This chapter centres on the market maintenance of the Norwegian meat market arrangement. A market design created in the 1930s to guarantee minimum prices to farmers and weekly volume balancing is still in place. The market arrangement must be shaped to a 100 per cent equilibrium – volume balanced – at 13:00 every Wednesday, 52 times a year. The market operator, Totalmarked, performs ‘continuous market organizing’ through market coordination and market correction. Ongoing market maintenance activity is an overlooked theme within the Market Studies literature. In the chapter, we make no normative assessment of the performativity of the market design. Instead, the temporal dynamics of market maintenance as ongoing continuous organizing through four market work activities performed by a market operator are analysed. This broadens current conceptualizations of market design towards something that is incomplete, requiring constant market work. The chapter thereby emphasizes the work and devices involved in the ongoing stabilizing of an existing market. Totalmarked performs four market work activities to enact the market rules that underpin a long-standing market design in this heavy regulated, protected agricultural market. The chapter concludes by highlighting the interplay between place and market identity in Market Studies.

Chapter 3 surveys enterprise reforms in China since the late 1970s to highlight evolving constraints and space for leadership in SOEs. It examines five periods: emergence and decline of “dual track” economic reform (1978–91), establishment of a socialist market economy (1992–94), retrenchment of state ownership in the “commanding heights” (1995–2001), internationalization and consolidation of the state sector (2002–12), and combination of limited economic liberalization with increased political control (2013 to present). Since the late 1970s, SOE leaders have transitioned from managing production to determining how to restructure their firms, managing state-owned capital, and expanding in both domestic and international markets. Although the overall trend has been toward expanded space for leadership, the current Xi Jinping administration has tightened political and commercial control.

Traditional economics served as the model case of most early performativity theory. In recent years, however, behavioural economics and particularly nudging has become increasingly popular; both as a policy instrument to design markets and as a behaviour change tool used by for-profit organizations. This chapter unpacks the implications of this shift in economic discourse for performativity theory, examining to what extent the performative process of behavioural economics overlaps with standard performativity and how it differs from that of traditional economics across policy and business domains. We focus on four aspects of the shift: (1) the nature of the economic subjects – consumers, workers, market actors – being performed, (2) the changes in the underlying normative standpoints and the politics of performativity, (3) the technologies of knowing adopted, and (4) the performative actions and socio-technical assemblages facilitated by traditional versus behavioural economics. The chapter concludes by offering a theoretical extension of performativity theory and a critical account of the potential impacts of behavioural economics and by laying the groundwork for future research.

This chapter examines the interrelationship between “a market’s materialities and practices” (Geiger and Gross, 2018) by offering an account of how a particular source of energy – wooden biomass – became a perferred energy resource in the Danish energy system. This chapter examines how biomass is qualified, i.e., identified, measured, framed, and, thereby, known. However, the materiality of forests and wooden biomass affords multiple understandings depending on the epistemic equipment – theories, models, and measurements – used. This introduces an epistemic uncertainty in how biomass can be known, providing opportunities for expression and enactment of interests, making policymaking more complex and more contentious. Our analysis highlights the antagonism and power struggles involved in the dynamics of market framing. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how the material ‘unruliness’ of biomass calls for complex accounting methods, leaving biomass incumbents much maneuver room and jeopardizing Denmark’s reputation as ‘a frontrunner’ in energy transition. The chapter contributes to Market Studies research by demonstrating the dual role of materiality in shaping (concrete, situated) interests and valuations while simultaneouly also affecting conditions for future maneuvering/actions. Further, the analysis brings out the politics of valuation.

This chapter contributes a means of teasing out the uneven spatial ordering of markets. Taking inspiration from Schatzki’s (1991, 2001) practice-based spatial ontology, we introduce a four-part scheme made up of ‘anchors’; ‘places’; ‘settings’; and ‘paths’. We ground the concepts in an empirical account of the Finnish Lapland’s emergence as the official ‘home’ of Santa Claus and the related historical constitution of a Christmas tourism market. With the future of market studies research in mind, we argue that this conceptual framework provides a way of thinking about market making as an inherently spatial process, while also supporting investigations of how markets and the concerns they help produce take shape unevenly over time and across physical space.

Commodity items may be singularized and revalorized in markets for second-hand goods. The market for singular goods, often cultural or aesthetic items, depends upon collective assessments of value, where the nature of value is embedded in the cultural community. Exiting studies have concentrated on the work of experts and practitioners within markets as they construct goods as valuable. As research begins to see valuation as a nexus of social relations, so it becomes important to study how valuation practices organize markets that span countries and socio-economic categories. We examine the valorization practices of second-hand bicycle traders in Hungary. These market intermediaries salvage obsolete discarded steel bicycles and reconstitute them into fashionable vintage bicycles: sought-after subcultural fashion accessories and collectors’ prized items. We propose a theory of value bricolage to describe the process of constructing value through the skilful combination of matters at hand, material, social and imaginary: scrap frames, spare parts, online resources, fan websites, and valuation communities.

This chapter proposes that the manifold tinkering and experimenting that happens in and around markets and their infrastructures over time holds valuable lessons for the future design of these markets. More specifically, we argue that a fair and equitable market design can only be achieved if the legal and political mechanisms that have shaped that particular market over time are understood, and misfires and repair attempts of the past are acknowledged and reflected upon. Using a historical perspective, this chapter maps the decades-long tinkering behind the HIV medications market, a market that has historically misfired in and through its very blueprint, which is strongly framed by its legal infrastructures. To examine the experiments in this particular market to create a collective good, we trace the relevant laws, property rights provisions and amendments, market governance practices, and civil society actions over the past forty years. Reflecting on the many misfires of this market and the equally numerous attempts to repair it, our study considers market tinkering as a reaction to overflows as an iterative, experimental process, but one that is likely to never fully transcend the market’s formative blueprint. Ending on an optimistic note, though, we also think through ways of radically redesigning the market for essential medicines.

