A market is the institution that coordinates the production and distribution of goods and services through prices rather than through command or custom. Ronald Coase's account of the firm treats the market and the firm as two alternative modes of coordinating economic activity: outside the firm, price movements direct production, coordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Sociologists dispute how self-regulating markets actually are: Karl Polanyi's concept of embeddedness distinguishes a society where market exchange is only episodic from one where it permeates every expression of life, and treats the fully self-regulating market as itself a historically specific social construction rather than a natural baseline state.
Facts
Disputed
Emergence PeriodMarkets in some localized, socially embedded form are documented across a wide range of historical societies; what is debated is not their antiquity but Karl Polanyi's claim that the fully self-regulating, disembedded market society of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism was a specific and recent historical development rather than the natural expression of a universal human propensity to trade. 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountDebated because it turns on how far exchange in early and non-industrial societies should be read as market behavior at all, not on any disputed date. Institution TypeSourced to the subject's own accountEconomic institution: a price-based coordinating mechanism for exchange, contrasted sociologically with non-market institutions, such as the guild, kin-based reciprocity, and state redistribution, that coordinate the same underlying activity through other means. 1 Institution TypeSourced to the subject's own account The Market
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Associated With
Barter exchange has historically taken place within marketplaces alongside monetized trade, especially in economies with limited currency circulation.
Homans social exchange theory modeled everyday social interaction on an economic logic of costs and rewards similar to market exchange.
White markets from networks theory modeled producer markets as social structures in which firms watch and position themselves against their nearest competitors.
Marine insurance grew directly out of the trading markets of early modern port cities, where merchants pooled risk against the loss of cargo and ships.
Knorr Cetina ethnography of global financial markets analyzed them as technologically mediated systems in which traders act on a shared, screen-based reality.
Polanyi The Great Transformation argued that the market economy is always embedded in, and made possible by, wider social and political institutions rather than a natural, self-regulating order.
Granovetter embeddedness theory reframed markets as structured by ongoing social networks and relationships rather than atomized rational exchange.
Callon studies of market performativity argued that economic theory does not merely describe markets but actively helps construct how they operate.
Source Wikipedia: Property
Source Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Wikipedia)
Guilds historically regulated entry into craft markets, one of several non-market and quasi-market mechanisms alongside price-based exchange.
Source Wikipedia: Guild
Historically, guilds regulated who could produce and sell a given craft or trade good, controlling entry to and competition within a market rather than existing independently of one.
Practices Studied
Source Alexander Rüstow (Wikipedia)
Source Alexis de Tocqueville (Wikipedia)
Studied By
Source Benjamin Tucker (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Harrison White
Source Wikipedia: Karin Knorr Cetina
Source Encyclopedia.com: Karl Polanyi
Source Michel Callon (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Neil Fligstein
Source Wikipedia: Neil Smelser
Source Wikipedia: Sharon Zukin
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Market (Economics)
WikipediaDefinition section
Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is co-ordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market.
Lead
In economics, a market is any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange goods, services and information.
- In Category: Institutions and Social Structures
View the Source Wikipedia: Guild
Wikipedia: Property
Encyclopedia.com: Karl Polanyi
Encyclopedia.comStudied By: Karl Polanyi, Article textQuote, Studied By: Karl Polanyi, Article text
In the capitalist, market-integrated economy and in conventional economic theory, the two meanings of “economic” are fused, since in capitalism the market institutions serve both to provide the material means of existence and to enforce economizing activities on the participants: to earn their livelihood people must abide by the rules of the market.
Wikipedia: Neil Fligstein
Studied By: Neil Fligstein, Article textQuote, Studied By: Neil Fligstein, Article text
Fligstein has developed a “political-cultural” approach to market analysis, arguing that markets are social and political arenas shaped by actors’ conceptions of control, state regulation, and institutional structures.
Benjamin Tucker (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Benjamin Tucker, Article textQuote, Studied By: Benjamin Tucker, Article text
But under system of a free market without state monopolies and privileges, which he believed to, among others, prevent zero-interest loans from being accessible to the workers, the capitalists would have a right to suppress aggressive strikers.
Wikipedia: Neil Smelser
WikipediaStudied By: Neil Smelser, Lead sectionQuote, Studied By: Neil Smelser, Lead section
His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods.
Wikipedia: Karin Knorr Cetina
WikipediaStudied By: Karin Knorr Cetina, Lead sectionQuote, Studied By: Karin Knorr Cetina, Lead section
Knorr-Cetina's progression to understanding how technology mediates sociality led her to select global financial markets as a new "laboratory" to study knowledge in society.
Wikipedia: Sharon Zukin
WikipediaStudied By: Sharon Zukin, Article textQuote, Studied By: Sharon Zukin, Article text
Zukin's research and publications focus on cities, how they change and why, culture (especially consumer culture and art markets) and real estate markets, particularly in New York City.
Wikipedia: Harrison White
WikipediaStudied By: Harrison C. White, Article textQuote, Studied By: Harrison C. White, Article text
Harrison White also developed a perspective on market structure and competition in his 2002 book, Markets from Networks, based on the idea that markets are embedded in social networks.
Michel Callon (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Michel Callon, Article bodyQuote, Studied By: Michel Callon, Article body
From the late 1990s, Callon led efforts to apply ANT approaches to study economic life, notably economic markets.
Alexis de Tocqueville (Wikipedia)
Practices Studied: Alexis de Tocqueville, Lead, marketQuote, Practices Studied: Alexis de Tocqueville, Lead, market
their relationship to the market and state in Western societies
Alexander Rüstow (Wikipedia)
Practices Studied: Alexander Rüstow, Life, social market economyQuote, Practices Studied: Alexander Rüstow, Life, social market economy
Rüstow promoted the concept of the social market economy, and this concept promotes a strong role for the state with respect to the market
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Wikipedia)
Associated With: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Lead sectionQuote, Associated With: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Lead section
For Unger, the market, the state, and human social organization should not be set in predetermined institutional arrangements, but need to be left open to experimentation and revision according to what works for the project of individual and collective empowerment.
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