Study of markets

Study of markets
Cabbage market by Vaclav Maly

The study of actual existing markets made up of persons interacting in space and place in diverse ways is widely seen as an antidote to abstract and all-encompassing concepts of “the market” and has historical precedent in the works of Fernand Braudel and Karl Polanyi. The latter term is now generally used in two ways. First, to denote the abstract mechanisms whereby supply and demand confront each other and deals are made. In its place, reference to markets reflects ordinary experience and the places, processes and institutions in which exchanges occurs.[2] Second, the market is often used to signify an integrated, all-encompassing and cohesive capitalist world economy. A widespread trend in economic history and sociology is skeptical of the idea that it is possible to develop a theory to capture an essence or unifying thread to markets.[3] For economic geographers, reference to regional, local, or commodity specific markets can serve to undermine assumptions of global integration, and highlight geographic variations in the structures, institutions, histories, path dependencies, forms of interaction and modes of self-understanding of agents in different spheres of market exchange.[4] Reference to actual markets can show capitalism not as a totalizing force or completely encompassing mode of economic activity, but rather as "a set of economic practices scattered over a landscape, rather than a systemic concentration of power".[5]
Wetherby town’s market.

C. B. Macpherson identifies an underlying model of the market underlying Anglo-American liberal-democratic political economy and philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Persons are cast as self-interested individuals, who enter into contractual relations with other such individuals, concerning the exchange of goods or personal capacities cast as commodities, with the motive of maximizing pecuniary interest. The state and its governance systems are cast as outside of this framework.[6] This model came to dominant economic thinking in the later nineteenth century, as economists such as Ricardo, Mill, Jevons, Walras and later neo-classical economics shifted from reference to geographically located marketplaces to an abstract "market".[7] This tradition is continued in contemporary neoliberalism, where the market is held up as optimal for wealth creation and human freedom, and the states’ role imagined as minimal, reduced to that of upholding and keeping stable property rights, contract, and money supply. This allowed for boilerplate economic and institutional restructuring under structural adjustment and post-Communist reconstruction.[8]





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