, whilst also briefly scraping away at the problem of integration for newcomers: ‘I am an introvert who craves structure and routine, and I was operating inside a company that privileged communication over control and had a unique tolerance for disorder and chaos.’

One of the great strengths of Turco’s book is emphasising the understated power of having a voice. One may not always have demands respected, but to have a voice, be listened to and consulted before a decision is made is important to people. Social media has given the opportunity to do this in the workplace, and in the wider world if used correctly. On the other hand, it can be a tool to buttress power and not engage, a prime example being Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a broadcasting tool instead of engaging in conversational democracy. TechCo’s iconoclasts give some hope that conversation does not need to fizzle out, and that now more than ever there are more opportunities for it to occur – all that is required is the will to speak and listen.

The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. Catherine J. Turco. Columbia University Press. 2016.

‘Empowered workforce’, ‘flat organisation structures’: we’ve all heard the empty buzzwords and latest fads to improve office productivity. When new initiatives are implemented there is often little change at the coalface for employees and minimal rewards to a company’s bottom line. Refreshingly, Catherine J. Turco’s study of a US social marketing company (which retains anonymity throughout the book as ‘TechCo’) reveals a business operating in a radical manner through its use of social media to discuss decisions and plan work. Building on ten months of fieldwork diligently interviewing and observing workers both in and out the workplace, Turco vividly writes in The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media about the unique problems of pursuing radical openness, such as not having a Human Resources (HR) department and publishing details of executive pay packages.

What does it mean to be a ‘conversational firm’? TechCo uses multiple communication channels (chat forums, a wiki, large open meetings) to leverage collective wisdom from its hundreds of employees to confront market and internal challenges. A vocal culture pervades TechCo, in which employees feel emboldened to speak out. This is most notably demonstrated in employees posting ideas and critiquing others’ thoughts on the company’s 

collaborative web-based forum (the wiki). There, the lowest-rung employees comment on executives’ posts and proposals, whilst high echelon employees reciprocate.

It is critical to understand nonetheless that in a conversational firm such as TechCo, communication rights do not correlate to decision-making rights, and employees at TechCo in general understand and are happy with this arrangement. As one employee states: ‘Ideally, I want a decision to come from the top down but with input having been encouraged and elicited from throughout the chain.’ Interestingly, Turco proposes that this could be a quirk of middle-class millennials brought up to be vocal on instant messengers, but with a ‘highly structured upbringing designed to advance their personal and professional development’.
Image Credit: (verlaciudad CC BY SA 2.0)

Desire for structure is also the backdrop to an engrossing chapter in Turco’s study: the pursuit of operating without a HR department. When Turco met Eric and Anil (TechCo’s founders) for the first time, Anil declared, ‘I have a visceral hatred of HR.’ About six months before Turco commenced her fieldwork, TechCo hired a professional HR manager to build much-needed HR functionality. Eric and Anil did not compromise on their post-bureaucratic vision easily: TechCo operated until it was five years old with nearly 400 employees without a HR manager, department or formal processes. This meant employees were plagued by issues such as a lack of standardisation in performance reviews and no consistent maternity leave policy. TechCo’s open culture of surveys, meetings and wiki discussions eventually won the day in persuading Eric and Anil of the need for HR.

Although not fully acknowledged by Turco, there are areas where communication and decision-making rights can significantly overlap. This passage is particularly powerful as Turco explores different perspectives of TechCo’s growing pains. While ethnographies of workplaces can become hamstrung by focusing on one segment of a workforce (frequently either upper management or workers) in a bid to not appear as a ‘double-agent’, Turco avoids this false dilemma well in giving understanding to the hopes and fears of TechCo’s founders, management and general employees.

