ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the main arguments conceptually grasping intense interaction within the corresponding debates. It describes a fundamental critique of these arguments based on the contention that they have not managed to offer a conclusive explanation of why it is presently, at the outset of the post-industrial knowledge economy that the process of socio-economic modernization seems to be turned upside down. The chapter discusses precisely the logic of the labour market drawing on Karl Polanyi’s concept of labour as a ‘fictitious commodity’ and trying to extrapolate his arguments to the reflexivity debate. The labour market is definitely the key institution through which the relation between economy and society is ‘put into practice’. The function of the labour market as a ‘hinge’ between economy and society in a market economy has been elaborated most clearly in the work of Polanyi.
