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Beyond the Pendulum: Feminist Institutionalism and Polanyi’s Framework for a Non-Teleological Economic Theory

Natalia Bracarense

Résumés

À la lumière de la crise généralisée à laquelle la société est confrontée aujourd’hui - incliant les défis sociaux, économiques, politiques, culturels et environnementaux - cet article suit les institutionnalistes féministes dans leur effort pour développer une théorie économique qui aborde les complexités du 21e siècle.
La compréhension des transformations institutionnelles par une telle théorie remet en question la vision de Fukuyama selon laquelle le capitalisme est la "fin de l’histoire". À cette fin, l’article soutient qu’une reformulation institutionnaliste féministe des concepts de transformation sociale de Karl Polanyi fournit un cadre théorique solide pour comprendre le changement sociétal d’une manière non téléologique et dynamique.

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1 Introduction

1Over the last decades, scholars specialized in feminist studies and original institutional economists relied on the work of Karl Polanyi to advance a new theoretical framework to confront different aspects of the generalized crisis of the 21st century (Morel 2007; Degrave and Nyssens 2008; Hillenkamp 2013; Fraser 2014; 2017; Waller and Wrenn 2021).

  • 1 William Waller (1988) demonstrates that one of the contributions of original institutional economic (...)

2In the United States, these researchers have recently been grouped under the denomination of Feminist Institutionalists. They justify using Polanyi’s work for their feminist economics proposal for two main reasons. Firstly, the angular stone of Polanyi’s socio-historical analysis, that is the fictitious commodities (land, labor, and money) (Postel and Sobel 2010), directs his focus beyond economic crises (i.e., crises caused by excessive commodification of money). In other words, thanks to his analysis of the three fictitious commodities, Polanyi’s framework allows economists to draw attention to the interactions between economic, sociological, cultural, and ecological factors (Postel and Sobel; Fraser 2017). Secondly, even if Polanyi did not evaluate how the market system impacted gender inequality, their rejection of formalist economics, their pragmatic and antinaturalistic approach to economics, their adoption of a non-cartesian epistemology1, thus negating simplistic dichotomies, grounds the compatibility between Polanyi’s theoretical framework and Feminist Economics (Jennings and Waller 1990; Morel 2007).

3The present paper focuses on aspects of Feminist’s adaptation of Polanyi’s framework that enhances his theory of historical transformation through a complete push away from a dualistic perspective and the construction of a non-teleological approach of history capable of grasping a crisis that could transcend capitalism or observing the multiple alternative directions through which history may unfold (Waller and Wrenn 2021; Bracarense 2022).

4Polanyi’s description of the Great Transformation rests on the "pendulum of history": a dynamic that leads society through consecutive swings from protectionism to liberalism. For Polanyi, the consolidation of the market system and the fiction of its auto-regulatory ability force the gradual commodification of the fictitious commodities, that is, elements that are essential for social reproduction but that cannot be commodified because they are not commodities. This process is the source of instabilities that threaten the cohesion of the social fabric. As a response, through a double movement, a Great Transformation occurs, or a process of economic reembeddedness; that is, the development of institutions that regulate the reproduction of the fictitious commodities (Postel and Sobel 2010, p. 8). In the market system, historical transformation may be understood through swings between intensification of commodification and protective resistance to it through reembeddedness.

5Polanyi’s theory of social and historical transformation relies on the tension between the commodification and non-commodification of labor, land, and money, where noncommodification, maintained or reestablished by embeddedness, functions as a protective device from the dismantling forces of the market. This dynamic leads the system back and forth from liberalism to protectionism. Consequently, despite his contributions to developing operational concepts that offer a fresh perspective on economics, Polanyi’s theory has three notable shortcomings in addressing our current generalized crisis as a potential shift to a postcapitalist order. First, it overlooks that neither liberalism nor protectionism inherently guarantees emancipation. More often than not, protection and liberalization have entailed national political and economic elites dominating productive and unproductive labor and appropriating resources such as land, forests, minerals, water, and money to their benefit (Seppälä 2014). Had Polanyi developed his concept of householding and seen it as a locus of resistance (Halpering 1991; Gregory 2009), his framework could have escaped this dualism. Second, while his concept of commodification provides a solid foundation for understanding market system instabilities, it limits his theory to being a tool specific to capitalism (Postel and Sobel 2010, p. 12; Fraser 2014). Third, his focus on the corrosive effects of commodification on communities, a perspective that neglects that "injustices within communities, including … slavery, serfdom, and the patriarchy depend precisely on constructions of labor, land, and money as non-commodities" (Fraser 2014, p.544).