A particularly intriguing mode of distributing decision-making rights is the policy of ‘use good judgment’. Shortened to ‘UGJ’, this means the distribution of broad freedoms and avoidance of micro-management. UGJ has become applicable to many areas of employees’ work, whether it be answering calls from clients (usually a receiver of a call in a normal company would be given a script; instead, at TechCo, it is UGJ that is the defining mantra), taking as much holiday time off as desired or smaller (but delectable) liberties, such as free (and always available) beer in the office for employees to drink whenever they want.

However, two novel problems occur with this policy – the first being a disparity in decision-making between different employees over work matters (one person’s UGJ may well be the opposite of another’s UGJ), with managers using UGJ to pass off difficult decision-making to other employees. As one manager candidly admits: ‘UGJ is a way for people at my level to avoid making decisions.’ The second quandary is that some employees are able to live more UGJ than others: for example, engineers with prior technical experience were able to exercise UGJ to greater levels.

TechCo’s idiosyncratic environment also requires a very specific type of person to succeed (millennial, extrovert, thick-skinned, obsessive), making hiring a critical process. It is perhaps churlish, but I am fascinated to hear more insights on recruitment and integration from the TechCo hiring manager who explains: ‘We rarely hire people from other places, and when we do, their experience is discounted. I have to coach people not to talk about their experience.’ The frequently cult-like atmosphere of TechCo could potentially make transition from the wider world to TechCo life difficult, or perhaps not if young recruits have little experience and are therefore more malleable. This transition is certainly ripe for further exploration; equally, more questions could be asked of how work-life balance is managed, if at all, at TechCo. The reader sees hints at potential failure in achieving this balance with the failing maternity leave standardisation as well as the relegation of some employees to ‘second-class citizens’ – a term used directly by several TechCo employees – when it came to control over time and schedules. The latter phenomenon has occurred because some roles in TechCo allow for more flexibility over work schedules than others: customer support and entry-level sales reps cannot by the nature of their work get the same level of flexibility in vacations as engineers. The openness of the conversational firm makes this inequality hard to ignore as vacation requests are available for all TechCo personnel to see on the company wiki and employees discuss their vacation plans in TechCo chat rooms.

The book is an excellent addition to the field of publications like Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations, gaining an empathetic understanding of how grand communication ideas like a conversational firm can affect employees in the smallest ways. Turco accompanies this emotional analysis with rigorous academic context, but this does not impede accessibility for more lay readers. A particular gem of the book is the methodological appendix at the end: here, the reader learns about the dilemmas of writing – for example, should TechCo ever be de-anonymised post-publishing? – and Turco brings to life her experience, whilst also briefly scraping away at the problem of integration for newcomers: ‘I am an introvert who craves structure and routine, and I was operating inside a company that privileged communication over control and had a unique tolerance for disorder and chaos.’

One of the great strengths of Turco’s book is emphasising the understated power of having a voice. One may not always have demands respected, but to have a voice, be listened to and consulted before a decision is made is important to people. Social media has given the opportunity to do this in the workplace, and in the wider world if used correctly. On the other hand, it can be a tool to buttress power and not engage, a prime example being Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a broadcasting tool instead of engaging in conversational democracy. TechCo’s iconoclasts give some hope that conversation does not need to fizzle out, and that now more than ever there are more opportunities for it to occur – all that is required is the will to speak and listen.

Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left. Gareth Dale. Columbia University Press. 2016.

Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left. Gareth Dale. Columbia University Press. 2016.

In Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, Gareth Dale continues his longstanding intellectual engagement with one of the twentieth-century’s leading theorists of the market economy in a biography that traces the development of Polanyi’s thought against the backdrop of his life. While the book may not fully grapple with the contradictions that emerge within the account,Stephen Darori praises this laudable and definitive work that is likely to inspire a new generation of activist scholars through its exploration of Polanyi’s life and times. 

