ABSTRACT
This chapter1 refers to Karl Polanyi's concept of the 'market', 'redistribution', and 'reciprocity' as three possible patterns of allocation, and the notion of 'embeddedness'. The aim of this work is to make use of these concepts for the conceptualisation of post-communist transformations. In order to do so, however, a re-formulation of Polanyi's categories seems appropriate. The three mechanisms are not treated as being defined a priori by a specific kind of 'embeddedness'. In other words, it is the type of social embeddedness of the 'market', 'redistribution' and 'reciprocity' that is at issue.2
