Markets And Market Places: Karl Polanyi And Contemporary Ca Pitalism

Abstract

This article explores the conceptual distinction between market, system of price-making market and marketplace created by Karl Polanyi and shows the relevance of this differences for the analysis of the contemporary capitalism focusing on the characterization and specific effects of actual marketplaces. It evokes Polanyi’s contribution to rethink the concept of market as the economic literature refers to specify the historicity of the markets, especially the system of price-forming market (equivalent to the capitalist system), opposing these concepts to marketplaces. It resorts to ethnographic and/or sociological works on marketplaces in the contemporary world. It supposes that marketplaces exist in the current configuration of market exchange, may create value symbolic, and material, as well as are at the origin of processes of social differenciation, intensified, for example, in the case of digital platforms.