6In sum, an intersectional perspective of historical transformation implies that a pendular vision that opposes liberalism and protectionism—and analogically commodification and noncommodification— is insufficient to understand the economic context of actions (Lawson 2003) of interactions between agents and structures that trigger historical change (Khanal and Bracarense 2021). An economic theory capable of dealing with the current generalized crises must not only encompass the economy and financialization (i.e., relationships of domination through money), and the environment and society, dealing also with relationships of domination based on both land and productive labor, but also, with subordination of "unproductive" labor both through gender and ethnicity dynamics.

7This article aims to demonstrate that the framework developed by Feminist Institutionalism, through a reformulation of Karl Polanyi’s ideas, offers a non-teleological economic theory capable of assessing current crises as a systemic crisis of capitalism, potentially leading to its collapse. The argument is built around three main points: (i) revisiting the concept of domination and disentangling it from commodification (Selwyn and Miyamura 2014); (ii) emphasizing the significance of Polanyi’s concept of householding (Halperin 1991; Gregory 2009) and the profound theoretical implications of separating family from economy (Waller and Jennings 1991); and (iii) exploring emancipatory responses that transcend both liberalism and protectionism (Halperin 1991; Fraser 2014) to show that the proposed framework approaches historical transformation in a non-teleological way, illuminating possibilities of postcapitalist trajectories.

2 Revisiting Embeddedness: De-Commodifying the Concept of Exploration

8Contrary to Polanyi’s perspective, Feminist Economics has long discussed gender inequalities in the market system and criticized the exclusion of housework from being recognized as productive labor (Walring 1990; Folbre 2001). Notwithstanding, in The Great Transformation (1944 [2001]), Polanyi introduced the concept of householding to describe activities conducted by a closed group (e.g., family, village, manor) for its use. He later acknowledged that this form of economic integration could define obligations and rights based on a combination of gender and age, not necessarily in reciprocal or altruistic ways but often hierarchically and, at times, despotically (Polanyi 1957; Hillenkamp 2013).

9However, Polanyi’s emphasis on the commercial and monetary aspects of the market economy, along with his treatment of householding as an autarchic and a highly specific system of integration (Gregory 2009, p. 135; Hillenkamp 2013, p. 219), led him to overlook the significant role of unpaid activities performed alongside market exchanges (Beneria 2017).

10While householding could have provided an entry point for addressing inequalities within group dynamics, Polanyi failed to develop this dimension of economic integration as thoroughly as he did with reciprocity, redistribution, and market exchange throughout his work.

11The neglect of care and housework as productive labor in the market system reflects how institutional and cultural systems often devalue or entirely ignore work predominantly performed by women (Degrave and Nyssens 2008). This oversight highlights that mechanisms of oppression operate within both market and non-market institutions. To address this gap, Feminist Economists have reformulated Polanyi’s concepts of embeddedness, the double movement, and the Great Transformation to include the idea of oppression, emancipation, and the recognition of gendered labor and power dynamics.

12The first of these modifications consists of a few ontological changes to Polanyi’s work, which results in the addition of new layers of complexity to economic analysis: the recognition of the commodification leads to exploitation and of the prevalence of exploitation/domination in different economic systems (Fraser 2014; Selwyn and Miyamura 2014). Exploitation has been present in all systems of integration: market, redistribution, reciprocity, and householding.

13Thus, as history unfolds, different types of exploitation, beyond commodification, have persisted.

14Firstly, according to Benjamin Selwyn and Satoshi Miyamura (2014, p.655), Karl Polanyi (1944 [2001], p. 159) refuses to conceptualize commodification as a form of exploitation. Polanyi (1944 [2001], p. 166) emphasized social, cultural, and moral degradations as aconsequence of ’disembedded markets.’ Injustices are, thus, often seen through the lens of unequal exchange and results, therefore, from society’s inability to sufficiently regulate the market under capitalism. Consequently, injustices can be eliminated by re-embedding the economy within non-market institutions. Said differently, his concept of exploitation is disconnected from the sphere of production, which in capitalism leads to the commodification of labor and workers’ alienation from the means of production and the product of their work.

