Karl Polanyi's intellectual work stands among the most significant and original contributions to social science scholarship in the period since the end of World War I. In particular, his book The Great Transformation is now widely recognized to be a classic of sociological thought. Although Polanyi was influenced by the major figures of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociology, his work cannot easily be classified within one or another of the major social science traditions. There are echoes throughout The Great Transformation of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and other classical thinkers, but Polanyi was not a direct disciple of any of these theorists. In fact, in anthropology, where Polanyi's influence has been greatest, the uniqueness of his contribution is suggested by the recognition of a distinctly Polanyian paradigm in economic anthropology that stands in conflict with both Marxist and substantivist traditions.

Significantly, such a paradigm or tradition cannot be located in the other disciplines that were central to Polanyi's work – history, economics, and sociology. While his ideas have influenced subgroups within each of these disciplines, there has been no recognizable attempt to carry out a Polanyian research program in any of them, and for a long period there was almost no secondary literature on Polanyi.