for presentation at the mit-sloan organizational studies...

Retelling Polanyi’s The Great Transformation

For Presentation at the MIT-Sloan Organizational Studies Group

Marc W. Steinberg

203 Wright Hall

Smith College

Northampton, MA 01063 [email protected]

My thanks to Malcolm Chase, Santhi Hejeebu, Lars Mjøset, and Gunnar Olofsson for providing

me with their writings.

Retelling/ASA Version Draft #1 [2]

Abstract

In this paper I partly retell Polanyi’s narrative of the industrial revolution found in his

Great Transformation. I discuss how new labor laws consolidated in the 19th century created a

legal structure of coerced contractual labor, that did not fit the ideals of free market economics.

My retelling focuses on how capitalists in some industries relied on legal coercion of their

workers as a means of discipline and labor process control. Through this retelling I demonstrate

that Polanyi was still beholden to neo-classical economics in his historical account, errantly

seeing the rise of a free market in labor with the Poor Law reforms of 1834 when in fact no such

freedom existed. Therefore, he could not provide a fully-fledged institutional analysis of

economic embeddedness that lies at the core of his theory. To realize a fully-developed

institutional analysis I argue that we need to bring class conflict back into the narrative of

institutional change through an analysis of legality and its transformation. I partly map out the

outlines of a revised institutional analysis that places emphasis on the spatial organization of

power, with ‘stateness’ conceptualized as a variable in which political power (and more

especially authority) is scrutinized as historically accreted institutional structures. I also

emphasize the historically specific role of the ‘local state’ in this narrative.


Retelling The Great Transformation

This paper is part of a larger project that analyzes the ways in which law was embedded

in the workplace in Victorian England. In the research I seek to demonstrate through several

case studies that employers drew upon legal constructions of the employment relationship to

maintain their control over the workplace and the labor supply. There was wide variation in the

degree to which employers in England had recourse to the law, and I argue that through path-

dependent processes some employers in particular regions and industries came to use the law

as part of their routine practices of exercising authority.

In a larger sense part of the argument is for a more robust institutional analysis of the

legal foundations of employment in the Industrial Revolution. Despite the extensive research

that has been conducted over the last four decades which questions the classic origins story of

the Industrial Revolution it still persists as an ur-history of the rise of a modern society and

economy. No less than the doyen of this history, David Landes, wrote in his sweeping account

of Western economic modernism:

Britain, moreover, was not just any nation. This was a precociously modern, industrial

nation. Remember that the salient characteristic of such a society is the ability to

transform itself and adapt to new things and ways, so that the content of ‘modern’ and

‘industrial’ is always changing. One key area of change: the increasing freedom and

security of the people. To this day, ironically, the British term themselves subjects of the

crown, although they have long—longer than anywhere—been citizens. Nothing did

more for enterprise.1

And in reaffirming the classic tale he argues,

When I was a student learned that homo sapiens is an animal species of single origin: all

humans today, of whatever color or size, are descended from a common ancestor, split

off from a larger hominid genus some millions of years ago. The same is true of the


species industrial society. All examples, however, different, are descended from the

common British predecessor.2

In addition a variety of eminent economics and pundits still draw on part of this origins

story to emphasis the legal foundations of free exchange and the non-interference of the state in

economic transactions. In this part of the tale the English state, while protecting private

property, provided relatively capacious room for all actors to maximize their maximize their

activities in the market, leading to a virtuous cycle of development.3 However, as I discuss

below, this assumption concerning legal freedom for labor is far off the mark, and thus we need

to re-examine the role of the law in England’s economic development.

And this is where the work of Karl Polanyi, especially The Great Transformation, fits into

my project. Many social scientists now look to this narrative of the rise of free-market industrial

capitalism and the reaction against it as a classic counter-template to explain both these

ongoing transformations and the reactions to them.4 The GT is taken as exemplary of Polanyi’s

master concept of institutional embeddedness and of the centrality of politics in the construction

of market systems. However, relatively little scrutiny has been paid to Polanyi’s account of

nineteenth-century British history, even though his story of the ‘double movement’ has become

a metanarrative for contemporary critics of free-market fundamentalism. In some respects this

is a problem of the history of the Industrial Revolution redux, as it rehearses the ways in which

modernization theory was inductively constructed from a different narrative of these events.5

Just as in the latter case, however, Polanyi’s story of the Great Transformation needs to be

reconsidered.

Therefore, in this paper I propose a partial retelling of The Great Transformation. I

return to the development of 19th-century English industrial capitalism and propose a revised

account of role of class conflicts and the legal system in the transformation of market, economy

and society. My aim is to preserve Polanyi’s cogent concern with the role of institutions, but to


do so with renewed attention to the ways in which class interests and legality were tightly

intertwined in the battles over the construction of a market society. In the end I hope to

provide a narrative that emphasizes the role of legal institutions in the Industrial Revolution, but

in the process asks us to reformulate all of our standard stories.

The Great Transformation, The Rise of the Market Society and the Double Movement

The GT of course is not solely about the rise of market society, but a more sweeping

account of what Polanyi takes to be a set of unprecedented institutional changes that restructed

the international system into the twentieth century. Here however, I concentrate on the first part

of his narrative, the unique historical creation of a market society in England. As Margaret

Somers and others have emphasized, Polanyi finds the underlying impetus for these

transformations not in the rise of modern capitalism, as for Marx, but in industrialization itself.6

More specifically, Polanyi’s obliquely stated causal analysis is a technological determinist

account of societal change that occurs spontaneously with the rise of the factory system.7

Industrial production transformed the functioning of the economy, installing commerce as the

servant of industry where the relationship historically had been the reverse. To meet the

demands of this new master land, labor and money were made subject to market dictates. 8 In

Polanyi’s perspective they were not products of human industry; and thus became “fictitious

commodities.”9 This prolonged process was part of a greater transformation by which social

relations themselves became embedded in the market system, an inversion of the historical

relationship between the two.10

By Polanyi’s account the most difficult part of this transformation was the

commodification of labor, a protracted and sometimes tempestuous process that put the state

and political action at the center of the birthing of a market society. Initially society reacted

against the creation of a free labor market with the state’s construction of the Speenhamland

system. However, as Polanyi himself tersely notes, “In the long run the result was ghastly,” only

furthering pauperism. 11 The state, accepting what political economists regarded as the brute


facts of nature, instituted sweeping changes in the social welfare system with the New Poor Law

in 1834, abolishing such subsidies, imposing stringent and punitive standards for workhouse

assistance, and in the process created a market society.12 Critically, this involved the

application of free market principles to labor with the state receding from the employment

relationship.

…justice and law, which were embodied in the institutional structure of earlier societies,

had worn thin under the market organization of society. A man’ s property, his revenue

and income, the price of his wares were now ‘just’ only if they were now formed in the

market and as to law, no law really mattered except that which referred to property and

contract. The varied propertied institutions of the past and the substantive laws that

made up the constitution of the ideal polis had now no substance to work upon

(emphasis added).13

Labor was now fully commodified with the first half of the “double movement.”

Polanyi argues that the working class was not sufficiently organized to protect itself from

the deleterious effects of the labor market until the maturation of unions beginning in the

1870s.14 However, what the state had taken away the state could return, and so began the

societal reaction to the laissez-faire system in the second part of the “double movement.” A full-

fledged market society was a utopian project that would have led to economic, social and

cultural devastation. Recognizing this possibility, a variety of collective interests—including

leading politicians, members of the landed elite, working-class leaders and public intellectuals—

spontaneously forced state action to re-embed the market. Factory legislation, public health

and amenities and education reform and a host of other enactments that brought the state back

in were part of a great collectivist countermovement to protect society as a whole. In Polanyi’s

story class interests themselves were too narrow an impetus for the explanation of such long-

term macro-social changes. Moreover, the crisis precipitated by the attempt to institute a


market society was not primarily economic but cultural, and thus required a societal rather than

a purely sectional countermovement.15

Problems in the Narrative

A striking feature of the reaction to Polanyi’s narrative of the rise of market society in

England is the degree to which critics from a wide array of competing perspectives concur with

his account.16 However, as Sally Randles notes, The Great Transformation precedes Polanyi’s

explicit and elaborated theory of institutional embeddedness, leading to a conceptual

unevenness in the ways in which this concept and the double movement can be read from

Polanyi’s corpus.17 Here I focus on three aspects of the narrative that require amendment, and

which, as I discuss below, augur a revision of both of the concepts of institutional

embeddedness and the double movement. I argue that the problems in Polanyi’s narrative

arise because he does not fully apply his own concept of embeddedness to the history of

industrial relations in England, an underdeveloped causal account of economic and institutional

change and a reductionist concept of the state.

A variety of scholars have debated the degree to which Polanyi offered a comprehensive

theory and analysis of the institutional embeddedness of all economic systems. Some have

claimed that Polanyi was still too beholden to classical economics in his understanding of free

markets and failed to conceptualize economic relations as necessarily embedded in wider social

relations and political processes.18 Others have seen Polanyi as consistently arguing that a free

market economy is never feasible and that all economic activity is embedded.19 There is

wisdom in both perspectives if we argue that while Polanyi’s later theoretical works pressed

forcefully for an encompassing theory of embeddedness, his early account of this process in the

GT was based in an historiography of the industrial revolution predicated on contrary

assumptions. Beholden to an historiography colored by its heritage in of nineteenth-century

economic thought, his narrative proved incapable of the intellectual separation achieved in his

subsequent writings. 20 In the next section in a partial retelling of the story I will provide a


narrative that emphasizes the embeddedness of economic processes during what Polanyi

highlights as the laissez-faire era, but with the ironic twist that it was much less structured

through free markets than he imagines.

