Three Shades of Embeddedness, State Capitalism as the Informal Economy, Emic Notions of the Anti-Market, and Counterfeit Garments in the Mauritian Export Processing Zone
Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy: Structural Ideals and Moral Realities
ISBN: 978-1-78441-056-8, eISBN: 978-1-78441-055-1
Publication date: 16 September 2014
Abstract
Purpose
This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capitalist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ).
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory – “embeddedness” and “the informal economy.” These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology’s engagement with (neoliberal) capitalism.
Findings
A process-oriented revision of Polanyi’s work on embeddedness and the “double movement” is proposed to help us situate EPZs within ongoing power struggles found throughout the history of capitalism. This helps us to challenge the notion of economic informality as supplied by Hart and others.
Social implications
Scholars and policymakers have tended to see economic informality as a force from below, able to disrupt the legal-rational nature of capitalism as practiced from on high. Similarly, there is a view that a precapitalist embeddedness, a “human economy,” has many good things to offer. However, this paper shows that the practices of the state and multinational capitalism, in EPZs and elsewhere, exactly match the practices that are envisioned as the cure to the pitfalls of capitalism.
Value of the paper
Setting aside the formal-informal distinction in favor of a process-oriented analysis of embeddedness allows us better to understand the shifting struggles among the state, capital, and labor.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
This paper develops further findings that I presented at the EASA conference in 2006 (paper title: “Formal or Informal Miracle: Mauritian Economic Globalisation in the 20th Century”) and at the 2010 History of Commodity Chains Research Group Meeting, University of Konstanz (paper title: “Ralph Lauren Mauritian Style: Methodological and Epistemological Challenges in the Study of Competing Notions of ‘Liberty,’ Legality, and Dependency within Global Commodity Chains”). I would like to thank the participants and conveners for their valuable comments. I have also benefitted from two anonymous reviewers’ comments on an earlier version of this paper. Natalia Buier, Robert Heinze, and Joe Trapido have given important stimulus to take my thoughts further, and Donald Wood has been an excellent editor. Research has been funded by the Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg, and by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 140484). The usual disclaimers apply.
Citation
Neveling, P. (2014), "Three Shades of Embeddedness, State Capitalism as the Informal Economy, Emic Notions of the Anti-Market, and Counterfeit Garments in the Mauritian Export Processing Zone", Production, Consumption, Business and the Economy: Structural Ideals and Moral Realities (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 34), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 65-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120140000034002
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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