Market/Place

Exploring Spaces of Exchange

Christian Berndt, Jamie Peck, Norma M. Rantisi, Christian Berndt, Jamie Peck, Norma Rantisi

• Editore: Agenda Publishing
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788213172
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Geografía humana

The term "market" originally portrayed a public space for economic transactions but the term has since evolved into an abstract and disputed idea. Despite modern markets seemingly omnipresent nature, their specific geographies have undergone relatively little analysis.

This collection of new essays rediscovers the physical space that markets inhabit and explore how the impact of political, social and economic factors determine the shape of a particular market space. The essays present new research from the fields of geography, economics, political economy and planning and provide valuable case study material to show how markets are contested, constructed and placed. Rather than separate markets from the surrounding society and state, these essays connect markets to their wider context and showcase how economic geography can combine with other disciplines to throw new light on spaces of exchange.

Chapter 1

Introduction: exploring markets

Jamie Peck, Christian Berndt and Norma M. Rantisi

A place of exchange

The origin of the present volume was an invitational workshop focused on questions of the spatiality and diversity of markets, held at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy in Montreal in the summer of 2017. This was an apt meeting place in a more than literal sense. Although many of those in attendance did not subscribe explicitly to a Polanyian worldview or mode of analysis, most had engaged with Polanyi’s work in different ways. Some had made extensive contributions to neo-Polanyian scholarship, while others were more closely affiliated to radical political economy, performativity approaches or poststructuralism. In this context, more pertinent were a series of broadly aligned sympathies with what might be characterized as Polanyian dispositions, including: shared recognition of the importance of respectful, constructive and non-dogmatic exchange across an interdisciplinary range of heterodox and critical positions; overlapping concerns with the potential of empirically engaged and “substantivist” investigation (to borrow the Polanyian terminology), not just in testing and tweaking extant theories but in the construction of new insights, understandings and socio-political visions; and mutual commitments to humane, emancipatory and sustainable modes of socio-economic and ecological development. Polanyi himself never subscribed to a restrictive or singular mode of analysis. Best known for his searing indictments of market fundamentalism, which have acquired a new (if unwanted) relevance in this protracted era of neoliberalism, more programmatically, Polanyi was committed to the objective of continuously “widen[ing] the range of principles and policies at our disposal” (Polanyi 2014 [1950]: 137, emphasis added).

Something similar might be said about the field of economic geography, a second terrain on which the conversations behind this book were initially convened. Although economic geography may not be a discipline with all the answers, it can perhaps be credited as a source of some of the more demanding (and as yet still unanswered) questions, including those that animate the present volume. Is there a distinctive geography of markets, expressed territorially or in some other register? In what ways can the actually existing socio-spatial diversity of markets be approached, documented, categorized and theorized? How are we to deal with the abstract, ideal-type model of the market as it has been advanced by standard economic theory? Is there something like a tendentially universal and functionally generic form? What are we to make – politically as well as theoretically – of the revealed and persistent (spatial) diversity of markets? In the final analysis, do “local” differences really make a difference? Can markets be “localized” in different ways, to different ends? And, if markets are indeed not only diverse but constitutively differentiated and polymorphic, what formative principles and analytical criteria ought to inform these alternative cartographies?

For its part, the field of economic geography – otherwise closely attuned to the spatiality of economic processes, practices and performances, with a commitment to empirically grounded theorizing – is in its present form, arguably, a source of such questions more in principle than in practice. The stock in trade of this characteristically heterodox field has been, inter alia, hands-on approaches to the study of extended production networks, localized governance regimes and economic cultures, gendered and racialized orders of work and economy, dynamics of clustering and agglomeration, and so forth. These enquiries, separately and collectively, have periodically dealt at least obliquely with markets and marketization, but only rarely are these addressed frontally or problematized explicitly. In economic geography, markets and marketization have not been sustained objects of study and debate – at least until quite recently (see Berndt & Boeckler 2009, 2012; Peck 2012). The questions as to how markets are territorialized and deterritorialized, how they are variously integrated and disintegrated across transnational space and how they are scaled and rescaled all remain both challenging and quite open. They might be said to be located within economic geography’s wheelhouse, but their implications certainly extend beyond this particular disciplinary space.

Although every field has its idiosyncrasies, blind spots and preoccupations, economic geography is arguably not so alone in this tendency to “study around” the market, at least when it is considered among the heterodox economic sciences. In their own ways too – and, of course, with some notable exceptions that prove the more general rule – economic anthropologists, economic sociologists, feminist economists, political scientists and institutional economists, along with other heterodox analysts, will often sidestep, work around or proceed alongside the market, understood as an explicit object of analysis and defined terrain of study. Notwithstanding the orthodoxy’s own treatment of the market, which too often manages to be cavalier and deferential at the same time, as critics have observed (see Peck, this volume), these alternative (or parallel) projects may either settle for a kind of grudging coexistence, choosing not to contest the territory occupied by neoclassical economists and rational-choice theorists, or they may opt instead to position their own projects as counterpoints to the orthodox science of markets. This tends to set up a polarized culture of theoretical and empirical enquiry around the – hardly marginal – question of markets: orthodox analysts habitually position the (singular) market at the uncontested centre of their intellectual worldview, often in an unquestioning way, whereas, in complete contrast, the gaze of heterodox analysts tends to be focused almost anywhere else (the household, the state, the corporate hierarchy or network, the local community … ), though frequently, and deliberately, away from the market. If the former are liable to be dazzled by the market, the latter, when they look at the market at all, will often do so obliquely, or in a rear view mirror.

