ABSTRACT
Something strange has happened to western welfare states over the last twenty years or so. Until recently, and notwithstanding the differences between the many ‘worlds of welfare capitalism’ (Esping-Andersen 1990), the social order of advanced industrial nations was based on the dichotomy of ‘market’ and ‘nonmarket’ spheres, with the latter providing shelter from what the former tended to generate-disruptive loss of income or long-lasting misery among people with limited ‘market value’ and lacking support from their family. This dichotomy was deep-seated too in major strands of social theory, for which the foundations of modernization were (and still are) often grounded in the differentiation of spheres of life, of societal systems, or of modes of social coordination. To be sure, the protection from market forces as ensured by the welfare state was never all-inclusive and varied over time and between groups, communities, and states. Moreover, welfare states were by no means an exclusive realm of decommodifi cation (in the terms of Esping-Andersen) as they also enabled people to ‘go market.’ However, nonmarket-based patterns of welfare provision were deemed to embed the market economy, as Polanyi (1944) put it, with the twin aim of making market economies work and preventing them from completely colonizing human existence.
