When Karl Polanyi described the emergence of market society, he identified something more profound than an economic shift. He traced a categorical transformation—the moment when land, labor, and money were reimagined as commodities, despite being nothing of the sort. Land is nature. Labor is human activity. Money is a token of exchange. None are produced for sale. Yet treating them as if they were restructured the entirety of social life. This insight remains the essential starting point for understanding how commodification operates as a force of social transformation.

Commodification is not simply the act of putting a price on something. It is the process through which a good, a service, a relationship, or even an identity is reorganized according to market logic—rendered exchangeable, fungible, and subject to supply-and-demand dynamics. The transformation runs deeper than economics. It rewires the social bonds, obligations, and meanings that previously governed how people related to one another and to the thing in question.

For those engaged in transformation strategy, this poses an unavoidable double problem. Commodification is one of the most powerful engines of structural change in human history. It dissolves feudal ties, dismantles patronage networks, and creates new forms of freedom. But it also corrodes reciprocity, erodes collective identity, and generates new vulnerabilities. Understanding its mechanisms—not as ideology but as process—is essential for anyone attempting to steer large-scale social change rather than merely react to it.

Commodification does not happen spontaneously. It requires institutional scaffolding—legal frameworks that establish property rights, measurement systems that render qualities comparable, and cultural narratives that normalize exchange. Consider how care work becomes a commodity. It begins with formal recognition: licensing requirements, standardized service definitions, billing codes. What was once embedded in kinship or community obligation is progressively extracted, packaged, and priced.

The process typically follows a discernible sequence. First comes abstraction: the thing in question is separated from its social context and redefined in generic, transferable terms. A plot of ancestral land becomes a parcel with a cadastral number. A healer's knowledge becomes a set of billable procedures. This abstraction is not neutral—it privileges certain qualities (those amenable to measurement and exchange) while rendering others invisible.

Next comes commensuration—the establishment of a common metric, almost always monetary, that allows unlike things to be compared and traded. This is where much of the social violence of commodification occurs. When education is commensurated through tuition fees and expected lifetime earnings, the intrinsic and communal dimensions of learning are subordinated to return-on-investment calculations. The metric does not simply describe value; it reorganizes what counts as valuable.

Then comes alienability: the severing of the commodity from its producer or original context so it can circulate freely. A farmer's harvest becomes grain futures. A community's traditional knowledge becomes intellectual property held by a corporation. Alienability is what makes market exchange efficient—and what makes commodification so socially disruptive. The thing now moves according to price signals rather than relational obligations.

Finally, commodification requires competition—the structuring of multiple providers and consumers into a market that disciplines behavior through the threat of substitution. Once your labor is a commodity, you are replaceable. Once your neighborhood is a commodity, it is subject to speculation. The competitive dynamic ensures that market logic, once established, is self-reinforcing. Those who resist it face material penalties. This is not conspiracy; it is structural momentum.

Takeaway

Commodification is not a single event but a four-stage process—abstraction, commensuration, alienability, competition—each of which restructures what counts as real, valuable, and possible within a social domain.

The most consequential effect of commodification is not economic but relational. When a domain enters market relations, the social bonds governing that domain are not merely supplemented—they are fundamentally restructured. Consider the difference between lending money to a neighbor and taking out a bank loan. The economic function is similar. But the social architecture is entirely different. The neighbor loan embeds obligation, trust, and reciprocity into an ongoing relationship. The bank loan replaces all of that with a contract, an interest rate, and a credit score.

Polanyi called this the shift from embedded to disembedded economic relations. In embedded economies, exchange is governed by social norms—kinship, status, religious obligation, community expectation. Commodification disembeds exchange from these norms and re-embeds it in market institutions. The gain is efficiency and individual freedom from traditional constraints. The loss is the dissolution of the social fabric that gave exchange its meaning beyond mere transaction.