A second set of problems in reading the GT revolve around uncertainties in the

underlying concepts of causality that explain historical changes. In both his historical narrative

and later theoretical essays this manifests itself in the absence of a coherent theory of social

change and the reification of society and the state as actors. Both critics and sympathizers alike

have noted that the initial impetus for change in Polanyi’s GT narrative is an ad hoc explanation

leaning on technological determinism. Polanyi provides no explanation for why contemporary

institutions failed to resolve the dilemmas created by the demands of an increasingly

technologically complex industrialism.21 Rather, the narrative ambiguously suggests an

inevitability of this transformation and focuses on the failed resolution to the problems of

commodifying labor with the Speenhamland system.22

Relatedly, the centrality of a spontaneous ‘societal’ reaction to the rise of the market

economy frequently hypostatizes society and the state at the expense of concrete analyses of

institutional conflict and change.23 Class interests of both workers and landowners are part of

Polanyi’s story, but he conceptualizes them largely as reflexive, non-ideological and pragmatic

responses to the disruptions of the market system, and argues that by themselves they are too

narrow to be primary explanatory factors of the countermovement. Moreover, such interests, in

the end, were not so material as they were moral and cultural, and concerned with integrity and

standing in society. 24 His alternative narrative of change, however, provides no specific

accounts of why and how these reflexive reactions against the perils of market forces are

channeled into coherent actions for institutional (or any other) change, nor how and why the

state (or any other institutions) successfully responded.25 Partly this might have been the result

of his underlying institutional theory, still developing during the time of the GT’s writing, which

focused on integration as opposed to conflict.26 Arguably this focus as well as the formalism of


Polanyi’s taxonomy that underlies his later substantive economics and his generally high level of

abstraction mitigate against a well-specified theory of institutional change, or an emphasize on

the conflicts and coercion that often are its impetus. As Mark Blyth remarks, “it is perhaps the

openness of Polanyi’s analytic that allows scholars to differ over exactly what the great

transformation actually was, which is no small consideration.”27 Thus Polanyi failed to highlight

the contradictions, tensions and struggles within institutions, and more provide a clear causal

perspective on political conflict and agency that were forces of change in the nineteenth-century

English state.28 In this sense The Great Transformation offers an historical account of concrete

institutional change without a developed perspective on such historical change.

In a lengthier version of this paper I reassess a key aspect of the Polanyi’s story

concerning societal reaction and state intervention in laissez-faire industrialism. Polanyi heralds

the rise of the Factory Acts as an exemplar of this reaction. Yet, extensive recent research on

the operation of the Acts and similar legislation thus throws a key part of Polanyi’s narrative into

doubt. 29 The factory inspectorate was never a large and robust interventionist force, its powers

actually diminished over time even as its scope spread, and it usually pursued relatively minor

penalties.30 Far from being at the vanguard of a societal countermovement, the implementation

of these laws was, as Robert Gray observes, for the 1840s and 1850s, “highly contentious,

marked by an uneven and spasmodic transition from employer resistance to ‘negotiated

compliance’, and by popular agitation which likewise challenged the terms of reference of state

officials.”31 It remained so throughout much of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the far more

important impact of the state during this period was in the ways in which it legally constructed

employment relations generally and unions specifically, and this leads to a very different story

than the one presented in the GT.

Below I offer a part of revamped narrative that addresses some of these concerns. I do

so by returning to class conflict as an important determinant of institutional change, though with

several important provisos. First, I take institutions to be the patterned set of legitimate


assumptions and the established structures and networks for action, and therefore a critical

arena in which class authority and coercion are enacted and challenged. Polanyi’s central

insight thus remains the touchstone for analysis: social action is institutionally mediated.

Second, and relatedly, class interests, consciousness and the articulation of such collective

understandings are bounded by the institutionally available cultural constructs for making sense

of the social situation. As I have argued elsewhere, class consciousness of position and conflict

has to be analyzed with careful attention to the discursive fields within which it can be

constructed.32 Third, following several of Polanyi’s sympathetic critics, we need to disaggregate

the focus on the centralized and bureaucratized state that is the assumed object of his analysis.

If an institutional analysis focuses on the potential for the exercise of power and challenges to it,

then we need to focus on the particular structures and networks in which these are actualized.33

A Retelling

In response to some of his sympathetic critics who observe that Polanyi did not fully

realize the promise of institutional analysis in the GT, my partial retelling focuses squarely on

the ways in which economic relations were always defined and mediated by the legal system. It

concentrates on the ways in which common and statutory laws, and decisions by judges and

magistrates in inferior and superior courts, played a central role in defining the market for labor.

In a reversal from Polanyi, however, I argue that it was not until the last quarter of the

nineteenth century, well beyond the heyday of laissez-faire liberalism and well into his claimed

societal reaction of the double movement, that labor becomes fully ‘commodified’. Additionally, I

assert that this inversion of Polanyi’s narrative is critical in understanding not just the labor

market, but also the ways in which institutional embeddedness and technological possibilities

interacted in the construction of the social and technical relations of production. Whereas

Polanyi rejects a focus on the production process when he eschews marxist theory, my claim

below is that the full importance and impact of institutional embeddedness can only be

appreciated by a focus on both exchange and production relations. Finally, while Polanyi’s story


of reaction centers on a spontaneous societal response in the double movement, my narrative

in the large version of this paper more directly focuses on a class struggle that was critical in

refashioning the legal institutions that defined the employment relationship, with the

transformation of labor’s legal status was union inspired and largely led against significant

resistant by some capitalists. Just as importantly, working-class organizations sought to

distance themselves as much as possible from the protective reaches of the state, once they

had established the minimum conditions for their legal integrity, opting for what has become

known as “collective laissez-faire”.

Common and Statutory Laws: Master and Servant, Combination and Conspiracy

In his overview of nineteenth-century British society Richard Price observes, “The British

state was the law, and how the law was applied determined in particular cases whether the

state was strong or weak.”34 In the case of labor control the state provided a surprisingly strong

set of instruments should employers or local officials wish to exercise them. These were not

vestiges of a feudal past, but new enactments often prompted by specific requests of

employers. From the middle of the eighteenth century until at least the last quarter of the

nineteenth they served to define what developed as the labor contract.

In his insightful analysis of the English and American labor law in the nineteenth century

Robert Steinfeld observes that the Industrial Revolution in England heralded the rise of “a form

of ‘coerced’ contractual labor” rather than free labor as we now understand it. 35 He and others

focus on the development of master and servant laws over the latter part of the eighteenth

century and early 1800s. These acts demarcated a new incursion by the state in the regulation

of employment, by broadening its scope and criminalizing misbehavior, neglect, disobedience,

improper performance and absenteeism.36 All, as Douglas Hay notes, contained “significant

new language” in defining the employment relationship and the power of the master over the

servant.37 In 1823 Parliament generalized these powers to include all categories of workers

with the exception of domestic servants and professionals. Under 4 Geo. IV c. 34 any worker


under an exclusive contract of service could be criminally prosecuted for failure to fulfill a written

contract, disobedience or misconduct, unauthorized absence, or incompetence or

misrepresentation of skill.38 These were crimes of summary jurisdiction, heard before one local

justice, and thus appeals were difficult and rare.39 Penalties included fines, abatement of wages

and up to three months imprisonment with hard labor. Under the legal understanding of the

‘entire’ contract all wages could be forfeited if a judgment for dismissal was rendered against the

worker before the completion of the contract.40 The Act also established civil recourse for

workers who were claimed unpaid wages wage payments or suffered abuse, but the trouble and

potential expense of pursuing a case could be a significant barrier. Fines for abuse or neglect

were generally no more than a few pounds. As I will discuss below, master and servant law

remained the basis for most employment relations until 1875. In my retelling of the GT I will

argue that understanding the implications of master and servant law fundamentally changes the

importance of the New Poor Law.

A second type of law, mentioned briefly by Polanyi, was that bearing on the legality of

labor unions. Polanyi correctly observes that the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800 mark the

heyday of statutory restrictions on unions and that these were repealed in 1824 and 1825 partly

under the banner of liberal political economy. However he overlooks both significant aspects of

the Combination Laws and the larger post-1825 context of the legal institutions in which unions

contended. First, the Combination Laws marked a new era in the legal control of labor and

unions in that they were the first modern general laws governing labor as a whole and the first

laws that criminalized association without also providing for wage regulation to counterbalance

this restriction on freedom.41 Second, the repeal of the Acts in 1824, while concordant with the

growing liberalism of the era, was tightly controlled by a self-styled working-class radical,

Francis Place, and his compatriot in Parliament, Joseph Hume, both enthusiasts of political

economy.42 Parliament gave its assent largely on grounds of political expediency rather than

economic doctrine.43 In fact, many political economists allied with a growing interpretation of


common law to see any combination by workers as an act of conspiracy and thus criminal by

nature.44 Repeal only legalized association for the purposes of agreement on demands for

wages and hours, the new law added significant new language regarding “molestation” and

“obstruction” that left collective action questionable. Unions themselves, as I detail in the larger

paper, only received state sanctification after a protracted class struggle.45 Thus, the laws of

the epoch, far from establishing the conditions for labor as a fictitious commodity of free

markets, created a much more complicated institutional context for labor relations.