It is unlikely that any social scientist today will be unfamiliar with at least some of the works of Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), the social historian of the market economy whose biography, authored by Gareth Dale, was recently published. For the uninitiated, Dale’s previous book Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market serves as a perfect introduction. In this he critically examined the Polanyian oeuvre and the main concepts emerging from it – such as the distinction between ‘embedded’ and ‘disembedded’ economies; the ‘ports of trade’ characteristic of the former and the ‘fictitious commodities’ dominating the latter; the ‘economistic fallacy’ by which mainstream economics has linked market behaviour with human nature; and, perhaps most famously, the Toynbee-inspired postulate of the ‘double movement’, in which the expansion of marketisation into new areas of life necessarily triggers a protectionist reaction that safeguards the survival of society.

Nevertheless, despite the conviction with which this critical introduction thrust Polanyi to the forefront of socio-economic theory, Dale felt obliged to admit the dilemma he encountered while writing the book: namely, that ‘a fully developed account of Karl Polanyi’s work requires a close look at his life’ as well as an understanding of ‘that ‘‘Great Generation’’ of Jewish Budapest intellectuals to which he belonged’ (The Limits of the Market, 6). A Life on the Left, alongside shorter biographical articles and an edited collection of Polanyi’s hitherto unpublished works (Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings), takes up this challenge.

There is no nutshell that could accommodate Karl Polanyi’s eventful life, and this becomes apparent from the pages of Dale’s biography. Born in Vienna ‘of liberal minded Jewish parents of the upper classes […] of German culture and western education’ – in Polanyi’s own words (11) – he spent most of his youth in Budapest. In his formative years in the Hungarian capital, Polanyi became involved in various organisational, educational and political activities, and developed the Christian socialist worldview that he would espouse, in one form or another, throughout his lifetime.

Emerging from the turmoil of the First World War into a new life in ‘Red Vienna’, he began a fulfilling journalistic career and experienced for a whole decade the possibility of social democracy, while developing more nuanced guild socialist arguments through direct polemics with Ludwig von Mises and other notable thinkers of the Austrian School. At the end of 1933 ­– when ‘Vienna was Red no more’  – he resettled to Britain. It was there that he ‘arrived at the thesis for which he was to make his name’ 

The manuscript of his magnum opus, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, was completed while in exile in the United States during World War II. The book, however, ‘gained only a ‘‘marginal’’ place in mainstream and leftist social analysis [in the US], while in Britain it was ‘‘greeted with a deafening silence’”. It would only gain a larger readership in the 1980s, but ‘that turn of fortune lies outwith the scope of this biography’ . Unable to find appropriate employment in Britain after the war despite several attempts, Polanyi eventually settled at Columbia University, where he developed a new body of work on the ‘substantive economics’ of pre-capitalist societies. His intellectual story ends with the address delivered in the autumn of 1963 at the University of Budapest: ‘the same institution that had expelled him from its student body nearly six decades earlier and from whose podium he had denounced the rising communist tide in early 1919’ .

Around this flimsy skeleton and across seven well-rounded chapters Dale builds up a sense of a person not in isolation, but rather as embedded in intricate familial and intellectual relationships. Based on substantial archival research in Montréal, Chicago, New York, Oxford and Budapest, supplemented with interviews with Polanyi’s family members, friends and former students, the book can safely be considered the definitive biography of Polanyi, unlikely to become rivalled by any other that may emerge on the wave of Polanyi’s increasing popularity. The book not only benefits from its author’s deep familiarity and sympathy with Polanyi’s work, but also from Dale’s skilful pen. His masterful balancing of chronological and topical exposition should satisfy most of his readers, while the sparse and well-placed apparent trivia – such as the humorous illustration of Polanyi’s limited cookery skills (148) – will offer a moment of repose to the reader, before they begin to assess the broader significance of such details.

Perhaps the only times when the text leaves us expecting more are the references to ‘contradictions’ in Polanyi’s thought and actions, which remain hanging in the narrative as impenetrable black boxes. Such instances will remind the reader that:

the many unresolved contradictions in his work […] such puzzles and paradoxes provided the initial impetus for the writing of this biography, in part because to understand them requires a thinking through of Polanyi’s life and times, but also because it is the tensions and contradictions in his personal commitments and his oeuvre that give them their engagingly maverick character .

