We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Market studies is a newly emerging field dedicated to understanding the origins, core concepts, theories and methods currently being used and developed to examine markets in the making. Providing a unique overview that introduces, positions and develops this highly fertile area of research, Market Studies is the first book to consolidate its themes, tools and methods in a single, comprehensive volume. Topics covered include: market organization and design; performativity in and around markets; valuation; market places and spaces; methods that may be utilized in studying markets; the field's relation to adjacent disciplines; the future of markets. Deploying a sensitivity for the socio-material constitution of markets, the authors put market practices at the centre of inquiry and offer insights into the future and potential impact of market studies research. The contemporary, practical and interdisciplinary approach is strengthened by multiple examples of original empirical research into markets.
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.
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).
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.
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).