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Chapter 5 - The Dynamics of Ongoing Market Maintenance through Centralized Market Work

from Part I - Market Designs and Market Misfires

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2024

Susi Geiger
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Katy Mason
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Neil Pollock
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Philip Roscoe
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Annmarie Ryan
Affiliation:
University of Limerick
Stefan Schwarzkopf
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Pascale Trompette
Affiliation:
Université de Grenoble
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Summary

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.

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