15The absence of the idea of exploitation in the work of Polanyi prevents him from seeing that, in the absence of commodification (as is often the case in other economic systems), exploitation/dominance is still present, facilitating the appropriation of the surplus by some people at the expense of others. In sum, the admission of commodification as a form of exploitation and recognition of its market-specificity opens the analysis to carefully evaluating transformation within and beyond capitalism.

16Secondly, as mentioned in the introduction, Polanyi (1944 [2001], pp. 76, 136-138, 201-209, 236) states that the commodification of fictitious commodities set in motion far-reaching crises; his theory of crises, therefore, relies on his concept of commodity, which the author defines as a good (or service) produced for sale. Polanyi’s (1944 [2001], p. 75) argument that land, labor, and money are fictitious commodities, consequently, presupposes a market economy as their fictitious character originates from the unnaturalness and impossibility of their complete commodification (Postel and Sobel 2010). The problem with such a conception is that Polanyi’s definition of commodity is market-specific, so his theory of crisis becomes constrained to evaluations of the market economic system. Nancy Fraser (2014, p. 547) argues that these market lenses are blind to the fact that access to land, labor, and money have never existed in their pure form. In other words, even before auto-regulating markets’ push for their commodification, they have always been engaged in production through some form of domination. Thus, commodification is not the only form of domination.

17By reformulating Polanyi’s (1947, p. 31) substantive approach, thus, Feminist Institutionalists find themselves better furnished to combat ahistoricism and simplistic dualism of formalist economics and push forward a critical theory able to grasp the complexities of the 21st century (Waller and Jennings 1991; Fraser 2014; Bracarense and Gil-Vasquez 2018). First, in directing their efforts at freeing the analysis from a market-specific concept (i.e., commodification), Feminist Institutionalists become equipped to consider a possible systemic capitalist crisis. Second, in broadly reintroducing the concept of exploitation, they can evaluate the source of injustices as intersectional and multilayered mechanisms.

18These concerns are quite relevant to understand current economic and social relations, be it in Europe (Degrave and Nyssens 2008), Asia (Khanal and Bracarense 2021), or other regions (Halperin 1991; Doss 2014; Amarante and Rossel 2018).

19For instance, a study on the conditions of women rural workers in Brazil demonstrates that they face profound intersectional exploitation that arises from the convergence of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geographic marginalization. These women not only contend with the traditional patriarchal structures that subordinate their labor within households and agricultural settings but also endure systemic inequities in access to land, resources, and political representation. In many cases, household violence further entrenches their oppression, as it reflects and reinforces broader systems of gender inequality, leaving them with limited avenues for autonomy and empowerment. The multilayered pressures of poverty and environmental degradation exacerbate their vulnerability, especially in a rural economy increasingly shaped by agribusiness and monocultures. This model often prioritises profit over sustainability, further marginalising the roles and contributions of women, who are central to the practice of agroecology and sustainable farming (Prévost, Galgani, Silveira, Leite, Esmeraldo, and Guétat-Bernard 2014).

20In sum, credit, land, rights/citizenship access either have or had long been based on factors— such as feudal, patriarchal, and caste relations—that exacerbate the problematic embeddedness of commodification, meaning that the lasting consequences of these historically instated institutions remain present today. An expansion of the notion of domination would allow us to observe violence and resistance that transcend capitalism. This leads us to the second modification of Polanyi’s framework suggested by Feminist Institutionalism.

3 Triple Movement: Private-Public as a Multidimension Contrast rather than a Dichotomy

21According to William Waller and Ann Jennings (1991, p. 485), while Karl Polanyi’s perspective is "both promising and hospitable to feminist reformulation" and establishes a pertinent critique of the private-public dichotomy between society and the economy created by formalist economics, it does not push incisively enough on the separation between family and economy. In questioning a teleological approach to economics, Polanyi (1947) entertains some questions that are currently pertinent to feminist theory, however, he spends most of his effort rejecting the formalist separation between economy and polity, while dedicating little to no time to its denial of the familial role in the provisioning process (Waller and Jennings 1991, pp. 491-493). Waller and Jennings (1991) argue that rather than representing only one opposition (household vs. government), the dichotomy private-public implies a double-dualism. While the economy is private vis-à-vis the government, it is public to the family’s privacy.