The proliferation of digital technologies is changing the face of markets and society. This on-going market digitalization represents an opportunity for Market Studies – a field that has long considered the role of technologies in markets. Careful inquiry into market digitalization allows for continued agnostic and descriptive research, but also prompts us to consider the human outcomes of market arrangements. This chapter explores how the digitalization of markets affects human relationships and experiences. Basing our argument on a review of contemporary scholarship on market digitalization, we suggest that digitalization reconfigures both visibility and participation in markets. This typology actualizes how everyday human market interaction is changing, exemplified through the figures of the consumer, the influencer, and the activist. We find that Market Studies is in a strong position to address technologies as it already considers several roles in markets: as market devices, objects of exchange, as well as market infrastructures. We propose that Market Studies should continue to explore differences in market arrangements, as well as the significant variability among the people interacting in digitalizing markets.

Simulated markets are a fascinating paradox for Market Studies. They are markets organized around nothing. No real property rights get exchanged when markets are “only” simulated. They are unproductive in the sense that simulated markets produce no surplus for anyone. They are markets that do not actually exist. Yet, simulations of market processes play an increasingly important role in market practices as well as in wider business pedagogy. This chapter uses historical and contemporary evidence on the development and uses of market simulations in various settings – ranging from business schools to Wall Street – to test the post-performativity paradigm in Market Studies. The chapter shows that real-world market arrangements are changed not with the help of economic models, economic theories or economists themselves, but rather through business school teachers, family accountants, software tinkerers and designs that emerged completely outside the sphere of economic theory and modelling. By studying the early uses of electronic spreadsheets for market simulations, we can see that market arrangements require calculative communities rather than economists.

High-end audio systems aim to reproduce the original sound of music performed in physical spaces. They are an intersection of aesthetic art and emotions, a culture of listening to music in ones’ preferred genres and a system of components or machines that are designed by technologists of acoustics, electrical engineering and material science. There is an abundance of scientific research on sound and acoustics from engineering and physics that discusses the engineering of good sound on the basis of quantitative, parametric measures for the human cognition of listeners (Pinch and Bijserveld 2012; Powell 2010). There is a dearth of research on how hi-fi aficionados determine what really counts as ‘hi-fi’, however. This chapter empirically investigates the high-end audio equipment market. It applies perspectives from the pragmatist literature of valuation to probe the valuation practices of actors and agents using data from field interviews and observations, and archive and online documents.

Today, the online trade press offers a wealth of easily accessible data on market developments. It provides information on consumption trends, innovation dynamics, competitive developments and regulatory changes. This chapter proposes methodological suggestions for using this data in Market Studies. The social sciences have traditionally approached the press through the paradigms of discourse analysis, the articulation between production and reception, or the construction of public events and problems. From a Market Studies perspective, the trade press can also be used to study the representational practices underlying the construction of markets, the staging of the qualities of goods and the emergence of collective concerns about economic activity. The chapter examines the qualitative and quantitative treatments of online data that can be used here, drawing on an empirical case concerning the implementation of a market label in the field of sustainable construction in France in the early 2010s’

This chapter operationalises a theory of value formation that suggests processes of valuation have two dimensions: evaluation and valorization. It argues that the value placed on a diamond after the practices of valuation have taken place has been altered by the very act itself – how the valuation has been done, by who and for what the purpose. The grading, pricing and trading of polished diamonds exist within a socialized sphere of interconnected relationships reinforced and impacted by power structures and institutional status at every point in the market. Using the diamond market case study, the chapter demonstrates how the institutions that structure the market are not static but dynamic, constantly challenged by the network of actors within the market. The resulting valuations and exchanges that are therefore both highly performative and hierarchical.

At its simplest, the Market Studies discipline is based on the idea that markets are organized – which is one of the reasons why Market Studies scholarship often overlaps with organization studies (Ahrne, Aspers and Brunsson 2015; Geiger and Gross 2018; Palo, Mason and Roscoe 2019). Though often decentrally and organically evolving, this organization typically is at least partly the result of deliberate shaping, engineering or design efforts by some market actors. Much attention in Market Studies has been given to acts of market making, which we define here as the multi-actor efforts of creating a market organization through socio-material assemblages according to certain organizational principles and directed towards certain goals. These efforts typically result in what Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon (2010) encapsulate through their famous notion of ‘market socio-technical agencements’, or market STAs (or, even shorter, mSTAs).

It is no longer news to argue that economics is performative, that it does not only describe markets, but takes part in producing or manufacturing them. Once accepted as close to a matter of fact, the performativity argument risks becoming too much of a general statement. So, what’s next for performativity? This chapter turns the performativity into an empirical research agenda which moves from demonstrating the existence of performativity to putting the performativity argument to the test and investigate sites and modes of performativity. We need to distinguish between the performativity of research as constitutive, that is how knowledge production has an effect on the world; while simultaneously being aware that this is not by itself enough to effectively shape actual markets. To find empirical and analytical ways to observe performativity in action, we go back to one of the original sites from where the performativity of economics argument was developed: economic and marketing experiments. We find that both much more is made in these settings than the making of actual markets, for instance the making of economics as a discipline and so also knowledge of markets, and much less, as the markets produced in these settings do not always move out of them.