Chapter 6 shows how false Stories help to perpetuate the economic imbalance described in Chapter 4. These Stories include those of economic growth, comparative advantage, creative destruction, and ceaseless innovation. Most of them originate in mainstream economics, including praise for shareholder interests and insistence on social choice theory. Karl Polanyi claimed that such Stories, which endorse a society roiled by constant change, ignore what he called community welfare.

This part considers how markets and other institutions decoupled society and environment and how to recouple them. Transitions along the way include the Western belief in progress by controlling nature, the reorganization from feudal to market systems, as discussed by Polanyi, and the idea that land can be divided and owned. The challenges and opportunities of collective use, of common-pool resources, were discussed and debated by Gordon, Hardin, and Ostrom. Economics needs to integrate ecology, as Daly emphasized. The implications can be dire, as Sen showed for famines. Catton and Dunlap made a like plea for sociology and the environment, and Bullard showed the environmental justice implications of unfairly sited urban waste and pollution. Lele explored the disconnect between the ideal of sustainable development and its application, arguing for knowing first the complex links between social and natural systems. Norgaard frames development as an evolutionary problem, arguing that knowledge, values, technology, organizations, and the environment coevolve. Diverse experimentation can provide the raw material for selecting more-sustainable paths.

The Roman monetary system was historically unique. Its complexity arose out of several intersecting and sometimes contradictory embedding contexts. This chapter identifies several important embedding contexts and provides a broad diachronic outline of their influence in the development of Roman money. Some of Rome’s Republican-era experiments with coinage, for example, were inescapably influenced by Greek practices and concepts. Roman territorial expansion seems to have been correlated with the rise of impersonal exchange in Rome, Italy and beyond – presenting unique cultural challenges for Roman elites in the Republican period. Notions of monetary value in the Roman Principate remained tethered to historical monetary contexts – but shifts in value and in the prominence of certain contexts over others could and did happen. Oscillations in the intensity and breadth of state power, for example, influenced money use, value and the scope for market exchange. It is impossible to import modern economic theory into Roman monetary history without first accounting for some of the key embedding contexts which shaped monetary practices, processes and concepts in the Roman world.

This chapter highlights the potential for national, international and EU stewardship developments to bring a ‘public’ coloration into investor-led governance. Departing from previous monolithic views that couch shareholder stewardship as a self-regulating, dis-embedded market mechanism solely protecting and enhancing shareholder primacy, the chapter applies a neo-Polanyian analytical framework and identifies shareholder stewardship as a policy counter-movement that operationalises socially responsible investing and environmental, social and governance investing through shareholder engagement. However, for current stewardship policies to engender fundamental behavioural changes in investment practices, some systematic regulatory intervention which will not result from bottom-up forces and market demand for investor-led norms is necessary. Ways to promote a strong sustainability approach to stewardship include the imposition of regulatory duties and mandatory disclosure regimes. The possibilities for regulatory alternatives may remain fluid, I argue, but it is important for the means of shareholder stewardship to meet its ends.

Polanyi–s and Galbraith–s analyses of very long-run changes in, and main characteristics of, economic and social structures. It is pointed out how neo-institutionalism is grounded in the traditional marginalist approach, thus sharing its limits, while the evolutionary and institutional approaches, with strong connections among them, are born in counterposition to the marginalist approach. Their contributions, in particular those to the analysis of technical change, are then illustrated. With reference mainly to Hirschman, the cultural element in development economics is recalled. A final section illustrates the –varieties of capitalism–.

Chapter 3 – How societies change – presents some key examples of how historians, anthropologists, economists, and other academics have tried to come to grips with the agents and drivers of previous societal transformations. We cite examples of how the great Western transformation between 1500 and 1900 has been framed in different ways. Furthermore, we present two analogies of transformations: the abolition of slavery, and the replacement of horse transport in cities with automobile transport. This constitutes the basis for a typology of societal transformations based on the system levels and tempo of transformations.