[El nombre de esta sección es “artículos en cuotas”. La idea es, como en una novela por entregas, ir subiendo partes de papers a medida que vayan saliendo. El texto abajo es un borrador de la introducción de un artículo en el que trabajo. Presenté la primera versión en EGOS este año y esto que estoy subiendo acá es una segunda versión, pero aun, borrador y sin edición del inglés. Además de la introducción, el artículo se compondrá de cuatro partes. Cada parte será una entrega que iré subiendo a medida que tenga las nuevas versiones listas. Como siempre, sugerencias son muy bienvenidas]
The concept of Market
José Ossandón, draft 30/11/2017
Introduction
The emergence of the broad set of practices and techniques grouped under the label of ‘market design’ makes apparent a challenge that has been avoided for too long in organizational and sociological studies of markets. The challenge can be illustrated with the example of school place allocation.
School allocation is a policy instrument increasingly popular among governments and policy makers. It consists in implementing algorithms to match two set of priorities; families’ preferred schools and schools’ available vacancies. School allocation is also one of the most recognized examples of ‘market design’ (Cantillon 2017). Markets designers label situations such as school place allocations, which do not feature some of the basic elements included in traditional social scientific definitions of markets (for instance: money, prices, or the transference of property rights), as market. In this context, social researchers interested in inspecting a situation like school place allocation are pushed to ask themselves a basic question: should the social researcher follow the definitions of markets accepted in their academic fields or they should take the definitions of market designers? In the following pages, I expect to demonstrate that school allocation is not merely a marginal example. It is “an extreme case” (Flyvbjerg 2006) that can be productively used as a provocation to initiate a broader discussion about the concept of market.
Although market design is a relatively new phenomenon, the challenge it poses is in fact not very different from a similar problem but in relation to the concept of organization discussed five decades ago. I revisit Egon Bittner’s 1965 piece ‘The concept of organization’ to introduce a distinction between two different stances in relation to the concept of market. Researchers can take the market either as a term that has to be defined by the social scientists that study it, or, as a concept whose uses and definitions are part of the social scientist’s empirical object. The main aim of this paper will be fulfilled if, at the moment of approaching a situation like the case of school choice, organization theorists and economic sociologists understand that what they have in front of them is not a choice between different definitions of market, but that they can pick between two fundamentally different conceptual stances. From the first stance, a situation like school choice, which does not feature the elements that constitute a market in existing definitions, is simply not a market. From the second stance, the concepts of markets used by relevant practitioners are part of the object of study; the social researcher studies native definitions and their consequences in existing semantics of market.
Overall, the discussion elaborated in this paper expects to contribute to two main discussions. This paper continues work in organization studies and economic sociology in which markets have been theorized on the basis of a comparison with organization (Callon & Muniesa 2005, Ahrne et al 2015, Fligstein 1996). What this paper does, in this context, is shifting the level of the comparison. Instead of theorizing markets on the basis of identifying features that markets and organization share (for instance, norms and membership rules, Ahrne et al 2015); markets are theorized on the basis of a comparison of the challenges both, the concept of market and the concept of organization, pose to social researchers. This level of theorizing helps to better equip social researchers to deal with the challenges posed by situations in which the work of practitioners involves conceptualizing markets. The second expected contribution of this paper is to update the path opened by Bittner. This paper expects to re-connect organization studies and the tools developed in the rich but dispersed recent social research (see for instance, Borch (2013), Cordero (2016), (Tribe 2014), and Somers (1995)) where concepts are studied as empirical objects.