22Questions pertinent to feminist theory are also present in Polanyi’s (1944 [2001]; 1957) concept of householding. For him, this pre-capitalist form of economic integration guarantees the production and sharing of resources according to the needs of the members of this autarchic group. At the institutional level, thus, householding is a locus of protection against market forces, bringing stability and unity to the economic process, but not equality or emancipation (Hillenkamp 2013, p. 224; Gregory 2009). In fact, as pointed out by Nancy Fraser (2014), protection does not imply emancipation; instead, the contrary, the sharing and dependence within a family, brotherhood, or clan, is often marked by submission and dominance based on race, gender, class, age, and kinship. Consequently, private-public conflicts consist of multilayered interactions that intersect with gendered, class-based, and racialized dimensions of labor and power, demonstrating the need for an intersectional approach to fully understand the complexities of these dynamics (Delphy 1975; IEJ 2021).

23Feminist economists have significantly expanded Polanyi’s framework by addressing its limitations and applying it to diverse contexts. For example, Isabelle Hillenkamp (2013) rejects Polanyi’s postulate of autarchy within householding to analyze popular economies in Bolivia, demonstrating how non-market activities are interwoven with broader socioeconomic dynamics. Similarly, Rhoda Halperin (1991) applies the concept to hybrid urban-rural communities in the Appalachian region of the United States, illustrating householding as a locus of resistance against dependence on and subjugation by market institutions. Building on the critique of the double-dualism identified by William Waller and Ann Jennings (1991), Nancy Fraser (2014) expands the analysis by framing it: the ’private-public’ and the ’domination-emancipation’ axes. From this foundation, she develops the concept of a triple movement, which integrates struggles for emancipation into Polanyi’s framework.

24According to Fraser, Polanyi’s (1944 [2001], p. 73) double movement focuses mainly on the former dualism, seeing the economic pendulum as a two-dimensional movement: that is, when the extension of the market system, through the commodification of land, labor, and money— threatens the social ethos, a double movement takes place, creating protective devices to guarantee the production and reproduction of society. In other words, society reacts to widespread commodification by creating protective devices to guarantee survival as a going concern.

  • 2 Nancy Fraser (2014) does not use the concept of householding, but with a few considerations, it see (...)

25When Polanyi discusses the ongoing provisioning process, however, he does not carefully consider the impact of the second aspect of the private-public dualism; that is, the relationship between familial institutions, or the provisioning happening within the clan or householding2— namely institutions that establish instances of domination unrelated to commodification, identifying, for instance, who belongs to "us" and the "others" (Gregory 2009) and determining types of labor that are productive or unproductive (Fraser 2014). A framework that can encompass this other dimension of private-public is critical for deconstructing domination sustained by, for instance, eugenic beliefs, caste, and patriarchal systems, which determined whose labor may be commodified or not.

  • 3 Although out of the scope of the current paper, similar patterns can be found regarding ethnicity ( (...)

26In Europe in 2021, for instance, 67.7% of the women’s labour force was employed, whereas men’s employment rate stood at 78.5% (EC 2023). Moreover, in the same year, considering both paid and unpaid labor in the European OECD member countries, men work on average 7 hours 18 minutes per day, while women’s work shift exceeded men’s by 38 minutes a day. More importantly, while men’s share of paid work amounts to 67% (4 hours 53 minutes) of their workday, it is a mere 44.6% (3 hours 30 minutes) for women. Consequently, men spend on average 2 hours 24 minutes on unpaid work daily, whereas for women this number rises to 4 hours 24 minutes a day (OECD 2023). Meanwhile, in the United States, men daily spend 5 hours 30 minutes (67%) in paid and 2 hours 45 minutes (33%) of unpaid activities on average, whereas women exercise 4 hours 6 minutes (47.8%) of paid and 4 hours 30 minutes (52.2%) of unpaid work per day (OECD 2023). In Mexico, the gap is even more striking. Mexican men declare eight paid (78.4%) and 2 hours 20 minutes (21.6%) unpaid hours of work per day, while women dedicate 4 hours daily (41.6%) to paid work and five and a half hours (58.4%) to unpaid work. In sum, regardless of the country here evaluated, women dedicate more than half of their workday to unpaid tasks, while the same is not true for men. In sum, the commodification of women’s work is less extensive than that experienced by men, which results in social inequalities and economic loss for women and for society as a whole (EC 2023)3. In other words, women’s non-commodified labor is more often exploited than men’s.

