EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

System Innovation and a New ‘Great Transformation’: Re-embedding Economic Life in the Context of ‘De-Growth’

Stephen Quilley

Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 2012, vol. 3, issue 2, 206-229

Abstract: The political-economic limits to system innovation are explored through the Polanyian concepts of disembedding and the ‘double movement’. The Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) is examined as an aspect of the ‘counter movement for societal protection’ and the outcome of selection from a much broader array of institutional and cultural responses to crisis. With the KWS, the principles of reciprocity and autarchy (the re-embedding of subsistence and provisioning activity in a modern Gemeinschaft) give way to the establishment of new, top-down circuits of redistribution, designed to facilitate continuing processes of capitalist modernization. Where social innovation is directed at the broad dynamics of marketization and the commodification of goods and services, this growth imperative continues to present an insuperable obstacle to system-level change. But as ecological capital at the level of the biosphere becomes a critical focus for a new protective ‘counter-movement’ and ‘degrowth’ becomes the de facto context for social innovation, systemic transformation becomes more thinkable. Hodgson's ‘evotopia’ is recommended as a heuristic for a provisional, experimental and incremental exploration of the ‘adjacent possible’.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19420676.2012.725823 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jsocen:v:3:y:2012:i:2:p:206-229

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJSE20

DOI: 10.1080/19420676.2012.725823

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Social Entrepreneurship is currently edited by Alex Nicholls

More articles in Journal of Social Entrepreneurship from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:jsocen:v:3:y:2012:i:2:p:206-229