That these ‘contradictions’ remain unpacked in the biography may be due to Dale’s treatment of Polanyi as a Lukacsian ‘typical character’: one who ‘is not the average representative of a social class or a historical movement nor an allegorical avatar but a person in whom general aspects common to the mass are synthesized with the peculiarities of their own singular life story’. Insofar as Polanyi’s ‘individuality [is] condensing the defining elements of a movement or era’ , it could hardly be reduced to anything but contradictory particles.

Rather than an exercise in elucidating individual conflicts in Polanyi’s life and work, A Life on the Left should be seen as another laudable step in Dale’s intellectual struggle to reveal the dangers of neoliberal market fundamentalism and to delineate the possibilities of a ‘countermovement’. Polanyi’s life is, above all else, desired to inspire a new generation of activist scholars who will see in him an intellectual hero, one able to unify around a higher cause voices on the Left as yet disjointed by various ‘tensions and contradictions’. As such, the book is anything but an antiquarian undertaking, inasmuch as Polanyi’s work is far from merely historical. ‘Despite common misconceptions’ – Dale reminds us – The Great Transformation in the title of Polanyi’s now famous book ‘alludes to his prognostication, not to any historical sociology’ . And yet, as Dale has argued elsewhere, the primary significance of Polanyi’s work lies not in ‘any one or other of his specific theses’, but in ‘the general example it sets’ through ‘the sort of critically engaged social science of which Karl Polanyi is an outstanding representative’ (The Limits of the Market,).

Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left. Gareth Dale. Columbia University Press. 2016.

Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left. Gareth Dale. Columbia University Press. 2016.

In Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, Gareth Dale continues his longstanding intellectual engagement with one of the twentieth-century’s leading theorists of the market economy in a biography that traces the development of Polanyi’s thought against the backdrop of his life. While the book may not fully grapple with the contradictions that emerge within the account,Stephen Darori praises this laudable and definitive work that is likely to inspire a new generation of activist scholars through its exploration of Polanyi’s life and times. 

It is unlikely that any social scientist today will be unfamiliar with at least some of the works of Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), the social historian of the market economy whose biography, authored by Gareth Dale, was recently published. For the uninitiated, Dale’s previous book Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market serves as a perfect introduction. In this he critically examined the Polanyian oeuvre and the main concepts emerging from it – such as the distinction between ‘embedded’ and ‘disembedded’ economies; the ‘ports of trade’ characteristic of the former and the ‘fictitious commodities’ dominating the latter; the ‘economistic fallacy’ by which mainstream economics has linked market behaviour with human nature; and, perhaps most famously, the Toynbee-inspired postulate of the ‘double movement’, in which the expansion of marketisation into new areas of life necessarily triggers a protectionist reaction that safeguards the survival of society.

Nevertheless, despite the conviction with which this critical introduction thrust Polanyi to the forefront of socio-economic theory, Dale felt obliged to admit the dilemma he encountered while writing the book: namely, that ‘a fully developed account of Karl Polanyi’s work requires a close look at his life’ as well as an understanding of ‘that ‘‘Great Generation’’ of Jewish Budapest intellectuals to which he belonged’ (The Limits of the Market, 6). A Life on the Left, alongside shorter biographical articles and an edited collection of Polanyi’s hitherto unpublished works (Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings), takes up this challenge.

There is no nutshell that could accommodate Karl Polanyi’s eventful life, and this becomes apparent from the pages of Dale’s biography. Born in Vienna ‘of liberal minded Jewish parents of the upper classes […] of German culture and western education’ – in Polanyi’s own words (11) – he spent most of his youth in Budapest. In his formative years in the Hungarian capital, Polanyi became involved in various organisational, educational and political activities, and developed the Christian socialist worldview that he would espouse, in one form or another, throughout his lifetime.