The goal of the present volume is to begin to redress this imbalanced and polarized situation, reclaiming the market, the geography of markets (plural) and the diversity of marketization processes as significant matters of concern across various registers of the heterodox tradition. As such, it does not set out to define an alternative theory – or singular counter-theory – of the market, and neither is it content to wallow in the banal contingencies of geographically distributed empirical diversity for their own sake. Instead, it seeks to articulate a pluralist research programme engaged with the twin problematics of market diversity and market spatiality. This is a journey involving not one but many pathways: pathways that will be illuminated and problematized differently by different modes of analysis – say, by Polanyian, feminist, institutionalist, neo-Marxist or poststructuralist approaches, or by some creative combination of these. It means staking not just a claim but several claims on the critical study of markets, from a range of heterodox perspectives and vantage points. In (re)claiming the terrain of the market for heterodox, substantive critical enquiry, the contributors to this book develop approaches that are certainly different from those found in the neoclassical economics textbooks – with their idealized view of the market as a supply and demand mechanism, moved by individual and voluntary actions, tending towards equilibrium – even if they are never indifferent to the normative status of this orthodox perspective, with all its ideational, institutional and ideological ramifications.

What they share is a desire to shake loose of this extraordinarily pervasive (not to say hegemonic) market fix, while not slipping automatically into a position diametrically opposed to it – as if an adequate counter-project can be assembled, in a reversed-out form, in the mirror. In its own way, this mechanically oppositional stance simply recycles the problem of market-centricity, albeit as a reaction against the dominant, orthodox conception; the free-market model, ironically, retains its prefigurative role, shaping the ontological terrain and the terms of debate. This, in other words, is to reproduce the bipolar theory-culture. In contrast, the contributors to this volume take the market seriously, as a differentiated and socio-spatially complex object of analysis, though they do not do so as a separate or exclusive analytical practice. Although there is (still) work to do, in deconstructing and destabilizing hegemonic and imperialist understandings of the capital-“M” Market, the project of “retheorizing” markets has not been especially well served by the tendency to fix on singular “alternatives”, perhaps the most common of which are various versions of the state/market binary. A different approach, and one pursued by several of the contributors to this volume, is to situate or place the market, as Polanyi would have put it, in an ontological, a methodological and a figurative sense. Doing so, however, also raises the crucial question: according to what (alternative) principles and coordinates?

Rather than indexing the variety of actually existing markets exclusively (or even primarily) against the super-abstraction that is the asocial, ahistorical and aspatial Market, an alternative strategy would seek to explore and theorize – in more modest or mid-level ways – in relation to the contours of revealed, empirical difference itself. In his programmatic intervention, some two decades ago, Michel Callon suggests something along these lines, making a case for the sustained investigation of marketplaces, in a fashion more attentive to the actual situations and circumstances of everyday economic exchanges:

While the market denotes the abstract mechanisms whereby supply and demand confront each other and adjust themselves in search of a compromise, the marketplace is far closer to ordinary experience and refers to the place in which exchange occurs. [Yet if] economic theory knows so little about the marketplace, is it not simply because in striving to abstract and generalize it has ended up becoming detached from its object? Thus, the weakness of market theory may well be explained by the lack of interest in the marketplace. To remedy this shortcoming, economics would need only to return to its object, the economy, from which it should never have strayed in the first place.

(Callon 1998b: 1)

One of the challenges here is to explore the revealed variety of real markets, in ways that are empirically grounded and theoretically informing, without (re)imposing a singular “market shape of things”, itself the complex legacy of a “web of preconceptions [including] a tendency of seeing markets where there are none” (Polanyi 1977b: xl; 1959: 174). Yet, such is the power of this practically all-encompassing Market optic, it tends to throw virtually all other socio-economic forms, processes and practices out of focus, including those necessary for the functioning of markets themselves, while at the same time demanding that extra-market diversity is evaluated primarily in relation to this normative epicentre.

A point of departure for the present volume is this recognition that the business of understanding actually existing markets has been impeded by the overbearing (omni)presence of the idealized and universalized idea of the “free” market, imagined as an autonomous and self-acting system comprised of atomized and voluntarily participating buyers and sellers. Such is the pervasiveness of this capital-“M” Market, and its more colloquial cousin, “the” market, that actually existing or what might be seen in the plural as lower-case-“m” markets tend to be seen only askew, as imperfections or distortions. It is as if orthodox theory looks into a mirror of its own making, and then sees only the Market, reflected back. Meanwhile, the kaleidoscopic variety of actually existing markets, along with the much wider spectrum of socio-economic diversity, is conventionally seen in something more like a fun-house mirror – warped and out of focus.

