Conclusion: are there any markets out there?
Economic sociology seems to face two impossible alternatives: either the market is absolutized as abstraction or it is dissolved into ‘culture’; economic rationality approximates to neo-classical calculations or it merges with ‘life’.
We seem to miss the turning into a critical space in which markets are neither uniform nor dominant yet are still identifiable. In order to map out this space we have to do something which Gallon is pointing to: we have to find some of the parameters and border disputes through which markets take endlessly contingent and unstable shapes. Externality is probably only one line of analysis/definition. It is a fruitful one if you are interested in following the relationship between technical knowledges and market boundaries. It might not be quite so useful in thinking about cultural matters where the inside and outside of the market are not defined by issues of cause and effect or empirical consequences but rather by the cultural stability of the entities themselves (actors, commodities, relationships): markets define themselves to the extent that they can stabilize objects, but every attempt to do so invokes meanings and processes that threaten to reopen the market structure. The power of the notions of disentanglement, framing and overflowing (and their real gain over simple ‘disembedding’) is that they focus us on the impurity of market behaviour- including the mixture of economic and cultural calculation involved in constituting economic action - while at the same time being able to acknowledge its basic structural forms. This conceptual apparatus is most useful, however, when it is not inextricably aimed at accounting for an expected and presumed form of calculation. Instead, such concepts give us a clearer grasp of the one feature that seems to be reliably useful in analytically delineating markets - the alienation of objects in the form of property that can be detached from the networks in which they originate
- and which allows for diverse, unpredictable and contradictory modes of calculation.
References
Bourdieu, P.
(1989) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1998) ‘The essence of neoliberalism: what is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic’, in Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris.Gallon, M. (ed.) (1998) The Laws of the Markets, Oxford: Blackwell.
Carrier, J.G. (1994) Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700, London: Routledge.
Carrier, J.G. and D. Miller (eds) (1998) Virtualism: A New Political Economy, Oxford: Berg. Knorr-Cetina, K. and U. Bruegger (2000) ‘The market as an object of attachment: exploring postsocial relations in financial markets’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 25(2): 141-68.
Miller, D. (1998) A Theory of Shopping, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Miller, D. (2002) ‘Turning Callon the right way up’, Economy and Society, 31 (2).
Slater, D. (2002) ‘Capturing markets from the economists’, in P. du Gay and M. Pryke (eds) Cultural EconomiestCultural Analysis and Commercial Life, London: Sage.
Slater, D. (2003) ‘Markets, materiality and the “new economy”’, in S. Metcalfe and A. Warde (eds) Market Relations and the Competitive Process, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Slater, D. and F. Tonkiss (2001) Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Thought, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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