Chapter 4 opens up the black box of the firm to assess the effects of leadership on reform outcomes in China Infrastructure (CI) (pseudonym), a central SOE in the construction industry. The chapter features paired comparisons of the consecutive tenures of chairmen in CI and process tracing of original data gathered during fifteen months of fieldwork inside the company, primarily in its Beijing headquarters, between January 2014 and June 2016, with follow-up visits in June 2018, December 2019, and December 2023. It presents evidence that the chairman’s leadership generated variation in the degree to which market expansion was decentralized and in the balance of influence among intra-firm actors. The chapter also evaluates and rules out alternative explanations: guanxi with and intervention by higher-level officials, shifts in policy by administrative superiors, and changes in industry competition in domestic and international markets.

Chapter 5 examines the effects of leadership on reform outcomes in four other central SOEs: State Grid, China General Nuclear Power Group, Sinochem, and China Railway Engineering Corporation. These companies are selected to capture full variation along two key dimensions: industry strategic importance and firm type. For each of these four central SOEs, the chapter compares the consecutive tenures of their chairmen to assess the effects of leadership on reform at the firm level. This survey provides additional evidence that successive leaders’ decisions about organizational strategy and structure are an important driver of variation in reform outcomes. Cross-firm analysis further suggests that the effects of leadership on reform are a matter of degree and are conditioned by existing institutions, policies, and economic factors.

Where Market Studies opened the theorizing of markets to concerns of various affected publics, we propose a new shift to further destabilize understandings of what markets are and can be. This shift considers how care, as an affective, ethical, and political force, figures in markets – and, moreover, to make room for care where it may currently be absent. We draw on feminist materialist discussions of care to render explicit the ways in which care circulates in existing markets – and in Market Studies – and propose five avenues for inquiry into care and markets: care as a market object; care as a critical market maintenance practice; care as more-than-concern, more affectively, ethically, and politically committed; care as a basis to rethink market relations and construct better – fairer and more just – markets; and, finally, care as a relational force circulating between us as Market Studies researchers, the objects of our study, our workplaces, and the more-than-human worlds we belong in. We do not suggest that care is a panacea for all market ills, but offer it as an analytic of provocation – something to think with as we imagine and enact future markets.

Gender remains absent from the agenda of Market Studies. This chapter asks (1) why gender is absent, (2) why Market Studies should bother with gender, and (3) how Market Studies scholars might go about incorporating questions of gender in their research. The chapter traces the roots of the field’s avoidance of gender issues to the idea that gender is either a problematic or an unnecessary concept. The chapter further suggests that studying the co-performation of markets and gender promises to lead to an improved understanding of both gender and markets. Imagining avenues for future research, the chapter seeks inspiration in ethnomethodological theories of gender and Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as proposes the strategy of seeking constructivist answers to feminist questions.

Chapter 2 defines leadership and outlines a leadership approach to studying China’s politics and economy, centered on the top-ranked individuals in public-sector organizations. It explains how the autonomy of Chinese public-sector leaders originates from multiple sources: the discretion built into the CCP’s cadre management system, guanxi (关系) with superiors and allies, decentralization of authority in the Chinese bureaucracy, and policy ambiguity and uncertainty. It critically reviews recent studies of China’s politics and economy to uncover the importance and influence of leadership. It concludes by discussing how a leadership approach helps to account for divergence, inaction, and subversion in reform outcomes.

This chapter draws on a mixed-method project that explored retail market encounters in Edinburgh during the pandemic. It borrows from Walter Benjamin’s methodological and conceptual approach in the arcades project to explore how online settings, notably Instagram, function as market spaces. Arcades, for Benjamin, work by using their architecture to create atmospheres conducive to specific actions – lingering, browsing and purchasing. Arcades and Instagram share material and technical features that are orchestrated to shape action and in this both parallel the functions of ‘market devices’. The significance of space, as an element in ‘the equipment and devices’ which give market ‘action a shape’ has long been acknowledged in market studies (Callon 1998: 22) but how retail space works to devise action has had little attention. In describing how Instagram provided ‘digital-affective premises’ during the pandemic we advance three broader propositions. First, that market spaces are necessarily market devices because they are designed to produce action. Second, that while scholarship has exposed the material and technical elements of market devices, it had said much less about their sentimental or affective elements. Finally, that market spaces showcase how technical-sentimental, digital-affective elements interact in giving action its shape.

The purpose of this chapter is to speculatively explore the future of digital platforms and how they transform the nature of many conventional markets. Digital platforms create novel connections between actors in multi-sided markets, whilst generating and capitalizing on vast amounts of data. Platforms are thus not just match but market-makers, exercising asymmetric power over their multi-sided users whilst framing the institutional and regulatory environment in which they operate. However, platforms are also the outcome of the market shaping activities enrolling a variety of actors, and may involve multiple economization modes (e.g., market, gift giving). The chapter draws upon examples of retail digital platforms to develop a conceptual discussion of the role of platforms in the contemporary economy and considers their implications for the future of markets and market-making. The dual purpose of this chapter is to examine what the rise of digital platforms means for Market Studies and what a Market Studies perspective brings to the study of platforms. We propose and discuss three specific themes at the intersection of Market Studies and digital platforms.

How might researchers begin to tackle markets that are constructed through digital texts, and how might they do so within the richly descriptive tradition of Market Studies? This chapter introduces semantic network analysis (SMA) of digital texts. It discusses the use of SMA to map the rhizomic structures of discourse, to extract mental models of participants, and draw a shared cognitive map from dispersed discourses. Through the example of an empirical study, focusing on an art investment consultancy, it examines how these methods can contribute to Market Studies and other related fields. It concludes with reflections on the relationship between theory, research practice, and the performative work of market texts

Market Studies scholars have adopted a wide range of methods to explore how markets are made and shaped, ranging from traditional ethnographic and netnographic approaches (see, for example, Fernandes, Mason and Chakrabarti 2019; Palmer, Simmons and Mason 2014), to interviews and observations (Mason, Friesl and Ford 2019; Onyas and Ryan 2015) and the use of big data (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016). Despite advances in our understanding of markets generated using these methods, studying markets as distributed, fragmented, multi-site and multi-actor institutions continues to present significant challenges (Hyysalo, Pollock and Williams 2019). These challenges cut across all stages of the research process: from the relationships researchers build with research participants, to the design and deployment of empirical methodological toolkits to collect and make sense of market and market-making data. One way of overcoming these challenges has been for researchers to reconceptualize methods as enabling tools: enabling researchers to identify, uncover and unfold market dynamics and the socio-material arrangements that perform them.