The State and the Courts

It was not just the ‘law on the books’ that was essential in determining labor’s fate, but

the court system through which they were animated. The court system was an arcane structure

with a variety of venues, but for the purposes of this retelling the backbone of the system was

the criminal courts comprising local courts of summary jurisdiction, quarter sessions, assizes

and the King’s/Queen’s Bench.46 The latter superior courts set important legal precedents, but it

was the former local courts that were most central venues for defining the status of workers in

the economy.

While attention to state formation often focuses on the development of centralized

bureaucracies, the nineteenth-century English state was “well integrated with dense networks of

local structures upon which the actual business of government rested.”47 The ‘local state’ was

still the touchstone for state authority in the lives of working people.48 For purposes of

controlling Polanyi’s most troublesome fictitious commodity, labor, the primary site of ‘state’

governance was the local court. Justices of the Peace sitting in local or “petty” sessions had a

long history of being the front line of the English judicial system and the face of the law for most

English people.49 During the nineteenth century these local courts proliferated with the

increasing powers of town governance.50 Borough courts also were dominated increasingly by

industrialists and their allies in commerce, finance and the professions. Over the course of the

nineteenth century local courts were provided with broadened powers of summary jurisdiction


for criminal offences and many working people viewed them as part of an increasingly

oppressive system of elite control.51 The development of both these components of the legal

system was central to the control of labor by capitalists in many areas of Britain during the Great

Transformation.

A Retelling

As I have noted, Polanyi concentrates on the degradation and dehumanization of labor

through its commodification and therefore focuses on exchange relationships and the market,

much as the classical economics that he rejects. Yet an equally vital if not greater process of

struggle in diverse industries occurred in the workplace, as capitalists and workers engaged in

protracted and principled battles over control and discipline.52 Law was central in a number of

such conflicts. While Polanyi asserts that labor was becoming a ‘fictitious commodity’ within a

market society, master and servant law ensured just the opposite. In fact, the law cast most

employment relations as one of a hierarchical status arrangement of continual service, albeit

one that was contractually bound. As Deakin and Wilkinson note

“there was no general movement from status to contract at the time of industrialization,

nor does the welfare state mark a reversion to pre-modern forms. In the period of

industrialization, contract was complemented by the disciplinary code of master and

servant regime and poor law conceptions of the legal duty to work.53

The free will of liberalism and patriarchal models of inequality were wedded together: workers

were deemed to be free agents to choose employment, but in making this commitment they

bound themselves to the will of their employer.54

By the mid-Victorian period some employers drew on this legal framing of service to

legitimize their control over the workplace, and in so doing specifically deny the precepts of

political economy. The routine reliance on the law developed through path-dependent

processes as industries in specific areas grew. “Master and servant law was carefully designed


to create labor markets that were less costly, more highly disciplined, less ‘free’ than markets in

which the master’s bargain was not assisted by such terms.”55 First, the law did so by serving

as a reliable disciplinary tool absent other forms of labor control. It could be used “in terrorem,”

as a reliable cudgel for performance or to dampen dissent. 56 Second, and relatedly, the law

provided leverage against the power of skilled workers who could control the production

process. Absent technological or supervisory controls, the threat of prosecution could be a

counterweight to the control skilled workers exercised.57 Third, throughout the epoch master

and servant law was probably also capitalists’ most efficient weapon against strikes since under

the law the termination of contract required advanced notice by either party based either on

customary practices or specific agreement.58

The rise of master and servant law as a means of discipline and control was uneven

both in terms of regions and industries in which it became standard means of constructing the

employment relationship, as I note in the longer version of this paper.59 Statistics available from

Parliamentary records starting in the late 1850s and extending to the mid-1870s (when the law

was finally changed) show substantial numbers of prosecutions in a number of regions in

England, with a general upward trend up through the early 1870s.60 Hay estimates that during

the final years of the laws, when prosecutions peaked, their ratio to all theft prosecutions in

courts that covered property offenses was about 30-40%.61

Because of these laws, the New Poor Law had a potential impact on the employment

relationship that was contrary to Polanyi’s narrative. With the abolition of settlement by hiring

the legal interpretation of exclusive service was broadened from its previous narrow test of

round-the-clock availability. Thus, rather than increasingly labor mobility in a free market, it had

the effect among some groups of workers of binding them more firmly to their employers. 62

Thus, over the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century local courts of summary

jurisdiction became increasingly important venues for the enforcement of labor control and

discipline. Employers in a number of regions and industries drew on the peculiar hybrid of


service and contract in master and servant law to assert their authority in the absence of other

possible avenues of control, or because of the unique opportunities that the local bench

provided for such action. Initial successes led to more routine reliance over the decades.

These prosecutions affirmed an understanding of employment that was much more

complicated, and in some respects antithetical, to the Polanyi’s story of the transformation of

labor into a “fictitious commodity”, though they demonstrate how local institutions nonetheless

were integral to the ways in which labor was controlled both in the market and in the workplace.

As the inferior courts played an increasingly large role in employment relationships, the

superior courts also interjected their authority in defining the operations of the labor market.

Starting at mid-century, often to the consternation of both unions and Parliament, these courts

articulated decisions that often were hostile to the operations of unions, both in terms of their

legal recognition and their capacity to engage in strikes. In so doing many judges opted for an

interpretation of common law that emphasized a liberal and thus atomistic and individualist

concept of agency.

As I noted above, the Combination Laws Repeal Act of 1825 legalized combinations for

purposes of bargaining over wages and hours, but failed to wholly resolve the boundaries of

conspiracy and also had added significant new language regarding molestation and obstruction.

The government was content to leave this position well enough alone, following the nostrums of

political economy that unions would inevitably fail to break the iron laws of the market and the

wage fund.63 This remained an uneasy status quo until the 1850s when the courts began to

adopt more explicit and expansive interpretations of conspiracy. Collective actions designed to

pressure employers or prospective non-union strikebreakers or to determine the terms of labor

in the workplace other than wages and hours were increasingly defined as criminal acts in

several ways, including under the common law of conspiracy.64 Increasingly, “The courts

proved unwilling to give anything but the most narrow and restrictive interpretations to statutory

measures which had intended to widen the legitimate sphere of union activity.”65 These growing


legal constrictions on union activity did not lead to a prosecutorial deluge, and many convictions

were subsequently overturned on appeal.66 However, successive court rulings solidified a

particularly tight definition of market freedom, which valorized the rights of individuals and made

more specious the claims of collective actors. This was as much (if not primarily) a particular

conservative appraisal of the legacy of the common law as the ascendance of political

economy.67

By the early 1870s unions faced a Dickensian moment, the best and the worst of times.

On the one hand unions had experienced a decade of rapid and perhaps unparalleled growth,

and they claimed over 1,000,000 members, with the expansion not only of skilled trades such as

engineers, but among miners and other less-skilled bodies as well. Local councils proliferated

and the Trades Union Congress became firmly established.68 On the other hand the legal

efficacy not only of their actions but of their corporate existence were fundamentally in doubt, in

a large part due to court decisions of the previous 20 years.69 Even the passage of the

legislation designed to mitigate some of the impacts of the court rulings on the legality of strikes

was soon revealed not fully to have impeded the courts in finding the means for criminal

convictions.70 Prompted by this legal morass, several trades’ councils and the nascent Trades’

Union Congress Parliamentary Committee spearheaded efforts to fundamentally reform the

laws, as I detail in the longer version of this paper. While they were abetted by several MPs and

some important public intellectuals, the reform of labor law was in the end very much a working-

class led affair. The TUCPC and other union bodies, given their increased political leverage

due to the recent expansion of male suffrage, engaged in a concerted campaign that ultimately

procured new legal foundations for trade unions and the employment relationship.

Toward a Revised Theorizing

In many respects the story I’ve told above concerning the struggles over the

commodification of labor is a mirror image of the one told by Polanyi. In the GT he provides a

history of state disengagement from labor control, whereas I focus on the growing legal


infrastructure over the same period that could be used for such purposes. Polanyi’s concept of

a double movement is predicated on a ‘spontaneous’ reaction to the process of fictitious

commodification by diverse groups and forces; alternatively, I emphasize a concerted and

strategic class struggle as the dynamo of change. And while Polanyi characterizes the

resolution of the double movement as a process of re-embedding, I argue in the longer version

of this paper that unions and their allies sought to buffer themselves from state power and

sought haven in a market partly of their preferred version of market relations.