27The proposed two-fold reformulation of the private-public dualism unveils commodifications as merely one form of domination, exposing more systematically the injustices within communities—such as slavery, serfdom, and patriarchy—that depend on social constructions of labor, land, and money precisely as non-commodities (Fraser 2014, p. 544). Consequently, transformation is multidimensional rather than being guided by a two-dimensional pendulum between liberalism and protectionism based solely on the tension between commodification and non-commodification.

28Multidimensional and intersectional tensions become evident through, first, studies highlighting the interconnectedness of social, economic, and environmental injustices, and second, the nature of the demands articulated by dissidents and protesters.

29Regarding the first point, in France, for example, a study evaluating 36,600 towns demonstrates that locations with high proportions of immigrants tend to host more hazardous sites, even after controlling for population size, income, degree of industrialization of the town and region (Laurian 2008). Similarly, immigrants and people of color are concentrated in the most hazardous occupations and the most environmentally polluted neighborhoods of the Silicon Valley (Pellow and Park 2002). Although racial climate injustice is more deeply study than gender differential (Buckingham and Kulcur 2009), some scholars have discussed this issue through both an analysis of women’s higher vulnerability to climate change (Ahmed and Erlund 2021) and their confrontation to increased burdens due to changing weather patterns given that women are more often responsible for household water and energy management (Rao 2010; Omolo 2010; Caronna 2014).

30About the second point, it is not a surprise that dissidents’ claims for justice have also become multilayered. Most recently, in June 2023, France witnessed widespread urban revolts, mirroring those triggered by the murder of George Floyd in 2020 in the United States, after Nahel Merzouk, a French-Algerian teenager, was killed by the police. Scholars have observed the correlation between social movements and environmental injustice in the US case.

31’I can’t breathe’—last words pronounced by Floyd while being choke hold by a police officer—became a powerful slogan in the Black Lives Matter movement, denouncing not only policy brutality, but also environmental racism (Pellow 2017; Sze 2020) as African American communities suffer from elevated rates of asthma and other health problems associated with disproportionately high levels of pollution (Mohai et al. 2009).

32Less divulgated by the media are the demands coming from Mexican indigenous communities for the indigenization of Mexican citizenship and identity. Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez (Marichuy), the chosen spokesperson of Mexico’s indigenous organizations, is tasked at pushing for an emancipatory platform to launch the national project of indigenized citizenship.

33Indigenizing entails several changes, such as: (1) delinking society from the abstraction of representative politics by promoting a direct democracy; (2) operating in alternative economic principles like community and reciprocity as defended by solidary economics (Banerjee, Lucas dos Santos, and Hulgard 2021); (3) to cope with violence, poverty, and environmental degradation issues by re-installing the rule of law, printing their own money, and reviving the forest (Gil-Vasquez and Bracarense 2022).

34Similar occurrences have surfaced in other contexts. For instance, during the ten years of Maoist insurrection in Nepal (1996–2006), the dissenters’ concerns extended far beyond class inequality to address the extreme sociocultural inequalities experienced by various linguistic, ethnic, religious, caste, and regional groups (Khanal and Bracarense 2021). Similarly, the 2022 Iranian protests following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini exemplify the multidimensional nature of conflicts that drive social and political unrest. Amini, a 22-year-old woman from the Kurdish ethnic minority, was killed by the Iranian morality police, sparking widespread protests supported by middle- and working-class youth, as well as Kurdish and Baluchi communities (Afary and Anderson 2023; Khatam 2023).

