Introduction : exploring markets

The origin of the present volume was an invitational workshop focused on questions of the spatiality and diversity of markets, held at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy in Montreal in the summer of 2017. This was an apt meeting place in a more than literal sense. Although many of those in attendance did not subscribe explicitly to a Polanyian worldview or mode of analysis, most had engaged with Polanyi's work in different ways. Some had made extensive contributions to neo-Polanyian scholarship, while others were more closely affiliated to radical political economy, performativity approaches or poststructuralism. In this context, more pertinent were a series of broadly aligned sympathies with what might be characterized as Polanyian dispositions, including: shared recognition of the importance of respectful, constructive and non-dogmatic exchange across an interdisciplinary range of heterodox and critical positions; overlapping concerns with the potential of empirically engaged and "substantivist" investigation (to borrow the Polanyian terminology), not just in testing and tweaking extant theories but in the construction of new insights, understandings and socio-political visions; and mutual commitments to humane, emancipatory and sustainable modes of socio-economic and ecological development.