My alternative narrative shares aspects of emplotment with stories told by a number of

other social scientists and historians of nineteenth-century British and American labor. Though

the specifics of their stories diverge significantly at points (both from my own emplotment and

one another’s), Kim Voss, William Forbath and Victoria Hattam all make claims that American

labor unions’ continuing battles with and defeats by the courts and inability to insure gains

through representative institutions led to the development of “business unionism”.71 Other

analysts argue such strategies in the face of juridical obstruction are characteristic of Anglo-

American union struggles as opposed to Continental labor histories.72

All of these analyses nonetheless affirm Polanyi’s most fundamental claim, i.e. capitalist

labor relations are necessarily institutionally embedded. The revised narrative I offered above

describes how capitalists in a number of important sectors of British industry relied on legal

institutions to subordinate labor, enforce discipline in the workplace and constrain labor markets,

particularly during the rise of ‘market society’. This analysis confirms what Polanyi’s

sympathetic critics argue, that economic relations are always institutionally embedded and that

we must analyze how legal processes are endogenous to capitalist organization of labor.73

Despite this general affirmation, however, the above analysis diverges from Polanyi’s

narrative of the double movement, and more generally his theory of embeddedness in several

important respects. First, to more fully pursue capitalist development from an institutionalist

perspective requires a different conception of the state. Polanyi’s vague model is an


understandable product of his times experiences. In confronting the crisis of Fordist capitalism,

the expansion of the welfare state to meet these exigencies in democratic nations that survived

the turbulence and the rise of fascism in those that did not, viewing the state as monolithic,

coherent and centralized made contextual sense.74 If they were not, states on both sides of the

Atlantic (democratic and fascist) at least in many ways aspired to this image. In the

metaphorical phrasing of geographer Peter Taylor, however, this is a concept of the state as a

political ‘container’.75

The infrastructure for a useful conceptual alternative for institutional analysis can be

found in the now venerable ruminations of J. P. Nettl and Phillip Abrams on the idea of the state.

As the latter argued, frequently when we refer to the state it is a shorthand for “politically

organized subjection”, and “Political institutions. . .are the real agencies out of which the idea of

the state is constructed.”76 The alternative, as Nettl suggested, is to analyze stateness as a

variable in which political power (and more especially authority) is scrutinized as historically

accreted institutional structures.77 Coherence, rationalization and centrality are all dimensions

imposed on this collectivity of institutional actors given particular historical exigencies, path

dependent development, and, as Tilly and others have argued, threats from the outside.78

One step toward an alternative analysis of stateness is a multi-scaled conception

institutional infrastructures through which power and authority are transmitted and sedimented,

a multi-dimensional ‘geometry of power’ through which we can map structural configurations in

both place and space.79 Where we look for ‘state’ activity is thus always historical and

relational, depending on the actors involved and the ways in which institutionally-sedimented

power can be exercised. State spaces should be seen as venues for strategic interaction, albeit

ones that generally advantage particular groups, rather than areas for the perfunctory exercise

of power.

In terms of labor control, as Jamie Peck argues, our focus starts with the locally

embedded, since labor power and the production process (even in the age of globalization) are


still place-bound. 80 Such local institutions, as the “’carriers’ of local economic histories,” are

also most likely to develop along path dependent lines as local power networks of trust,

cooperation, convention are critical in cementing economic stability in particular locales.81 Kevin

Cox usefully distinguishes such local, stabilized spaces of institutionalized power as ‘spaces of

dependence’ on which actors “depend for the realization of essential interests and for which

there are no substitutes elsewhere.”82 Alternatively ‘spaces of engagement’ are sites where

power dynamics are less secure and where actors strategically engage in “building up a much

more elaborate network of connections to other centers of social power.”83 The distinction

highlights how collective actors frequently find they need to move between areas and levels to

transform existing relationships. Cox and others argue that a spatially informed analysis of state

power provides us with a multi-scaled mapping of the ways in which institutionalized power

unevenly sediments in specific places and organizations, both within and between institutions,

and is transmitted between spatial levels. In part this is because local institutions of governance

develop relationally to other institutions, such as structures of local labor subordination and

capital accumulation.84 More specifically a variety of economic and political geographers,

relying on some variation of David Harvey’s concept of ‘spatial fixes’ maintain that that the

landscape of power in capitalist societies is structured by nested hierarchies of institutions.85

Destabilization of institutionalized power at one level motivates capitalists to find a fix through

institutional infrastructures at higher levels. Alternatively, “state-generated opportunities for

mobilization (political opportunity structures) may or may not exist at a particular time at different

scales—national or local. When one scale is relatively closed, social movements may approach

the scale that is more open.”86 Harvey and others maintain that working-class collective action

is generally more readily conducted through local places than through extra-local spaces

because the social lives of workers are grounded in place, but I think that this is an empirical

question, dependent on the structure of institutional networks and capacities at different levels.87


A fully-fledged analysis of institutional embeddedness does not assume the spatial

organization of state power, but takes it as a question to be investigated. In my retelling I have

offered an example of such possibilities. The narrative focuses on the ways in which capitalists

in the eighteenth century from specific regions and industries sought to transform labor law at

the national level to overcome the power of local artisanal groups, and how these attempts

crystallized into a new more generalized and repressive version of master and servant in the

early nineteenth century. Yet the application of such law was not superintended by the central

government, but devolved back to the ‘local state’, to the magistrates’ and borough courts over

which Westminster had little practical supervision.

Contemporaneously effective control of this local judicial infrastructure in many of the

more urban areas was passing from gentry and clergy to industrialists and sympathetic

professionals. In the process some of these capitalists searching for a means of labor

subordination in growing industries, in which technological and other solutions were not readily

at hand, found the local court a reliable venue, and continued growth was pursued through local

path dependence. Throughout most of the nineteenth century Parliament strengthened the

hand of these local courts by providing them with great summary powers without additional

oversight. In this sense institutional state power was devolved downward to local places,

creating a more disorderly national space of governance. While uneven in its development, the

growth of the local court systems into semi-autonomous nodes of state power created

impediments to national administrative law with the coming of the Factory Acts and other similar

national legislation. During the same period the appellate courts on the national level,

exercising considerable independence from Parliament and a rising bourgeoisie, further

complicated governance with its rulings on unions and conspiracy.

This narrative thus focuses on the embeddedness of economic relations, but does so by

dissecting the geometry of state power as it was structured through a number of distinct

institutions arrayed and connected at differing spatial levels. This is a dynamic story of


contingencies as actors and state authority move between places and levels, rather than the

Polanyi’s contrapuntal movement between market freedom and state interjection. Yet it remains

true to his fundamental insight, i.e. that these battles were (and are) never merely matters of

markets: the subjugation and commodification of labor are always dependent on complex

processes of embeddedness. To fully understand the complex processes by which these

relations are constructed is to navigate into the interior of this geometry of power, to chart the

infrastructures within and between levels, to see both recursive processes that reproduce it and

contradictions that create the ruptures for change. A comprehensive embeddedness analytic

requires us to go behind assigning causes of conflict and change to reifications such as ‘the

state’, ‘politics’, or ‘economics’ and to examine the structured institutional matrices through

which people and power worked.

Finally, we need to see how the cultural response to the market society effervesces not

from a general ‘societal’ response, but from the fault lines of structural inequalities that traverse

this geometric system. Concomitantly, this requires an alternative perspective on cultural

struggle. The story of change in nineteenth-century Britain is partly one of class struggle,

certainly partially a cultural conflict, but in ways different than Polanyi envisioned. In my larger

paper I offer an example of how class processes—both attempts by capitalists at routinizing

subordination and discipline and working peoples efforts to transformation these conditions—

were at the heart of mid-Victorian institutional change. Local courts were a venue for capitalist

labor control and the national political stage was ultimately the site at which this form of labor

subjugation was altered. Bringing class (and any other process of inequality) back into

institutional analysis offers the analytical tools to explain both endurance and change.

“Polanyi glimpsed at the idea of the always embedded market economy,” observes

Block in some recent reflections on the GT, “but he was not able to give that idea a name or

develop it theoretically because it represented too great a divergence from his initial theoretical

starting point.”88 In his subsequent writings, particularly his collaborative work, Polanyi


attempted to further his perspective by providing a more extensive taxonomy of institutional

forms and provided wide-ranging case studies to demonstrate them. However, these

investigations never extended this glimpse into a gaze. In my reflections above I have tried to

set out an agenda to move this vision forward. Through my revised narrative and theoretical

amendments on institutional power and the state system, class conflict and cultural conflict I

hope to extend our focus.

1 David S. Landes. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So

Poor. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988): 219.

2 Landes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: 231.

3 C. Harley Knick. “Substitution for Prerequisites: Endogenous Institutions and Comparative

Economic History,” in Richard Sylla and Gianni Toniolo editors Patterns of European

Industrialization. Edited by. (London: Routlege, 1991): 29; Gordon Tullock. The Rent-

Seeking Society. The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock v. 5, Charles K. Rowley, editor.

(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005): 160-70.

