Chapter 1 introduces the book’s core argument: that leadership in China’s public sector helps to explain variation in reform outcomes at the organization level. Focusing on Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), it introduces the book’s analysis of the effects of leader decisions about strategy and structure and their execution on two types of reform outcomes: (1) the degree to which SOE market expansion is decentralized and (2) changes in the balance of influence among intra-firm actors – who gains and who loses during reform. This chapter also provides an overview of Chinese SOEs’ domestic economic presence and their strategic functions for the state. It distinguishes between SOEs owned by central and local governments and situates them in China’s administrative hierarchy. Next, the chapter takes a closer look at central SOE leaders: their demographics, integration in China’s political system, and attributes relative to other Chinese officials. It concludes by previewing the content of the remaining chapters.

Taking a spatial and pragmatic approach to markets, this chapter develops an understanding of small trade and its logistics in markets at the periphery of global capitalism. Based on field surveys carried out in Senegal, it examines the day-to-day interactions between wholesalers, resellers and logistics intermediaries that organize the circulation of goods within and between distributed marketplaces and spaces. The research question addresses the process of ‘scaling up’ that transforms a multitude of small hawker transactions into mass consumer markets. The analysis reveals a reticular structure interconnecting individual and informal cross-border traders and shopkeepers, resellers of differing sizes and capacities, and the interconnection of these parties by ‘coxers’ and drivers, who are actors in both micro-logistics and hawking. It shows that the daily circulation of a multitude of small batches of goods relies on logistics assemblages recomposed on a day-to-day basis, based on kinship (interpersonal alliances), tech-ship (micro-technologies) and a credit chain. It shows how this socio-technical circulation infrastructure is a key driver of market access for small traders, allows for the conquest of spatial scales, and provides a flexibility of hierarchies and trajectories as a form of market organization.

The Market Studies discipline represents an effort to understand and unscramble the entangled knot of practices, agents, devices and infrastructures that constitute markets. Over the past two decades it has become an interdisciplinary field, with scholars from sociology, marketing, management, organization studies, economics, anthropology, geography and design – an epistemic community (Knorr Cetina 1999) studying the emergence, transformation and innovation of markets (Araujo, Finch and Kjellberg 2010; Kjellberg and Helgesson 2006, 2007). The Market Studies field understands markets as socio-material, technical, political and economic forms of organizing collectives of distributed, heterogeneous sets of expertise – not only of exchange but also of society (Çalışkan and Callon 2009; Callon 1998).

This chapter explores how Market Studies scholars can usefully direct their expertise and attention to the complex challenges thrown up by the required shift to the imaginary circular economy. We propose a framework and research agenda for the infrastructuring moves required to fundamentally shift the sociomaterial, technical, political and economic arrangements that sit below our linear economy, in order to reconfigure how our economy works. The need for greater fungibility at a local, regional, national and international scales, and for new forms of governance are seen as critical to success. However, while Market Studies scholars are well-equipped to address these challenges, we need to do more than simply deploy existing conceptual frameworks and tools, asking, what demands do circular economy concerns place upon Market Studies? We argue that theories of materiality and valuation need to be extended if not reformulated, to accommodate many of the features associated with circularity. We recommend that scholars engage more actively with understanding the infrastructures of supply and demand that compose the linear economy, the practices that sustain that demand, and the practices of repair, remanufacturing, retrofitting, upgrading, and enabling new modalities of access to goods.

Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing what a leadership approach contributes to the analysis of China’s politics and economy. It introduces the concept of the “intra-organizational politics of reform”: the daily dynamics of cooperation and conflict between leaders and their subordinates inside public-sector organizations. While elite politics and bargaining among different parts and levels of the Chinese bureaucracy have received much attention, the internal world of public-sector organizations is also a crucial arena for reform politics. Such intra-organizational politics both constitute the everyday substance of reform and shape its ultimate course. Next, the chapter discusses the increasingly global context and effects of leadership in Chinese SOEs. It explains why leadership continues to matter despite the ongoing centralization of political authority under Xi Jinping. Finally, it outlines several directions for future research on leadership in China’s public sector during the Xi era.

This chapter is concerned with understanding the history and operation of the market for political risk insurance, and the related political risk analysis industry that provides metrics, narratives and pricing prosthetics that are used by insurance brokers and underwriters when they negotiate terms and prices for the cover they provide. These prosthetics include a variety of colour-coded ‘heat’ maps, indices and geographical categorizations (such as ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, ‘MENA’ [Middle East and North Africa] or ‘Asia-Pacific’), which do not determine the pricing of political risk insurance cover but, rather, act as ‘technologies of the imagination’ (Gilbert 2020a) and spur imaginative effects and particular approaches to valuation. As political risk insurance (PRI) brokers and underwriters would themselves argue, PRI does not lend itself to an actuarial mode that seeks to predict the likelihood of future ‘political risk events’ based on statistical tabulation of past occurrences.

This chapter contributes to understanding market design by examining the construction, mobilization, and contestation of facts and fetishes within an ongoing design process, introducing the notion of ‘factishing’ a market. The premise is that facts and fetishes are manufactured and interconnected, shaped by different market actors, and serve different purposes. This combination empowers multiple market actors to make market design work in practice and catalyses market innovation. This conceptualization draws on the empirical case of the Brazilian cancer pill, phosphoethanolamine. This substance was originally intended to ‘cure cancer’ and became the centre of a protracted conflict involving patients, researchers, a public university, physicians, courts, the regulatory agency, and legislators, intensely covered by national media outlets, culminating in the pill’s emergence in the market as a dietary supplement.

The concept of assetization has been recently developed to designate the social processes through which things are turned into assets. Building on the case of the market for social investment in France, this chapter proposes to untangle the two concepts of marketization and assetization. Assetization occurs when a market object is constructed in such a way that it provides a rent to its owner. However, this chapter departs from the view that describes assetization as the unintended outflow of marketization. Instead, it examines how the prospect of assetization can actually be the key driver behind the creation of new markets. It contends that such entanglements between marketization and assetization should be tracked by investigating: a) whether new markets are supported by coalitions dominated by financial investors and b) whether these markets feature capitalization agencements designed at channelling rent to such investors. It concludes by detailing the conditions needed to untangle the marketization process from the assetization one and calls for Market Studies to exert scrutiny over how numerous ‘markets for collective concerns’ end up being turned into ‘markets for investors.’

This chapter is intended as a conversation piece aimed at our fellow Market Studies scholars. The goal is to bring to the fore some of the possibilities and challenges of activities usually grouped under the term market design cause to our field. The argument unfolds in four steps. First, we draw on resources from economic history, economics, and Market Studies that, although in different ways, emphasize engineering in relation to economics and markets. We mobilize them to show how engineering rather than the looser notion of design provides a more precise and productive conceptual starting point for studying the work of market designers. Second, drawing on previous work by the authors, we provide two empirical illustrations of market engineering in action. Third, we combine the conceptual and empirical antecedents to delimit what we mean by the concept of market engineering. Fourth, we explore how market engineering is not only a relatively new problem of analysis for Market Studies scholars, but also challenges central conceptual and analytical habits that characterize research in this community.