The argument of the paper unfolds in four sections. The first section uses the example of school allocation and the work of market designer Alvin Roth to illustrate how market design disrupts existing understandings of markets in sociology and organization studies. The second section uses Bittner’s work to introduce a distinction between two stances in relation to the concept of market. The third section organizes recent social studies of markets in relation to how they approach the concept of market. The revision shows that, so far, the best known interventions in social studies of markets -for instance articles published in Organization Studies by Callon and Muniesa (2005), and by Ahrne, Aspers and Brunsson (2014), or older and influential contributions by Richard Swedberg (1994) and Harrison White (1981) – follow the first stance. They take the definition of the concept of market as their task. There is, however, a set of lesser known interventions – for instance Depeyre & Dumez (2008), Onto (2016), Frankel (2011), and Ossandón & Ureta (2017) – where concepts of markets –different definitions and their uses – are taken as objects of empirical study. The fourth part closes by coming back to the dilemma presented by market design and by discussing the possible consequences of the analysis here conducted for future studies of markets and organization.
References
Ahrne, G., Aspers, P. and Brunsson, N. (2015). The organization of markets. Organization Studies, 36 (1), 7 – 27.
Antal, A. B., Hutter, M., & Stark, D. (Eds.). (2015). Moments of valuation: exploring sites of dissonance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aspers, P. (2011). Markets. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Baker, W. E. (1984). The social structure of a national securities market. American Journal of Sociology, 89(4), 775-811.
Becker, H. (1998). Tricks of the trade: How to think about your research while you’re doing it. University of Chicago Press.
Breslau, D. (2013). Designing a market-like entity: Economics in the politics of market formation. Social Studies of Science, 43(6), 829-85.
Breslau, D. (2011). What Do Market Designers Do When They Design Markets? In C. Camic, N. Gross, & M. Lamont, Social Knowledge in the Making (pp. 380–403). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bittner, E. (1965). The concept of organization. Social Research, 239-255 [page numbers used here refer version reprinted in Ethnographic Studies 2013].
Blumer, H. (1954). What is wrong with social theory? American sociological review, 19(1), 3-10.
Borch, C. (2013). The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Callon, M. (1998). Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In Callon, M. (Ed.), The laws of the markets (pp. 1–57). Oxford: Blackwell.
Callon, M. (1980). ‘Struggles and negotiations to define what is problematic and what is not’. In Knorr, K, R. Krohn, & R. Whitley (eds.), The social process of scientific investigation (pp. 197–219). Amsterdam: Springer.
Callon, M. and Muniesa, F. (2005). Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices. Organization Studies, 26(8), 1229-1250.
Cantillon, E. (2017). Broadening the market design approach to school choice. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 33(4), 613-634.
Coase, R. H. (1937). The nature of the Firm. Economica, 4(16), 386-405.
Cochoy, F., Deville, J., McFall, L. (eds.) (2017) Markets and the Arts of Attachment. London: Routledge.
Cordero, R. (2016) Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life. London, Routledge.
Christophers, B. (2015). The Law’s Markets: Envisioning and effecting the boundaries of competition. Journal of Cultural Economy, 8(2), 125-143.
Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2013). The New Way of the World: On Neo-liberal Society. (Gregory Elliot, Trans). Brooklyn, OH: Verso.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2014). What is philosophy? NYC: Columbia University Press.
Depeyre, C., & Dumez, H. (2008). What is a market? A Wittgensteinian exercise. European Management Review, 5(4), 225-231.
Duflo, E., 2017. ‘The Economist as Plumber’, National Bureau of Economic Research, retrieved from: https://economics.mit.edu/files/12569
Dumez, H. (2016). Comprehensive Research. A methodological and epistemological introduction to qualitative research. Frederiksberg: Copenhagen Business School Press.
Fligstein, N. (1996). Markets as Politics: a Political-Cultural Approach to Market Institutions. American Sociological Review, 61, 656-673.
Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979. (G. Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Frankel, C. (2011). In the Image of the Market. In Farías, I. & Ossandón, J. (eds.) Comunicaciones, Semánticas y Redes, México DF: Universidad Iberoamericana.
Frankel, C. (2015). The multiple-markets problem. Journal of Cultural Economy, 8(4), 538-546.
Frankel, C., Ossandón, J., & Pallesen, T. (2017). ‘The organization of markets for collective concerns’, submitted manuscript.