4 Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf, “The World Market Unbound,” Review of International

Political Economy 4, no. 3 (1997): 448-471; Fred Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing of The

Great Transformation,” Theory and Society, 32 (2003): 275-306; Vicki Birchfield “Contesting

the Hegemony of Market Ideology: Gramsci’s ‘Good Sense’ and Polanyi’s ‘Double

Movement’,” Review of International Political Economy 6, no. 1 (1999): 27-54; Mitchell

Bernard, “Ecology, Political Economy and the Counter-Movement: Karl Polanyi and the

Second Great Transformation,” in Stephen Gill and James H. Mittleman, editors, Innovation

and Transformation in International Studies. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1977): 75-89; Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change

in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Vicki Birchfield,


Vicki. 1999. “Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology: Gramsci’s ‘Good Sense’ and

Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’,” Review of International Political Economy. 6, no. 1(1999): 27-

54; Michael Burawoy, “Transition without Transformation: Russia's Involuntary Road to

Capitalism,” East European Politics and Societies 15, no. 2 (2001) 269-290; Michele

Cangiani, editor, The Milano papers: Essays in Societal Alternatives (Montréal: Black Rose

Books, 1997); Peadar Kirby, “The World Bank or Polanyi: Markets, Poverty and Social Well-

Being in Latin America,” New Political Economy 7, no. 2 (2002): 199-219; Hannes Lacher,

“The Politics of the Market: Re-reading Karl Polanyi,” Global Society. 13, no. 3 (1999): 313-

26; Marguerite Mendell and Daniel Salée, editors, The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market,

State, and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan); Ronaldo

Munck, “Globalization and Democracy: A New ‘Great Transformation’?,” The Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science 581 (2002):10-21; Beverly J. Silver and

Giovanni Arrighi, “Polanyi's ‘Double Movement’: The Belle Epoques of British and U.S.

Hegemony,” Politics and Society 31, no. 2 (2003): 325-355. See also the special issue of

the International Review of Sociology 13, no. 2 (2003), 13 edited by Ronnie Ramlogan and

Mark Harvey.

5 Rebecca Jean Emigh, “The Great Debates: Transitions to Capitalism” in Julia Adams,

Elizabeth S. Clemens and Ann S. Orloff, editors, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and

Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, 356. Anthony D. Smith The Concept

of Social Change: A Critique of the Functionalist Theory of Social Change (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973): 99. See also Charles Tilly Big Structures, Large

Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage, 1984).

6 Margaret R. Somers, “Karl Polanyi’s Intellectual Legacy”, in Kari Polanyi-Levitt, editor, The

Life and Work of Karl Polanyi (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 156.


7 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

{hereafter GT} introduction by R. M. MacIver (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 74-5. As he

notes, “On the eve of the greatest industrial revolution in history, no signs and portents were

forthcoming. Capitalism arrived unannounced. No one had forecast the development of a

machine industry; it came as a complete surprise” GT, 89.

8 He observes, “The extension of the market mechanism to the elements of industry—land,

labor, and money—was the inevitable consequence of the introduction of the factory system

in a commercial society. The elements of industry had to be for sale. This was

synonymous with the demand for a market system…As the development of the factory

system had been organized as part of a process of buying and selling, therefore land, labor

and money had to be transformed into commodities, as actually they were not produced for

sale on the market” GT, 75; As his student George Dalton similarly argues, “The industrial

revolution was also an institutional revolution: a condition for the profitable use of expensive,

long-lasting machinery was that entrepreneurs be assured of uninterrupted supplies of labor

and resource inputs to work the machines as well as internal and external markets to

effectively demand the outputs of the machines. Laissez-faire capitalism was created in

response to the needs of machine technology”, Dalton, “Primitive, Archaic, and Modern

Economies: Karl Polanyi’s Contribution to Economic Anthropology and Comparative

Economy,” in June Helm, Paul Bohannan and Marshall Sahlins, editors, Essays in

Economic Anthropology: Dedicated to the Memory of Karl Polanyi. Proceedings of the 1965

Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Association (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 1965), 8.

9 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 72; Karl Polanyi, “The Economy as an Instituted Process,” in

George Dalton, editor, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 148. Several scholars have noted parallels between


Polanyi’s concept and Marx on commodity fetishism and alienation, the latter of which was

just becoming known during the period of the writing of the GT with the publication of the

1844 manuscripts.

10 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 75. As Polanyi noted elsewhere, “Man’s economy is, as a

rule, submerged in his social relations.”, Karl Polanyi “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” in

Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, 65; Karl Polanyi, “Anthropology and Economic

Theory,” in Morton H. Fried, editor, Readings in Anthropology: v. 2. Readings in Cultural

Anthropology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959), 162.

11 Polanyi, GT: 80.

12 Polanyi, GT: 83 ; Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, “Beyond the Economistic Fallacy:

The Holistic Social Science of Karl Polanyi,” in Theda Skocpol, editor, Vision and Method in

Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56-57.

13 Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man edited by Harry W. Pearson (New York: Academic

Press, 1977), 16. And as he notes in the GT, “To separate labor from other activities of life

and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence

and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic

one…. Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of

freedom of contract,” Polanyi, GT, 163.

14 Polanyi, GT, 82, 166.

15 Polanyi describes this in general terms as a kind of existential crisis:

…a social calamity is primarily a cultural not an economic phenomenon that can be

measured by income figures or population statistics…. Not economic exploitation, as

often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then the

cause of degradation. The economic process may, naturally, supply the vehicle of

destruction, and almost invariably economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the


immediate cause of his undoing is not for that reason economic; it lies in the lethal injury

to the institutions in which his social existence in embodied. The result is a loss of self-

respect and standards, whether the unit is a people or a class, whether the process

springs from so-called ‘culture conflict or from a change in the position of a class within

the confines of society. Polanyi, GT, 157.

16 For example, Douglass North, readily observes, “The stubborn fact of the matter is that

Polanyi was correct in his major contention that the nineteenth century was a unique era in

which markets played a more important role than in any other time in history” North,

“Markets and Other Allocation Systems in History: The Challenge of Karl Polanyi,” Journal of

European Economic History. 6, no. 3 (1977): 706. For important exceptions see Santhi

Hejeebu and Deirdre McCloskey, “The Reproving of Karl Polanyi,” Critical Review 13, no.s

3-4 (1999): 285-314 and Sandra Halperin, War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The

Great Transformation Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and

“Dynamics of Conflict and System Change: The Great Transformation Revisited,” European

Journal of International Relations 10, no. 2 (2004): 263–306. The former, while applauded

Polanyi’s general concept of embeddedness, argue that he systematically misreads the

importance of market mechanisms in pre-nineteenth century economies, noting that price

and other institutional mechanisms exist in differing configurations throughout history.

Halperin, in a more wide-ranging critique, maintains that Polanyi is blind to the class bases

of economic change in conflict in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly the ways in which

ruling and economic elites benefited from industrial and commercial expansion, the impact

of major inter-state conflicts on the development of European economies and polities, and

the extent to which states acted in the interests of the dominant landed and industrial

classes.


17 Sally Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda in Economic Sociology,” International

Review of Sociology 13, no. 2 (2003): 414. Randles argues however that during this time

period Polanyi develops a more encompassing understanding of embeddedness, since by

the 1950s he no longer sees a fully self-regulating society as ontologically possible.

Randles, ““Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 420. Trent Schroyer concurs by noting that

the GT, “is a very dense historical description of the actual emergence and consequent

social and political responses to the rise of market society in England” “Karl Polanyi’s Post-

Marxist Critical Theory,” in Marguerite Mendell and Daniel Salée, editors, The Legacy of Karl

Polanyi: Market, State and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: St.

Martin’s), 76. Fred Block, conversely, maintains that Polanyi always saw market society as

an unreachable utopian ideal of political economists. Block, Block, “Karl Polanyi and the

Writing,” 297-300; “Introduction,” in Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political

and Economic Origins of Our Time Introduction by Fred Block (Boston: Beacon Press,

2001), xxiv.

18 Sally Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 420; Bernard Barber, “All Economies

are ‘Embedded’: The Career of a Concept, and Beyond,” Social Research. 6, no. 2 (1995):

400; Mark Blyth, Great Transformations, 4; Hannes Lacher, “The Politics of the Market”,

320, 326; John Lie, “Embedding Polanyi’s Market,” Sociological Perspectives 34, no.

2(1991): 319; Lars Mjøset, “Regulation and the Institutionalist Tradition,” Lars Mjøset and

Jan Bohlin Introdukson Til Reguleringskolen (Aalborg: Nordisk Sommeruniversitet,

Arbejdspaprier. nr. 21), 23.

19 Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing,” 276; Fred Block, “Political Choice and the Multiple

‘Logics’ of Capital,” in Sharon Zukin and Paul DiMaggio, editors, Structures of Capital: The

Social Organization of the Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 296-


97. For similar views see also Greta Krippner, “The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the

Paradigm of Economic Sociology,” Theory and Society. 30, no. 6 (2001): 781; Mark

Granovetter in Gretta Krippner, Mark Granovetter, Fred Block, Nicole Biggart, Tom Beamish,

Youtien Hsing, Gillian Hart, Giovanni Arrighi, Margie Mendell, John Hall, Michael Burawoy,

Steve Vogel and Sean O’Riain, “Polanyi Symposium: A Conversation on Embeddedness,”

Socio-Economic Review. 2, no. 1 (2004): 117.

20 Ellen Meiksins Wood sheds light on this issue when she notes,

The main outlines of Polanyi’s historical narrative, then, are in some respects not entirely

different from the old commercialization model: the expansion of markets goes hand in

hand with technological progress to produce modern industrial capitalism. And although

the process culminates in England, it is a general European process. For that matter, it

appears that the process that led from commercialization to industrialization to ‘market

society’ may after all have been a more or less natural development in an increasingly

commercialized world, a development completed only in Europe simply because certain

non-economic obstacles did not here block its path.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), 25.