There are consequences of this representational hegemony that are often paid insufficient attention. The Market in its ideal-typical form stands in the way of attempts constructively to theorize the diversity of economic life in its own right and in its own terms, as opposed to those “received” from orthodox theory – or, for that matter, by way of neoliberal ideologies. We tend to see markets (or their others, be they firms, communities, households … ) as relatively self-contained, discrete entities, though often as deviations from a supposedly universal model (the Market). This is reflected, for instance, in the argument that markets are not (and can never be) benevolent, but instead tend to destroy or violently colonize everything in their reach – one of the ways in which there is a clear through-line to Polanyi’s polemics against the market. Furthermore, there is the flip-side view that markets are never merely the sum of the rational decisions of individual atoms, freely interacting, but are (and can only be) “embedded”, socially, culturally and politically. As Callon (1998a) has demonstrated, this can easily play into the hands of orthodox economics, despite the insufficiencies of its own take on markets. It stabilizes, once again, the abstract Market/deviant markets binary, affirming the transhistorical and pan-geographical role of the former as a normative benchmark, contributing to pervasive orthodox mystifications of the always-and-everywhere-existing diversity of economic life, while at the same time repressing efforts to understand how markets and other actually existing economic entities emerge and evolve as complex hybrids – as relational combinations of multiple principles and logics, both “economic” and “non-economic”. Such conflations of the abstract and singular Market with diverse and plural markets inadvertently but quite consistently reproduce the binary, leaving us stranded with futile attempts to map Weberian ideal-types, rather than engaging with real economies and real marketplaces (Berndt & Wirth 2019).

In exploring the plurality of markets, with a lower-case “m”, the contributors to this collection draw on a wide range of scholarly literatures, including: perspectives that highlight the complex ways in which actually existing markets are governed by institutional rules, cultural conventions, social expectations and legal regimes (Boyer 1997; Hall & Soskice 2001; Coriat & Weinstein 2005; Peck 2005a, 2013b; Hann & Hart 2011; Chester 2016); approaches that recognize the “institutedness” of markets as a generalized condition while at the same time seeing the diverse (social) forms exhibited by actually existing markets (Block 1991; Krippner 2001; Fligstein & Dauter 2007); readings of markets that call attention to their constitutive embeddedness in networks of social relations (after Granovetter 1985; White 1981, 2002); and frameworks that are sensitive to the practical and ongoing ways in which real markets are made and continually constructed, to how they are stabilized and often fail, and to the role of marketization as a performative socio-spatial process (Mitchell 2007; Cochoy, Giraudeau & McFall 2010; Berndt & Boeckler 2011).

A Polanyian perspective can be helpful in tackling the problem of how actually existing markets are made and remade, going beyond attempts to routinely catalogue market and non-market elements, processes and formations, while seeking to do justice to “the question of how multiple forces come together in practice to produce particular dynamics or trajectories, as well as possible alternatives” (Hart 2004: 97). In light of this, the present collection is premised on a wager that one of the domains worthy of further exploration and conversation is the spatiality of markets. Written against the overbearing notion of the market as an unmoored abstraction, unified in logic and pan-geographical in reach, it asks what it might mean to recover the “topography of exchange”, uncovering the apparently submerged “geography of social relations” (Agnew 1979: 109, 99) through which markets and marketization take place. Braudel (1982: 26) is surely correct to have cautioned that there can be “no simple linear history of the development of markets”, and there is no simple geography of markets to be (re)discovered either. None of this is to imply, then, that there is some territorially defined alternative waiting in the wings, like a “varieties of markets” rubric analogous to that of the varieties of capitalism (VoC) paradigm – one that draws a plenary distinction between the small-state, “liberal market economy” (LME, styled on the United States), in which interventionist impulses are limited, and the more socially oriented “coordinated market economy” (CME, for which Germany is the principal model), thereby reducing economic difference to a single, dominant spectrum. Rather, it is to suggest that explorations of the relational interdependencies, complex spatialities, b/ordered unevenness and territorial (re)constitution of markets, marketization and market practices represent promising – if barely charted – lines of enquiry. This exploratory charge, it must be underlined, goes far beyond the domains conventionally associated with economic geography. To be sure, there are creative ways in which economic geographers might engage more explicitly with the problematization, positioning and deconstruction of markets, but there is also an argument that the emergent project of critical market studies – in economic sociology, science studies, anthropology, heterodox economics and beyond – could also benefit from, and gain new traction with, a more “space-sensitive” perspective. Intriguingly, this would set up the “geography of markets” as a demanding, interdisciplinary question.

Views from somewhere?

In his well-known paper on “organizations and markets”, which was an effort to convince (other) economists that there is much more to the (economic) world than a web of market transactions, Herbert Simon ventures far beyond the expositional norms of his field when he invites readers to imagine themselves as Martians, encountering Earth for the first time, but handily equipped with a special telescope capable of identifying the basic socio-economic structures of the planet below. This facilitated a thought experiment in a strange kind of economic geography, for the benefit of an audience unaccustomed to looking or thinking much beyond the market form. Simon’s hope was that, by imagining what the Martian visitors were bound to see, empi...