35In other words, these are reactions to an intersectional system of domination. Fraser calls them a triple movement, which brings up the third reformulation of Polanyi’s theory proposed by Feminist Institutionalism.

4 Rethinking the Great Transformation away from Fixed Dichotomies: Commodification may be Emancipatory / Embeddedness may be Exploratory

36As shown above, the added complexity layer for analyzing social transformation illuminates the transformative power of emancipatory movements. Depending on whether emancipation allies with liberalism or protectionism, the contexts of action it spurs may exacerbate individualist impulses or reshape social relations towards alternatives to the market system (Halperin 1991; Fraser 2014; Bracarense and Gil-Vasquez 2018, p. 617). According to Tony Lawson (1997), social reality is "conceived as intrinsically dynamic and complexly structured, consisting in human agency, structures and contexts of action, none of which are given or fixed, and where each presupposes each other without being reducible to, identifiable with, or explicable completely in terms of, any other" (Lawson, 1997, p. 159). Consequently, social transformation is not teleological, but rather multiple and uncertain.

37Polanyi’s rejection of strict methodological holism and individualism (Postel and Sobel, 2010), allowed him to articulate possible combinations of interactive action between institutions and individuals that could lead to non-teleological outcomes (i.e., socialism, social democracy or fascism) (Polanyi 1933; 1945, pp. 88-90; 1957, p. 251). Linking the commodification of labor, land, and money to the emergence of technical and utilitarian rationality, Polanyi argues that instrumental rationality unites fascist totalitarianism and unrestrained liberalism as both reduce individuals to identical automatons, stripped of their uniqueness, history, and ethics (Postel and Sobel 2010, pp. 21-22). Said differently, Polanyi sees historical unfolding as an open-ended process. However, in his framework, the possible outcomes remain straightjacketed to possible unfolding within capitalism due to the market-specificity of the concept of commodification (Selwyn and Miyamura 2014, p. 658).

  • 4 A statement that is explored and illustrated in Chris Gregory’s (2009) study of brotherhoods in Ind (...)

38To overcome this shortcoming, Feminist Institutionalists suggest a rectification of Polanyi away from "fictitious commodities cannot be commodified all the way" through adopting Hegel’s idea that society cannot be contracted down (Fraser 2014)4. With this modification, Fraser (2014, p. 548) elaborates a "structural interpretation of fictitious commodification," which extends the concept of domination beyond recognizing commodification as exploitation to systems other than the market system. Through a combination of ’Two Karls,’ Fraser (2014, p. 551) argues that "struggles around labor’s commodification were actually three-sided: they included not just free marketeers and proponents of protection, but also partisans of ’emancipation’, whose primary aim was neither to promote marketization nor to protect society from it, but rather to free themselves from domination." This kind of reaction is made clear by the Black Lives Matter movement, the social organization of women rural workers in Brazil, or the protests in Iran.

39Feminist Institutionalists’ choice of building upon Polanyi, after some considerations, is twofold: his peculiar ability, in comparison to other economists, to deal with a generalized Crisis that goes beyond economic factors (i.e., commodification of money), bringing to attention its interactions with sociological, cultural, and ecological aspects (through the evaluation of the commodification of land and labor); and the epistemological and methodological compatibility of his framework and feminist economics. The triple movement stresses something Polanyi had seen but had not elaborated upon. Polanyi saw that while the "double movement" keeps the system functioning, it is not inherently beneficial to everybody, and may be oppressive (Halperin 1991; Khanal and Todorova 2019). Struggles to protect nature and society from the market are often aimed at entrenching existing privilege and excluding ’outsiders’ (Gregory 2009). Parallelly, James Galbraith (2008) discusses the emergence of a predator state, where private interests cast themselves as too big to fail and use their political power to get protection from the state at the expense of the public to support their institutions. Commodification and exploitation can be intensified by infiltrating market relations into institutions that should ostensibly slow the pace of commodification. In this case, government action is not analogous to decommodification.

40Conversely, as both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1846 [1959], p. 370) and Karl Polanyi (1947, p. 107) have noted, marketization is capable, at times, of generating emancipatory effects.

41It may dissolve modes of domination external to the market and create the basis for new, more inclusive, and egalitarian solidarities.

