Shaping exchanges, building markets

Abstract

This article provides a conceptual overview of theoretical approaches to the study of markets from across social science disciplines. These approaches are arranged according to the dimensions of socialization and materialization. While necessarily simplistic and non-exhaustive, such arrangement drives out some of the strengths and weaknesses of the frameworks considered. Particular attention is given to the emerging markets-as-practice approach, which loosely unites the contributions to this special issue. While the markets-as-practice framework has received considerable attention in the recent decade, much remains to be studied in and around markets. Some of the issues highlighted in this article, and explored across the five contributions in this issue, are multiplicity in markets, market changes and dynamics, the possibility of “managing” markets, and values, morals, and power in markets.

Keywords:

• markets as practice
• exchanges
• market dynamics
• market studies

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers of this special issue for their time and for their careful and constructive reading of the submitted articles. Lisa Peñaloza and Jonathan Schroeder were extremely supportive in making this special issue happen, thank you very much! Thanks to all the special issue contributors for the feedback on this introductory article; as always, all remaining mistakes and omissions are purely the authors' doing. Finally, many thanks to the wider markets-as-practice community and particularly the participants of the First Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop for the many stimulating discussions around market issues.

Notes

The Second EIASM Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop is held in Dublin in June 2012.

Examples include transaction cost economics, which recognizes that human cognitive limitations, social relations, and asset characteristics create frictions or imperfections that may require intentional governance (Williamson 1973, 1991), and market design theories that seek to device institutional and technical solutions to remedy problems in allocating scarce resources in markets (Roth 2007).

This is not to say that all approaches occupying such positions are equally concerned with dynamics, or that they approach the issue in the same way. The articles in this issue, however, all place considerable emphasis on emergence, processuality, and instability.