Emerging from the turmoil of the First World War into a new life in ‘Red Vienna’, he began a fulfilling journalistic career and experienced for a whole decade the possibility of social democracy, while developing more nuanced guild socialist arguments through direct polemics with Ludwig von Mises and other notable thinkers of the Austrian School. At the end of 1933 ­– when ‘Vienna was Red no more’  – he resettled to Britain. It was there that he ‘arrived at the thesis for which he was to make his name’ 

The manuscript of his magnum opus, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, was completed while in exile in the United States during World War II. The book, however, ‘gained only a ‘‘marginal’’ place in mainstream and leftist social analysis [in the US], while in Britain it was ‘‘greeted with a deafening silence’”. It would only gain a larger readership in the 1980s, but ‘that turn of fortune lies outwith the scope of this biography’ . Unable to find appropriate employment in Britain after the war despite several attempts, Polanyi eventually settled at Columbia University, where he developed a new body of work on the ‘substantive economics’ of pre-capitalist societies. His intellectual story ends with the address delivered in the autumn of 1963 at the University of Budapest: ‘the same institution that had expelled him from its student body nearly six decades earlier and from whose podium he had denounced the rising communist tide in early 1919’ .

Around this flimsy skeleton and across seven well-rounded chapters Dale builds up a sense of a person not in isolation, but rather as embedded in intricate familial and intellectual relationships. Based on substantial archival research in Montréal, Chicago, New York, Oxford and Budapest, supplemented with interviews with Polanyi’s family members, friends and former students, the book can safely be considered the definitive biography of Polanyi, unlikely to become rivalled by any other that may emerge on the wave of Polanyi’s increasing popularity. The book not only benefits from its author’s deep familiarity and sympathy with Polanyi’s work, but also from Dale’s skilful pen. His masterful balancing of chronological and topical exposition should satisfy most of his readers, while the sparse and well-placed apparent trivia – such as the humorous illustration of Polanyi’s limited cookery skills (148) – will offer a moment of repose to the reader, before they begin to assess the broader significance of such details.

Perhaps the only times when the text leaves us expecting more are the references to ‘contradictions’ in Polanyi’s thought and actions, which remain hanging in the narrative as impenetrable black boxes. Such instances will remind the reader that:

the many unresolved contradictions in his work […] such puzzles and paradoxes provided the initial impetus for the writing of this biography, in part because to understand them requires a thinking through of Polanyi’s life and times, but also because it is the tensions and contradictions in his personal commitments and his oeuvre that give them their engagingly maverick character .

That these ‘contradictions’ remain unpacked in the biography may be due to Dale’s treatment of Polanyi as a Lukacsian ‘typical character’: one who ‘is not the average representative of a social class or a historical movement nor an allegorical avatar but a person in whom general aspects common to the mass are synthesized with the peculiarities of their own singular life story’. Insofar as Polanyi’s ‘individuality [is] condensing the defining elements of a movement or era’ , it could hardly be reduced to anything but contradictory particles.

Rather than an exercise in elucidating individual conflicts in Polanyi’s life and work, A Life on the Left should be seen as another laudable step in Dale’s intellectual struggle to reveal the dangers of neoliberal market fundamentalism and to delineate the possibilities of a ‘countermovement’. Polanyi’s life is, above all else, desired to inspire a new generation of activist scholars who will see in him an intellectual hero, one able to unify around a higher cause voices on the Left as yet disjointed by various ‘tensions and contradictions’. As such, the book is anything but an antiquarian undertaking, inasmuch as Polanyi’s work is far from merely historical. ‘Despite common misconceptions’ – Dale reminds us – The Great Transformation in the title of Polanyi’s now famous book ‘alludes to his prognostication, not to any historical sociology’ . And yet, as Dale has argued elsewhere, the primary significance of Polanyi’s work lies not in ‘any one or other of his specific theses’, but in ‘the general example it sets’ through ‘the sort of critically engaged social science of which Karl Polanyi is an outstanding representative’ (The Limits of the Market,).