21 As Bernard observes, “. . .precisely because agency is ascribed to an autonomously

evolving technology. . . change cannot be understood in terms of the social forces deploying

technological innovation and the power relations, institutions and ideologies that shape the

context in which they emerge.”, Bernard, “Ecology, Political Economy and the Counter-

Movement,” 81-2. See also Vicki Birchfield “Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology,”

38; Michael Hechter, “Karl Polanyi’s Social Theory: A Critique,” Politics and Society. 10, no.

4 (1981): 423; Lars Mjøset, “Regulation and the Institutionalist Tradition,” 22-23; Allen M.


Sievers, Has Capitalism Collapsed? A Critique of Karl Polanyi’s New Economics (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1949), 50; Wood, The Origins of Capitalism, 23.

22 As Block and Somers have recently noted Polanyi, following the standard narrative

constructed by political economists of the period, misreads the importance and effects of

this wage supplementation, Fred Block and Margaret Somers, “In the Shadow of

Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law,” Politics and Society. 31, no. 2 (2003):

283-323.

23 As Halperin observes, “Particularly problematic are his treatment of society as an organic

and sociologically undifferentiated whole, and his conception of the state as a neutral

mechanism for aggregating interests.”, Halperin, “Dynamics of Conflict and System

Change,” 291. See also Hechter, “Karl Polanyi’s Social Theory,” 420.

24 In eviewing his thesis on the rise of anti-liberal interventionism he contends, “Briefly, not

single groups or classes were the source of the so-called collectivist movement, though the

outcome was decisively influenced by the character of class interests involved. Ultimately,

what made things happen were the interests of society as a whole, though their defense fell

primarily to one section of the population in preference of another. It appears reasonable to

group our account of the protective movement not around class interests but around the

social substances imperiled by the market (emphasis added), ”Polanyi, GT, 162-3. See also

149, 152-3.

25 As Block and Somers suggest, within Polanyi’s tale of action and reaction a neo-Hegelian

state operates in the interests of society as a whole; one which whether instituting the

dictates of laissez-faire liberalism or in responding to the collectivist countermovement

grows in centrality and power throughout the epoch,”Block and Somers, “Beyond the

Economistic Fallacy,” 68.

26 In the context of creating a theory of substantive economies and institutions Polanyi noted,


A study of how empirical economies are instituted should start from the way in which the

economy acquires unity and stability, that is the interdependence and recurrence of

[149] its parts. This is achieved through a combination of a very few patterns which may

be called forms of integration. Since they occur side by side on different levels and in

different sectors of the economy it may often be impossible to select one of them as

dominant so that they could be employed for a classification of empirical economies as a

whole. “The Economy as an Instituted Process,” 148; see also “Anthropology and

Economic Theory,” 168.

North, “Markets and Other Allocation Systems in History,” 715; Gunnar Olofsson,

“Embeddedness and Integration,” Pp. 38-60 in Ian Gough and Gunnar Olofsson Capitalism and

Social Cohesion: Essays in Exclusion and Integration (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 38,

44-45; Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 413; Sievers, Has Capitalism

Collapsed?, 215.

27 Mark Blyth, “The Great Transformation in Understanding Polanyi: Reply to Hejeebu and

McCloskey,” Critical Review. 16, no. 1( 2004):120.

28 As Randles summarizes the problem,

There does not appear to be, within Polanyi’s framework an explicit mechanism for

institutional change, since competitive struggle and innovation do not (paradoxically

given our interest both in Polanyi, and in the study of innovation and competition) feature

in the Polanyian frame at all. What we might need to add, using Polanyi as an essential

start point, is a mechanism for subsequent tensions and struggles which potentially or in

actuality produce a re-instituting of whatever arena of substantive study we are

interested in. Further, our developed analysis would need to explicitly provide for this re-

instituting to occur at a range of temporal-spatial scales, more than likely bringing groups


of vested interest into competitive confrontation with each other (or alternatively mutual

accommodation, of each other. Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 423.

See also Halperin, “Dynamics of Conflict and System Change,” 264, 272; Birchfield

“Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology,” 38; Bernard, “Ecology, Political

Economy and the Counter-Movement,” 80, 82; Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the

Material: Thought, Economy and Society translated by Martin Thom (London: Verso,

1986), 200.

29 P. W. J. Bartrip, “British Government Inspection, 1832-1875: Some Observations,” The

Historical Journal 25, no.3 (1982): 626; P. W. J. Bartrip, “British Government Inspection,

1832-1875,” 613-16; P. W. J. Bartrip, “State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain:

Fact or Fiction,” The Journal of British Studies. 23, no. 1(1983): 70-72, 81; P. W. J. Bartrip

and P. T. Fenn, “The Administration of Safety: The Enforcement Policy of the Early Factory

Inspectorate, 1844-1864,” Public Administration. 58, no. 1 (1980): 206, 209: Richard

Rodger, “Mid-Victorian Employers’ Attitudes,” Social History. 11, no. 1 (1986): 79, n. 12

30 Stewart Field, “Without the Law? Professor Arthurs and the Early Factory Inspectorate,”

Journal of Law and Society. 17, no. 4 (1990): 448. See also Bartrip and Fenn, “The

Administration of Safety,” 96; Bartrip and Fenn, “The Administration of Safety,” 96; P. W. J.

Bartip and P. T. Fenn, “The Evolution of Regulatory Style in the Nineteenth Century British

Factory Inspectorate,” Journal of Law and Society, 10, no. 2 (1983): 210. Any fine over £4

was subject to appeal to superior court, providing a strong disincentive to the inspectors to

exact strong punishment, Field, “Without the Law?,” 452; P. W. J. Bartrip and P. T. Fenn,

“The Evolution of Regulatory Style in the Nineteenth Century Factory Inspectorate,” Journal

of Law and Society 10, no. 2 (1983): 207; W. G. Carson, “The Institutionalization of

Ambiguity: Early British Factory Acts,” in Gilbert Geis and Ezra Stotland, editors, White


Collar Crime: Theory and Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), 163, 167; and “The

Conventionalization of Early Factory Crime,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 7,

no. 1 (1979): 51-3.

31 Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830-1860 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163.

32 "'A Way of Struggle': Reformations and Affirmations of E. P. Thompson's Class Analysis in

Light of Postmodern Theories of Language," British Journal of Sociology. 48, no 3 (1997):

471-92; Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action and Discourse in Early

Nineteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

33 Olofsson, “Embeddedness and Integration,” 53-9; Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian

Agenda,” 423. See also Martin Hess, “'Spatial' Relationships? Towards a

Reconceptualization of Embeddedness,” Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 2, (2004):

165-86.

34 Richard Price, British Society, 1660-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124.

35 Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9, 234.

36 John V. Orth, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721-1906.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 108-110. See also Douglas Hay, “England, 1562-

1875,” in Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, editors, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in

Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005),

82-84; Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization,

Employment and Legal Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61-3; Brian

Napier, "The Contract of Service: The Concept and its Application," (D. Phil., University of


Cambridge, 1975), 83-6; Daphne Simon, "Master and Servant," in John Saville, editor,

Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954) 160-200. For

full texts of all the acts see Charles J. B. Hertslet, The Law Relating to Master and Servant…

(London: John Crockford, 1850), 28-90.

37 Douglas Hay, “England, 1562-1875,” 83. See also Douglas Hay, "Patronage, Paternalism,

and Welfare: Masters, Workers, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England,"

International Labor and Working-Class History 53 (1998): 29. Deakin and Wilkinson also

note that “the master-servant model was a product of industrialization . . . the master and

servant legislation was not an attempt to maintain in place a pre-industrial model of

household employment,” The Law of the Labour Market, 62.

38 Douglas Hay, “Master and Servant in England: Using the Law in the Eighteenth and

Nineteenth Centuries,” in Willibald Steinmetz, editor, Private Law and Social Inequality in the

Industrial Age: Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 228; Simon, "Master and Servant," 61-2; Hertslet,

The Law Relating to Master and Servant …, .

39 Overturning a conviction often hinged on a writ of certiorari that challenged the language

used in the indictment. See Christopher Frank, “’He Might Almost As Well Be Without Trial’:

Trade Unions and the 1823 Master and Servant Act—the Warrington Cases, 1846-47,”

Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 14 (2002): 3-43

40 Hay, “Master and Servant in England,” 228. An 1867 modification of the Act required two

justices for conviction, imprisonment only for “aggravated circumstances” (though this was

up to the justices to define), the capacity of the accused worker to testify in his own defense

and damage payments to the employer in addition to the previous penalties, James Edward

Davis, The Master and Servant Act, 1867. (London: Butterworth, 1868).


41 They were also the first to provide for summary jurisdiction, foregoing jury trials. John V.

Orth, “The British Trade Union Acts of 1825 and 1825: Dicey and the Relation Between Law

and Opinion,” Anglo-American Law Review. 5, no. 2 (1976), 134-5; John V. Orth, “The

English Combination Laws Reconsidered,” in Francis Snyder and Douglas Hays editors,

Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective (London: Tavistock, 1987) 136, 141.

