ABSTRACT
The third chapter explores Polanyi’s economics film, Unemployment and Money: The Principles Involved (1940) as a boundary object bridging various social worlds. Polanyi envisioned that his economics film can become an engine of large-scale disciplinary and social changes fostering “democracy by enlightenment through the film”. But most people who came into contact with his film did not embrace this vision. The aim of this chapter is to show the diverse habitat of socially crafted eyes and hands in which Polanyi’s film, the vessel of his postmodern economics, needed to prove its fitness if it was to survive. It analyses Polanyi’s rich correspondence with economists, film experts, managers, economics tutors and others to map their manifold perceptions and discusses whether such diversity rather fostered or hampered the spread of his economic ideas. Instead of focusing on the process of interessement and the making of obligatory passage points as accounts of actor-network theory (ANT) do, this chapter seeks to explore the minutiae of the social, economic and personal implications of these perceptions from a Jasanoffian approach.