42Nepalis’ fights for emancipation, for example, included all sectors of the population who actively participated in the production and reproduction of society, yet had their access to the provisioning process restricted through feudal subjection, social exclusion, and imperial domination, as well as from sexism and patriarchy. Firstly, while injustice and inequality were aggravated by the commodification of land, labor, and money during the liberalism of the British proto-colonial period and neoliberalism under the surveillance of the IMF and World Bank, the 1950s-1960s developmentalist policies did not mitigate these issues. Secondly, the sociocultural inequalities existed in Nepal long before the liberal, developmentalist, and neoliberal periods. Thirdly, the commodification process of the 1990s engendered the empowerment of ethnic minorities and transformation of gender roles and relations; elements of broader shifts in the sociocultural patterns of Nepali society (Manchanda 2001; Yadav 2016).

43These changes led to deed political, institutional, social, and legal transformation in Nepal (Khanal and Bracarense 2021). However, we shall not overplay the emancipatory power of progressive neoliberalism (Fraser 2023). Our current institutional setting, placed to sustain the market system, is politically, socially, culturally, and environmentally destructive (Fraser 2022), and solutions for this generalized crisis demand radical changes, such as those proposed by Mexican indigenous communities.

44Fraser’s triple movement—through the incorporation of additional layers of complexity to Polanyi’s double movement—nonetheless, renders the reach of embeddedness unbounded; fights for emancipation may create alternative forms of organization to the market system (Halperin 1991; Hillenkamp 2013; Prévost, Galgani Silveria Leite Esmeraldo, and Guétat-Bernard 2014). In doing so, the pendulum of historical transformation moves multidimensionally, resulting in a non-teleological understanding of history and fostering a critical theory of contemporary crises, capable of charting postcapitalist trajectories.

5 Concluding Remarks

45This paper demonstrates the potential of Feminist Institutionalism to extend and reformulate Karl Polanyi’s framework in addressing the intertwined social, ecological, and economic crises of the 21st century. By challenging the narrow focus of formalist economics on market mechanisms, this approach highlights the systemic injustices perpetuated by both market and non-market institutions. In fact, Feminist Institutionalists expand Polanyi’s ideas by incorporating intersectional perspectives, which expose forms of domination beyond commodification—rooted in gender, class, race, and ethnicity—that are often overlooked in economic theory.

46These injustices lead to social contexts where Fraser’s (2013, p. 130) triple movement could emerge; that is, the interplay of ecological, economic, political, and social instabilities incited by market forces may trigger emancipatory reactions that may align themselves with either marketization or embeddedness, encouraging possible social erosion or ethical protection.

47By revisiting Polanyi’s concept of householding and integrating concepts such as intersectionality and the triple movement, Feminist Institutionalism offers a robust, non-teleological perspective on institutional transformation, capable of grappling with the complexities of the 21st century.

48This paper underscores the relevance of Polanyi’s framework, reinterpreted through a feminist lens, for understanding the interconnected crises of our time. It demonstrates that systemic instability arises from the commodification of fictitious commodities—land, labor, and money—and entrenched social hierarchies rooted in other integration systems that perpetuate inequities. A reimagined economic theory, informed by Feminist Institutionalism, is essential for addressing these instabilities and paving the way for a non-teleological theory to evaluate a transition to a postcapitalist order.

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Notes

1 William Waller (1988) demonstrates that one of the contributions of original institutional economics (OIE) to economic theory consists of its understanding of institutions as both structures and processes, rather than focusing only it the former characteristics. Such contribution allows OIE to evaluate economic change as a dynamic and complex process.

2 Nancy Fraser (2014) does not use the concept of householding, but with a few considerations, it seems compatible with the activities and dynamics she attributes to the family, clan, and/or community.

3 Although out of the scope of the current paper, similar patterns can be found regarding ethnicity (Banks 2020; Benanni 2023).

4 A statement that is explored and illustrated in Chris Gregory’s (2009) study of brotherhoods in India.

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Natalia Bracarense, « Beyond the Pendulum: Feminist Institutionalism and Polanyi’s Framework for a Non-Teleological Economic Theory »Économie et institutions [En ligne], 33 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2024, consulté le 13 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ei/8184 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14g8v

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