Struggling for the Moral Market: Economic Knowledge, Diverse Markets, and Market Borders

abstract

Focusing on the recent emergence of behavioral and experimental economics and its implications for the design and implementation of social policies, we demonstrate that geographies of marketization are not confined to the narrow study of the models of neoclassical economics. We structure our argument around what we perceive as key dimensions of marketization and their variegated geographies: First, we argue for renewed attention to the naturalization of abstract market knowledge and its methodological separation from real markets in the wake of the behavioral and experimental turn. We then turn to really existing markets, conceptualizing them as articulations of a variety of economic and social rationalities struggling over an apparent “moral market.” Third, we focus on the role of the nonhuman in marketization processes and discuss the work of market devices in making these market arrangements possible. In the fourth and final section we turn to the “human side” of marketization. Our argument is that market struggles connect with the formation of “quasi-subjects” that oscillate between attempts to reestablish autonomy and their dissolution in the disciplining webs of behavioral and experimental market devices. Throughout the text we illustrate our arguments on the so-called social impact bonds as a concrete example for the types of policy intervention informed by economic behaviorism and experimentalism.

Key words:

• marketization
• assemblage
• subjectivity
• behavioral economics
• bordering

Acknowledgments

Versions of this article have been presented at the 2017 “Geographies of Markets Workshop” at the Karl Polanyi Institute, Concordia University, and the 2018 “Market Studies Workshop” at the Copenhagen Business School. We thank the participants for suggestions that allowed us to improve the article. We additionally acknowledge the editorial support from Jane Pollard and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on our article. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (POZHP1_168899).

Notes

¹ See Social Finance’s Impact Bond Global Database, http://sibdatabase.socialfinance.org.uk.

² We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for alerting us to the role of knowledge production about markets (see also Pollard et al. 2009, 138).

³ See http://modernisation.gouv.fr/en/about-the-sgmap/who-we-are.