Decisions
Currently Submitted to: Economic Thought: The WEA Journal
Desk Rejection from METHODOLOGY: European Journal
Dear Dr. Zaman,
Before confirming the receipt of the manuscripts and giving them a code, we read them carefully in order to see whether they fulfil APA requirements and they follow editorial policy. We make this because the number of manuscripts we receive is very high and we can only select a few of them in order the time between acceptance and publication not to be very long. Thus you should not take our decision as related with the quality of your paper.
In respect to your manuscript entitled "The methodology of Polanyi´s great transformation", after carefully reading it, we regret to tell you that it does not answer to the requirements of the journal Methodology. It tackles an interesting topic providing a deep analysis of the methodology used by Polanyi and showing that his approach is radically different from those used nowadays within economics . However, we regard that it does not make a novel contribution to the methodological field. Methodology tackles general methodological approaches, with a focus on the development of new proposals in the areas of data analysis, research methodology and statistics.
Thanks for considering Methodology as an outlet for your research and we hope that you will follow considering this journal in the future.
Sincerely,
Nekane Balluerka
Editor
Arantxa Gorostiaga
Managing Editor
METHODOLOGY European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences
Dear Asad Zaman
I have received your paper 'The methodology of Polanyi’s great transformation’ and will contact you again once the review process is complete.
Thank you for submitting your paper to the Review of Political Economy.
Best wishes,
Lynne Chester
Co-editor, Review of Political Economy
Dear Professor Zaman,
I am writing with regard to manuscript # CJE-2014-158 entitled "The Methodology of Polanyi's Great Transformation", which you submitted to the Cambridge Journal of Economics.
Unfortunately the Editors have decided that they are unable to offer publication of the manuscript in Cambridge Journal of Economics. I am attaching comments from the referees to the end of this message. Please note that the Editors may not agree with all comments but the reports are being sent for your information. All papers go through a careful assessment process following peer review and the Editors do regard this decision as final.
Thank you for considering the Cambridge Journal of Economics for the publication of your research. I hope the outcome of this specific submission will not discourage you from submitting to the journal in the future.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Jacqui Lagrue
Managing Editor
Cambridge Journal of Economics
Referee Comments to Author:
Referee: 1
Comments to the Author
This paper is an original and strong effort to lay out the methodology that Karl Polanyi uses in The Great Transformation. It has the potential to make a significant contribution, but the present version has several problems that must be overcome.
The first is that the paper almost completely ignores the unit of analysis issue. What is obviously distinctive about the GT is that Polanyi frequently analyzes global dynamics and sees the choices that are made at the level of nations as responses to the global pressures. This is obviously central to his methodology—nations cannot be analyzed in isolation from the organization of the global economy and state system. This element needs to be included in this article.
The second problem is that the paper is weak in explaining why Polanyi’s distinctive methodology is important to understand and possibly emulate. There is some brief discussion of this at the end, but it is not satisfying. Given the massive failure of mainstream analysts to anticipate the 2008 crisis, it would seem a rather easy argument to make. The author could draw on Skidelsky’s powerful critique of the economics discipline and its failure to understand the linkages between economy, polity and ideas.
The third problem is that the paper does not do enough with KP’s analysis of the influence of wrong or mistaken ideas. The author is correct that this is central to his argument, but he or she does not really tell us where this distrust of official knowledge leads the analyst. A related problem is that KP talks about how classes gain power by responding to the needs of society, but how do we know what those needs actually are? How do we escape from the ideological formulations that are systematically produced.
Finally, the paper makes little use of the abundant literature on KP that has emerged in recent years. More familiarity with this literature would have made it possible to avoid mistakes such as failing to recognize that “the great transformation” of Polanyi’s title is what happened in the 1930’s and the quite unsatisfactory discussion of KP’s account of the origins of World Wars.
Referee: 2
Comments to the Author
The paper has some interesting and close textual analysis of the Great Transformation. However, the author would benefit from a wider reading of Polanyi's own work, especially the later anthropological studies. Already in the 1940s Polanyi was drawing on anthropological studies of the shifting place of economies in societies.
The paper would benefit from at least some discussion of the wider literature on Polanyi - eg. in relation to the shaping of economy by ideas (Mark Blyth), Randles on the double movement, and especially Dale's many publications. Fred Block's contributions touch on many of the issues raised in the paper, and need to be addressed when discussing arguments developed in the paper.
The paper is in fact not about methodology, as claimed, but about what kind of explanations Polanyi provides. For example, there is no discussion of the comparative economic anthropological method which underlies much of Polanyi's work, or of the particular historical methodology employed in GT.