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ABSTRACT
Market System Dynamics (MSD) and Constructivist Market Studies (CMS) have both emerged to return markets to the center of marketing thought. Arguing that the two fields have only rarely engaged in intellectual exchange, we compare MSD and CMS and consider the potential for their cross-pollination. We first outline the intellectual origins of the two fields and show how they have, in part, been propelled by three overlapping concerns: (1) market ontology, (2) market ideas, and (3) market agency. We then compare how MSD and CMS have pursued these concerns differently. Whereas MSD tends to treat markets as meaning-based, shaped by big cultural ideas and animated by institutional agents, CMS typically portrays them as practice-based, shaped by small technical ideas and animated by socio-technical agents. Based on these differences, we offer some suggestions for how the two fields may learn from each other in pursuing the three concerns in question.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Mikkel Ø. Nøjgaard is a PhD student in the Consumption, Culture, and Commerce unit at the University of Southern Denmark. His PhD research addresses the history of consumer testing and its role in modern markets.
Domen Bajde is a professor WSR, and head of the Consumption, Culture, and Commerce unit at the University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include the study of moralized markets, consumer governance, and the social life of technology. He explores these topics primarily through the lens of relational ontology and consumer culture theory.
Notes
1 The label MSD has recently been offered to designate market systems research within the field of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). While the label is young and has (so far) not been broadly adopted, we use it as a practical means of referring to this emerging stream of research.
2 In 2003, Giesler (Citation2003) for example promoted a turn to “social systems” and proposed to analyse these systems, in keeping with Luhmannian systems analysis, as communicative systems that constantly reproduce themselves and their separation from their “environment” through communication.
3 This does not mean, however, that MSD work features exclusively in US outlets. In fact, the MSD label was introduced in a Marketing Theory article (a European outlet) (Giesler and Fischer Citation2017).
4 Presenting this work to both CMS and MSD audiences also revealed this tricky combination of similarity and difference. Here, we both met the critique that the two fields are too different to compare as well as the critique that they are not different enough to warrant comparison.
5 This call also resonates with CMS voices that have previously pointed out that “the construction of markets requires […] activities that embed exchange in a specific context (e.g. relate product design to usage context)” (Araujo Citation2007, 223, emphasis added).
6 A few studies (e.g. Stigzelius et al. Citation2018) have begun answering these questions, demonstrating their relevance and value.
7 This question echoes Mason, Kjellberg, and Hagberg’s (Citation2015, 11) suggestion that “future research on the performativity of marketing might also explore how social values [such as those found in mythologies, discourses, ideologies, etc.] can become foregrounded in the production, representation, materialisation and circulation of market knowledge.”
8 Previous studies have looked into the ebb and flow of management fashions (Abrahamson Citation1996) and the social processes leading to conformity around dominant marketing ideas (Marion Citation2010). But these studies only say little of the importance of the ideological and mythological context of marketing knowledge for understanding how that knowledge develops and comes to impact on markets.
9 Foucault (Citation1982, 781) writes: “There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.”
10 Note, however, that this does not imply that CMS scholars conceive of humans and objects as being ontologically identical. Instead, they hold that
[b]eings engaged in action fall within ‘differentiated ontologies’; they evidence different properties, and these properties are what make the action possible as a composition of differentiated and distributed capabilities (intelligence, will, beliefs on the human side; force, durability, materiality on the object side. (Cochoy and Mallard Citation2018, 389)
11 For a similar argument on the agency of consumers in MSD, see Stigzelius (Citation2018).
12 Following Latour (Citation2003), Andersson, Aspenberg, and Kjellberg (Citation2008, 74) define actants as “whatever acts in a practical situation,” which may include both humans and non-humans.
13 The term “agencing” appears particularly vulnerable to this critique, as it is often unclear who or what actually agences. Indeed, the verb is most often used in the passive verb (e.g. shopping bags or consumers “being agenced”) or in gerund (e.g. “agencing” markets), denoting a process whose instigator remains vague.
14 Araujo (Citation2007, 221–222) provides an interesting answer to this question, suggesting to explore the unequal distribution of calculative agencies.