42 Iorwerth Prothero Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and

His Times (London: Methuen, 1979), 172-82; John V. Orth, “The English Combination Laws

Reconsidered,”.

43 William D. Grampp, “The Economists and the Combination Laws,” Quarterly Journal of

Economics 93, no. 4 (1979): 505-6, 515.

44 As the eminent economist Nassau Senior advised the Home Office in 1831 in a report they

commissioned,

All meetings or agreements whatever for the purpose of affecting the wages or hours of

work of persons not present at the meeting, or parties to the agreement, are

conspiracies. So are all agreements for controlling a master in the management of his

business, in the persons whom he shall employ, or the machinery which he shall use.

So of course are all agreements not to work in company with any given person, or to

persuade other persons to leave their employment, or not to engage themselves. In fact

there is scarcely an act performed by any workman as a member of a trades’ union,

which is not an act of conspiracy and a misdemeanour.

Nassau Senior, Historical and Philosophical Essays, v. 2 (London: Longman, Roberts &

Green, 1865), 132.

45 Summing up the status of worker organization an action after 1825 Mark Curthoys observes,

“For nearly a half century after the repeal of the Combination Acts the liberty to combine


continued to be restricted—in theory, if not much in practice. Governments and courts

admitted the impolicy of an outright ban on combination. But they were unwilling to

recognize unions or to remove the penalties for strikes, or threat of strikes, in all instances:

to do so would be to sanction conditions placed upon the sale of labour which might be

deemed ‘arbitrary’, ‘tyrannical’, or ‘foolish’. Such conditions were improper encroachments

upon the prerogatives of the masters, and were contrary to the broader policy that markets

should operate free from obstruction, “ Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian

Britain: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),

235.

46 For an overview of the court system see A. H. Manchester, A Modern Legal History of

England and Wales, 1750-1950 (London: Butterworths, 1980), 160-70. Claims for wages by

workers were civil actions and therefore could be heard by Courts of Requests which were

transformed into the County Courts in 1846. It is not clear how often workers pursued

redress in the civil courts, but it was probably less than in local petty sessions given that

they frequently required additional travel to reach and the judges hearing such cases were

less prone to accept arguments concerning local customs. Fees were also higher compared

to petty sessions, Douglas Hay, “England, 1562-1875,” 105; Steinmetz, “Was There De-

Juridification,” 294, 306.

47 Price, British Society, 126, 183. As Derek Sayer argues, “Such locally developed, yet

centrally regulated, institutions of governance were arguably very much better suited to the

needs of a developing capitalism than either a more bureaucratized, or a more bourgeois-

democratic, polity might have been.”, “A Notable Administration: English State Formation

and the Rise of Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (1992): 1407.

48 Anne Digby, “The Local State”, in E. T. J. Collins, editor, The Agrarian History of England

and Wales. v. 8, 1850-1914, Pt. 2 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1425-1464. For the important of


the local government in economic transformation see Pat Hudson, “The Regional

Perspective,” in Pat Hudson, editor, Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial

Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5-38.

49 For the earlier history see Norma Landau. Property qualifications for county magistrates

were £100, Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17.

50 William Holdsworth, A History of English Law v. 13 (London: Methuen, 1964), 94, 235-36;

Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure Of Politics in Victorian

Cities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), 18, 150. The property qualification for a

borough magistrate was a hefty £1,000, Conley, The Unwritten Law, 17. On stipendiaries

see Stanley French, “The Early History of the Stipendiary Magistrates—I” Criminal Law

Review 12 (1965): 213-21, “ “The Further History of Stipendiary Magistrates,” Criminal Law

Review 14 (1967): 224-230, “The Early History of the Stipendiary Magistrates—II” Criminal

Law Review 12 (1965): 281-91,” “The Further History of Stipendiary Magistrates,” Criminal

Law Review 14 (1967): 269-277; Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900

(London: Longman, 1987), 159; Holdsworth, A History, v. 13, 94.

51 Clive Emsley, Crime and Society, 160-61.

52 Clive Behagg, Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge,

1990); James Jaffe, The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal

Industry, 1800-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Joyce, “Work”;

William Lazonick Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1990); Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (London:

Arnold, 1965); Richard Price, "The Labour Process and History," Social History 8 (1984): 57-

75; John Rule, "The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture." in Patrick Joyce, editor,

The Historical Meaning of Work (88), 99-118; Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Historical


Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century

Industrialization." Past & Present 108 (1985):133-174; Samuel, “Workshop of the World”;

Jonathan Zeitlin “Between Flexibility and Mass Production: Strategic Ambiguity and

Selective Adaptation in the British Engineering Industry, 1830-1914,” in Charles F. Sabel

and Jonathan Zeitlin, editors, Worlds of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in

Western Industrialization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 241-72.

53 The Law of the Labour Market, 37.

54 As Frank describes the relationship, “…the relationship of employment was not perceived as

one based on a contractual understanding between equal parties that conferred mutually

binding obligations and rights, but rather was one of status and subordination.”, Christopher

Frank, “’He Might Almost As Well Be Without Trial’: Trade Unions and the 1823 Master and

Servant Act—the Warrington Cases, 1846-47,” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 14

(2002): 28. A writer in the workers’ paper The Bee-Hive complained, “. . .an engagement of

service is looked on not as a contract between two parties, but as a subjection of inferior to

superior. And the breach of contract is treated as a ‘revolt,’ a kind of public offence,” The

Beehive, no. 592, Feb. 15, 1873, 1. See also Hay, “England,” 133; Steinfeld, Coercion,

Contract, and Free Labor, 52.

55 Hay and Craven, “Introduction,” 32.

56 See the evidence of the solicitor for the solicitor to the Mining Association of Great Britain,

PP 1874 [c. 1094] XXIV, 155. Deakin and Wilkinson maintain that,

the significance of the master and servant legislation lay in providing employers with a

mechanism for imposing discipline on workers who otherwise had only a loose

organizational connection to the firm, and who would often be in a position to take

advantage of labour shortages to push up wages. . . .The historical evidence suggests

that the disciplinary mechanism of the Acts was widely used as instruments of economic


regulation during a period when modern managerial techniques had yet to develop, and

when shifts in the business cycle could lead to considerable fluctuations in the

bargaining power of employers and workers.

The Law of the Labour Market, 70-71; see also Hay, “England, 107; Christopher Frank, “’Let But

One of Them Come Before Me, and I’ll Commit Him’: Trade Unions, Magistrates, and the Law in

Mid-Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire,” Journal of British Studies. 44, no. 1 (2005): 87; Steinfeld,

Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, 50; Report from the Select Committee on Master and

Servant, 1866, XIII (499), 60, 67.

57 Curthoys, Governments, Labour, and the Law, 185; Hay, “England,” 101. I explore this in

my analysis of the pottery industry, Marc W. Steinberg, “Capitalist Development, the Labor

Process and the Law: The Case of the Victorian English Pottery Industry, American Journal

of Sociology. 109, no. 2, (2003): 445-95. See also the comments of stipendiary magistrate

James E. Davis, First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Working of

the Master and Servant Act, 1867, and The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 34 & 35 Vict.

Cap. 32. 1874 [c. 1094] XXIV, 141.

58 The “miners’ lawyer” W. P. Roberts, who successfully contested many cases, testified that

miners’ unions imposed fines on their members if they struck before the end of their

contracts to insure that the strike would not become embroiled in prosecutions, PP 1866,

XIII (499), 90. See also Malcolm Chase, “’This Tremendous Conflict Now Raging Between

Capital and Labour’: Workers’ Organisations on Teeside in the Mid-Victorian Period,” The

Bulletin of the Cleveland and Teeside Local History Society 60 (1991): 21, 24-25;

Christopher Frank, “The Defeat of the 1844 Master and Servants Bill,” in Douglas Hay and

Paul Craven, editors, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-

1955. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 408, 416; Douglas Hay,


“Master and Servant in England: Using the Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth

Centuries,” in Willibald Steinmetz, editor, Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial

Age: Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000), 251-52; Otto Kahn-Freund, "Blackstone's Neglected Child:

The Contract of Employment," Law Quarterly Review 93 (1977): 526; David Philips, "The

Black Country Magistracy 1835-60," Midland History 3, no. 3 (1976): 180; Simon, “Master

and Servant,” 171; Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, 65; D. C. Woods, "Crime

and Society in the Black Country 1860-1900," (D. Phil, University of Aston, 1979), 332; PP

1866, XIII (499), 40.

59 The most notorious area was the Black Country in the Midlands. Frank, “’He Might Almost

As Well Be Without Trial’,” 17; Hay, “Master and Servant in England,” 231, 234, 255, 258;

Philips, "The Black Country Magistracy, 182; Simon, “Master and Servant,” 191-94;

Steinberg, “Capitalist Development” and “Unfree Labor Recruitment and Retention in

Capitalist Development: The Rise of the Victorian English Fishing Industry,” “Regular

Session. Historical Sociology: Violence, Repression and Transformation,” Annual meeting of

the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 17, 2004; Woods, "Crime

and Society," 320-21, 328; PP 1866, XIII (499), 17, 34, 48, 59-60, 77; PP 1874 [1094] XXIV,

139.

60 These can be found in annual Parliamentary returns for convicts for offenses subject to

summary jurisdiction, Police—Criminal Proceedings—Prisons. Judicial Statistics. Returns.

