Public sociology vs. the market

Building on Karl Polanyi’s theory of a societal reaction to the unregulated exchange of what he called fictitious commodities—labour, money and land— this paper links the history of sociology to the history of the market. If the first wave of marketization in the nineteenth century dwelt on the commodification of labour, prompting utopian sociologies, and the second wave of marketization of the twentieth century was provoked by the commodification of money, generating national policy sociologies, then the third wave of marketization that began in the last quarter of the twentieth century includes the commodification of the environment (land, air, water), and calls for public sociologies of a global dimension.