Karl Polanyi's conception of “instituted economic process” (IEP) is a radical one, implicitly embodying a fundamental variability of both temporal and spatial scales. Instituted, the concept, which will be discussed and elaborated below, has two key components. First, when used in conjunction with economic processes, it is relational. Polanyi posits a “two-process” economy: processes of “changing hands” (appropriation and exchange) and processes of “changing place” of goods or people (distribution) (Polanyi 1957). So, in this respect, economic processes become instituted when dynamically related to each other in such a way as to reproduce themselves in a relatively similar organizational form, over a significant temporal and spatial scale, albeit in variable ways. A market form of organization, therefore, becomes instituted when monetary exchanges of ownership of goods or services are systematically combined with the movement of goods and services.

Second, the concept radically historicizes and spatializes any economic organizational form, precluding any supra-organizational laws or dynamics other than those immanent in any given organizational form and its interactions with other spatially and temporally contingent instituted organizational forms. Dynamics or logics are historically and spatially instituted, immanent in relational configurations of economic processes. In that sense, the concepts of “instituting” and being “instituted” immediately problematizes the spatial and temporal scales of any economic organization, as opposed to constructing abstract models (for example, of capitalism) that are transcendent with respect to socio-spatial scale or time. Scale, both temporal and spatial, is to be conceived as emergent, and the appropriate discipline of knowledge for “the economy” becomes historical and comparative. That vision, I suggest, is intimated in Polanyi's Columbia 1950– 52 lectures, when he proposed a “general economic history … an advance as important as that which has revolutionised … the disciplines of physics or biology, psychology or economics. No true science ever stands still” (Polanyi 2014 [1950]: 133). It was a discipline that needed to become at once comparative, anthropological and historical, dispensing with abstract models, especially those assuming individual calculative behaviour, rational or boundedly so.