Garcia-Parpet, MF. (2011) ‘Symbolic value and the establishment of prices: globalization of the wine market’. In Beckert, J., & Aspers, P. (eds.). The worth of goods: Valuation and pricing in the economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 131-154.
Ginzburg, C. (2004). Family resemblances and family trees: two cognitive metaphors. Critical Inquiry, 30(3), 537-556.
Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.
Hayek, F. (1991). Spontaneous (‘grown’) order and organized (‘made’) order. In Thompson, G., Frances, J., Levačić, R. and Mitchell, J. (eds.) Markets,Hierarchies & Networks – The Coordination of Social Life. London: Sage Publications.
Jenle, R. P. (2015). Engineering Markets for Control: Integrating Wind Power into the Danish Electricity System, PhD Thesis, Copenhagen Business School.
Karpik, L. (2010) Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kornberger, M., Justesen, L., Mouritsen, J. Madsen, AK. (eds.) (2015) Making Things Valuable. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Koselleck, R. (1982). Begriffsgeschichte and Social History. Economy and Society, 11(4), 409-427.
Krippner, G. R. (2002). The elusive market: Embeddedness and the paradigm of economic sociology. Theory and Society, 30(6), 775–810. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013330324198
Langley, P. & Leyshon, A. (2016) ‘Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation.’ Finance & society, online first, 1-21.
MacKenzie, D. A., & Millo, Y. (2003). Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange. American Journal of Sociology, 109(4), 107–145.
March, J. G. (1962). The Business Firm as a Political Coalition. The Journal of Politics, 24(4), 662–678.
McFall, L. and Ossandón, J. (2014). What’s New in the ‘New, New Economic Sociology’ and should Organisation Studies care? In Adler, P., du Gay, P., Morgan, G. and Reed, M. (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McMillan, J. (2002). Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso.
Neyland, D., Ehrenstein, V., Milyaeva, V. (2017) ‘On the Difficulties of Solving Problems through Markets: Interventions, Accountability Devices and Recursion’, submitted manuscript.
Nik-Khah, E. & Mirowski, P. (2017) ‘On going the market one better’, submitted manuscript.
Onto, G. (2016). The market as lived experience. Vibrant, 11(1): 159-190.
Ossandón, J. (2015). ‘Insurance and the Sociologies of Markets’, Economic Sociology European Newsletter 17 (1), 6-15.
Ossandón, J. & Ureta, S. (2017) ‘Problematizing markets and the inner movement of neoliberalism’, submitted manuscript.
Pallesen, T. & Jenle, R. (2017) ‘Synthetic markets and the design of economic institutions’, submitted manuscript.
Rabinow, P. (2011). The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roth, A. E. (2007). The Art of Designing Markets. Harvard Business Review, October, 1–8.
Roth, A. E. (2002). ‘The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics’, Econometrica, 70(4), 1341–1378.
Schutz, A., 1953. Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14(1), pp.1-38.
Somers, M. R. (1995). What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation. Sociological Theory, 13(2), 113–144. https://doi.org/10.2307/202157
Swedberg, R. (1994). Markets as social structures. In NJ Smelser & R. Swedberg (eds.), The Handbook of Economic Sociology, pp. 255-282. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tribe, K. (2015). The Economy of the Word: Language, History, and Economics.
Uzzi, B. (1999). Embeddedness in the making of financial capital: How social relations and networks benefit firms seeking financing. American Sociological Review, 61(4), 481-505.
Weber, M. (1949). Objectivity in social science and social policy. In Shils, E. A., & Finch, H. A. (eds) The methodology of the social sciences. Max Weber, NYC.
White, H. (1981). Where Do Markets Come From?. American Journal of Sociology, 87(3), 517–547.
Williamson, O. (1973). Markets and Hierarchies: Some Elementary Considerations. The American Economic Review, 63 (2), 316-325.
Wilson, R. (1999). Market architecture, Presidential speech at the annual meeting of Econometrica Society, retrieved from: http://econ2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/MarketArchitecture.RWilson1999.pdf
Estudios de la Economía 