This relational restructuring cascades. When housing becomes primarily a commodity rather than a social good, neighborhoods transform from communities of mutual obligation into collections of individual investment positions. Residents relate to one another not as neighbors but as co-participants in a property market. Decisions about where to live, how long to stay, and whom to welcome are increasingly governed by asset appreciation rather than belonging.

The pattern repeats across domains. Commodified education produces students who are consumers rather than participants in a shared intellectual project. Commodified healthcare generates patients who are revenue units navigated through billing categories. Commodified information yields audiences whose attention is the actual product being sold. In each case, the human relationship—between teacher and student, healer and patient, writer and reader—is subordinated to the transactional logic of the market.

What makes this so analytically important for transformation theory is that relational restructuring is largely invisible to economic analysis. GDP rises when grandmothers stop caring for grandchildren and daycare centers take over. The market registers a new service. What it cannot register is the transformation of an intergenerational bond into a consumer transaction—and the downstream effects on solidarity, identity, and social cohesion that follow.

Takeaway

Commodification does not just change how things are exchanged—it transforms who we are to each other, replacing bonds of reciprocity and obligation with bonds of contract and substitutability.

If commodification is this powerful, can it be wielded strategically? The history of social transformation suggests a qualified yes—but with dangers that transformation strategists routinely underestimate. Commodification can be a liberating force when it breaks down entrenched hierarchies. The commodification of labor, for all its brutalities, freed millions from feudal bondage and created the conditions for collective bargaining. The commodification of information through the printing press and later the internet dismantled clerical and expert monopolies on knowledge.

The strategic question is always: what social relations does this particular commodification displace, and what replaces them? When Amartya Sen argues that development is fundamentally about expanding human capabilities, he provides a crucial evaluative framework. Commodification that expands people's real freedoms—their ability to live lives they have reason to value—can serve transformative ends. Commodification that narrows those freedoms, even while generating economic growth, is regressive regardless of its GDP effects.

The most sophisticated transformation strategies therefore involve selective commodification paired with deliberate decommodification. The Nordic social democracies exemplify this: highly commodified and competitive export sectors coexist with substantially decommodified healthcare, education, and social insurance. The market is used where its disciplinary logic generates productive innovation. It is excluded where its logic would corrode the social foundations on which productive innovation ultimately depends.

But this strategic balance is inherently unstable. Commodification generates constituencies—investors, entrepreneurs, consumers—who benefit from its expansion and lobby for its extension into new domains. Decommodification generates constituencies who resist marketization but often lack the concentrated economic power of market actors. The political economy of this asymmetry means that commodification tends to expand beyond its strategic optimum unless countervailing institutions are deliberately maintained.

The deepest lesson for transformation theory is this: commodification is a tool, not a direction. Treating market expansion as synonymous with progress—or market restriction as synonymous with justice—both miss the point. The question is always institutional and contextual. What capabilities does this commodification expand or contract? What social relations does it create or destroy? And do the people affected have genuine power to shape the terms on which market logic enters their lives?

Takeaway

Commodification is neither inherently liberating nor inherently destructive—its transformative value depends entirely on whether it expands or contracts people's real capabilities, and whether affected communities retain power over its boundaries.

Commodification is among the most potent forces of social transformation available—and among the least understood in its full relational consequences. It does not merely create markets. It remakes the social world in which markets operate, transforming bonds of reciprocity into bonds of exchange, communal identities into individual consumer positions, and shared obligations into priced transactions.

For transformation strategists, the imperative is analytical precision rather than ideological reflex. The mechanisms of commodification—abstraction, commensuration, alienability, competition—are not inherently good or evil. They are structural processes with predictable social consequences that vary enormously depending on institutional context and political power.

The societies that navigate transformation most successfully are those that treat commodification as a bounded instrument—powerful within its proper domain, destructive beyond it. The enduring challenge is maintaining the political and institutional capacity to decide where those boundaries lie, before the structural momentum of market logic decides for us.