61 He also calculates that in the late 1850s this ratio was almost 90% in some mining districts

in Staffordshire, Hay “England,” 108.

62 Simon and Wilkinson say that this was particularly the case for certain groups of skilled

workers, The Law of the Labour Market, 65.


63 As Orth remarks, “This was, of course, the perennial dream of laissez-faire ideologues: that

a ‘general disease’ did not require a general remedy because it would—indeed, ‘must’—

‘cure itself’”, Combination and Conspiracy, 70.

64 1851 when Justice William Erle (the future head of the Royal Commission on Labour Laws

and hardly a friend of labor) ruled in two cases on the issue of conspiracy to molest and

obstruct. Charges were brought against both the local union and the leaders of the National

Association of United Trades in lieu of their efforts to dissuade both the employer and the

scab laborers he sought as replacements from continuing production. Erle’s instructions to

the jury, upheld by the Queen’s Bench, was that any effort on the part of any parties to

influence anyone other than their fellow members amounted to a conspiracy against the

employer. The cases were Regina v. Duffield and Regina v. Rowlands. In response

Parliament again legalized peaceful picketing with the Molestation of Workmen Act of 1859,

though this did not solve the larger problem of conspiracy. See John V. Orth “English Law

and Striking Workmen: The Molestation of Workmen Act, 1859,” The Journal of Legal

History 2, no. 3 (1981) 238-57; Curthoys, Governments, Labour, and the Law, 35-44. For

Erle’s view on conspiracy see “Memorandum on the Law Relating to Trade Unions,” Royal

Commission: Eleventh and Final Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Inquire

into the Organization and Rules of Trades Unions and Other Associations. XXXI [4123.],

1868-69, v. 1; Robert S. Wright, a sympathetic lawyer who helped draft much of the reform

legislation of the mid-1870s noted that before 1800 law books did not mention criminal

conspiracy of workers at all, The Law of Criminal Conspiracies and Agreements

(Philadelphia: Blackstone Publishing, 1887), 43.

65 Deakin and Wilkinson The Law of the Labour Market, 205-06; Michael J. Klarman, “The

Judges Versus the Unions: The Development of British Labor Law, 1867-1913," Virginia

Law Review, 75, no. 8 (1989): 1561.


66 Curthoys notes that between 1853 and 1866 he has located only ten indictments of strikers

for conspiracy, for example, Governments, Labour, and the Law, 33.

67 Governments, Labour, and the Law, 38. Otto Kahn-Freund, “Legal System” in Allan

Flanders and H. A. Clegg, editors, The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain: Its

History, Law and Institutions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), 50. See also Curthoys,

Governments, Labour, and the Law, 85.

68 The early 1870s marked a high point for union membership in part because of a robust

economy was to decline precipitously from the middle of the decade and take the fortunes

of many unions with it. H. A. Clegg, Alan Fox and A. F. Thompson, A History of British

Trade Unions Since 1889, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1-43; W. Hamish

Fraser, Trade Unions and Society: The Struggle for Acceptance, 1850-1880 (Totowa, NJ:

Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 16-28; Henry Pelling A History of British Trade Unionism

(London: Macmillan, 1963) 70-77.

69 In 1867 in Hornsby v. Close the Queen’s Bench ruled that unions could not register under

the Friendly Societies Act as authorized by Parliament in 1855 because one of their

underlying goals was restraint of trade, and this threw the legality of unions in general into

question, Orth, Combination and Conspiracy, 102-3. See also Lawrence Goldman, Science,

Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857-1886

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 202; Ron Harris, “Government and the

Economy, 1688-1850,” in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, editors, The Cambridge

Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), 210; R. Y. Hedges and Allan Winterbottom, The Legal

History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1930), 41-44; Klarman, "The

Judges versus the Unions,” 1491, 1561; Michael Lobban, “Strikers and the Law, 1825-51,”


in Peter Birks, editor, The Life of the Law: Proceedings of the Tenth British Legal History

Conference (London: The Hambledon Press, 1993), 229-31.

70 The legislation was the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1871. Curthoys, Governments,

Labour, and the Law, 142-65. For a union leader’s recollections see George Howell, Labour

Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders (London: T. Fisher, Unwin, 1905), v. 1,

182-92.

71 Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class

Formation in the Nineteenth Century. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); William E.

Forbath, “Courts, Constitutions, and Labor Politics in England and America: A Study in

Constitutive Power,” Law and Social Inquiry 16, no. 1 (1991): 1-34’ and Law and the

Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1991); Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business

Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also

Catherine Fisk, "Still 'Learning Something of Legislation'; The Judiciary and the History of

Labor Law," Law and Social Inquiry, 19, no. 1 (1994): 151-86; Joel Rogers, “Divide and

Conquer: Further ‘Reflections on the Distinctive Character of American Labor Laws”

Wisconsin Law Review 1990, no. 1 (1990): 1-147; Christopher Tomlins, The State and the

Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), "Subordination, Authority, Law: subjects in

Labor History," International Review of Social History 47 ("Subordination, Authority, Law:

subjects in Labor History," International Review of Social History. 47: 56-90): 56-90 and

"How Who Rides Whom. Recent 'New' Histories of American Labour Law and What They

May Signify," Social History. 20, no. 1 (1995): 1-21.

72 Willibald Steinmetz, “Introduction: Towards a Comparative History of Legal Cultures, 1750-

1950,” in Willibald Steinmetz, editor, Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age:


Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2000), 1-41; Fisk, "Still 'Learning Something of Legislation'”, 178;

Forbath, “Courts, Constitutions, and Labor Politics”.

73 See above n. 18; Bruce G. Carruthers, “Historical Sociology and the Economy: Actors,

Networks and Context” in Julia Adams, Elizabeth S. Clemens and Ann S. Orloff, editors,

Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2005), 345; Laura Edelman and Robin Stryker, “A Sociological Approach to Law and the

Economy,” in Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, editors, The Handbook of Economic

Sociology 2nd ed. (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2005), 532.

74 For a discussion of the imprint of Fordism on social science see George Steinmetz, “The

Epistemological Unconscious of U.S. Sociology and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The

Case of Historical Sociology,” in Julia Adams, Elizabeth S. Clemens and Ann S. Orloff,

editors, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2005, 109-57

75 Peter Taylor, “Places, Spaces and Macy’s: Place-Space Tensions in the Political Geography

of Modernities” Progress In Human Geography 23, no. 1 (1999): 14.

76 Philips Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State” Journal of Historical Sociology

1, no. 1 (1988 [1977]): 63, 75.

77 J.P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable” World Politics 20, no. 4 (1968): 562-63.

While Nettl and Abrams focus on the state to a considerable extent as an ideological and

cultural project I offer here a more materially-grounded analysis.

78 Charles Tilly Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1990 (Oxford: Blackwell,

1990). As Neil Brenner maintains, following Jessop, “organizational coherence, operational

cohesion, and functional unity of the state are never structurally pregiven, but can be

established only through the deployment of historically specific political changes”, Neil


Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2004), 89.

79 As Brenner argues, “. . .state space in the integral sense refers to the territory-, place-, and

scale-specific ways in which state institutions are mobilized to regulate social relations and

to influence their locational geographies” Brenner, New State Spaces, 78. Similarly, Robin

Stryker argues that a comprehensive institutional analysis must investigate the ways in

which actors are enmeshed in institutional fields at multiple levels, determining possibilities

for dissonance, choice and innovation, Robin Stryker, “Mind the Gap: Institutional Analysis

and Socioeconomics,” Socio-Economic Review 1: 345. See also Erik Swyngedouw,

“Excluding the Other: The Production of Scale and Scaled Politics” in Roger Lee and Jane

Willis, editors, Geographies of Economies (London: Arnold, 1997), 167-76.

80 Jamie Peck, “Places of Work” in Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes, editors, A Companion

to Economic Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 144.

81 Ron Martin, 2003, “Institutional Approaches to Economic Geography” in Eric Sheppard and

Trevor J. Barnes, editors, A Companion to Economic Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),

80, 84

82 Kevin Cox, “Spaces of Dependence, Spaces of Engagement and the Politics of Scale, or:

Looking for Local Politics” Political Geography 17, no. 1 (1998): 2.

83 Cox, “Spaces of Dependence,” 16.

84 For a discussion of the uneven spatial development of institutional labor control see Jamie

Peck Work-Place (New York: Guilford, 1993), 100-13

85 Brenner, New State Spaces, 10; Neil Brenner, “Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation,

Territorial Organization and the Historical Geography of Spatial Scales,” Environment and

Planning D: Space and Society 16, no. 5 (1998): 463; Swyngedouw, “Excluding the Other,”

170; Jamie Gough, “Changing Scale as Changing Class Relations: Variety and


Contradiction in the Politics of Scale” Political Geography 23 (2004): 185-211; David Harvey

The Limits to Capital (Chicago: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1982).

86 Sallie A. Marston “The Social Construction of Scale” Progress in Human Geography 24, no.

2 (2000): 224; Cox, “Spaces of Dependence,” 17; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly provide a

similar concept of a ‘scale shift’ mechanism in their theorizing on contentious politics, Doug

McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), 331-40.

87 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 236.

88 Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing,” 276.

for presentation at the mit-sloan organizational studies...

Documents