This chapter explores the performative power of research methods, and specifically the power of audio-visual technologies – the video camera - in capturing and re-presenting data concerning markets, their innovation and transformation. Our claim is that cameras and their research outputs, are engines of change. They act as market-making devices that not only inform but additionally perform markets. After reflecting on the Market Studies conceptualization of markets and the role of the camera as a market-making device, we show how the camera provides new perspectives, generates a deeper understanding of context and opens-up new opportunities for the reflexive action that has the power to transform both our understandings of markets and how they are performed. We draw on our own experiences and extant research to consider how the camera acts as a socio-technical and sentimental device to shake up existing practices, generating opportunities for new data collection, analysis and new ways of seeing, representing and expressing the politics of markets – transforming them in the process. We argue that i) zooming-out, ii) zooming-in, iii) refocusing, iv) slowing-down action and motion, and v) editing, have the capacity to generate and reveal different constitutive components of a market’s sociomaterial realities by drawing attention to actors, objects and emotions, and their relations with their wider social setting. We conclude that cameras can constitute different realities, breaking down taken for granted binaries, between society and nature, opening opportunities to build moral markets in new and innovative ways.

This chapter explores the interplay between space production, place qualification, and market-making. It argues that market-making is closely tied to space creation, with competing socio-technical arrangements shaping and economizing space. Understanding market site qualification is crucial for grasping the relationship between marketplaces and spaces, as it involves equipping agencies to co-produce site characteristics alongside goods therein. Further, market sites are influenced by non-economic factors alongside economic arrangements, serving as spaces for social interaction and inclusivity beyond their economic function. Examining the reciprocal relationship between market spaces and places, a case study on the changes made in the Irish pub during the Covid-19 pandemic is presented. The pandemic disrupted economic activities, leading to the reconfiguration of market sites to comply with public health measures. Irish pubs serve as an illustrative example, being significant market sites for the alcohol and hospitality industries as well as community pillars. However, during the pandemic, the social interactions and alcohol consumption at the heart of pub life posed serious public health risks. This created conflicting priorities, with commercial interests pushing for pub reopening while public health authorities called for closure. The chapter highlights the qualification process of market sites and how these dynamics impact the relationship between marketplaces and spaces, with the Covid-19 pandemic serving as a catalyst for change.

How markets develop and change has been and continues to be a central theme in Market Studies. In this chapter I use theoretical ideas about change processes in general to elaborate on the markets as practice model and develop a conceptual vocabulary for analysing market change. Specifically, I combine three different theories of change (teleological, dialectical, and evolutionary) with findings from empirical studies of market change to identify six distinct, yet generic subprocesses of market change: market mimesis, market controversies, market management, market interferences, market change loops, and market development sequences. I elaborate on and illustrate each of these subprocesses and discuss how they interrelate to form ‘global’ market change processes.

Marketers are, generally, paid workers. While this may seem self-evident, for us to fully understand the hybrid combinations of devices, individuals and organizations that partake in marketing work and in the configuration of market actors, we must acknowledge the impacts of working relationships that are deeply embedded into marketing practice. A Marxist analytic lens helps us to do this. It encourages us to explore how the organization of marketing work produces and exploits value from marketing workers.

In an age of climate emergency and social divide, we investigate how the use of design methods in Market Studies can drive positive, real-world change through the development of moral markets. As universities catalyse technological innovation using responsible research and innovation approaches that bring in multiple stakeholders, new opportunities to simultaneously make moral markets have opened-up. Viewing moral markets as dynamic sociomaterial assemblages that seek to deliver value for people and the planet, but are always in the making, implies that Market Studies researchers can engaged in their transformation. Through a focus on design methods, we see how market-studies researcher actively engage in market interventions and transformation activities, and how this activism is shaping our understanding of the future. We draw on a pragmatist perspective on design inquiry, outlining different elements and devices of co-design methodology, and provide an example of its use in Market Studies. We conclude that, in a research environment that demands real-world impact, design methods may come to challenge and complement traditional research practices due to their ability to transform and create new worlds.

Marketographies – market ethnographies – are rooted in the actor-network theory tradition of ‘following the actor’, emphasizing descriptive methods that should be carried out like ‘a fly on the wall’ (Latour 2005, 136). By understanding the valuation and social life of methods in Market Studies, this chapter uncovers how Market Studies can require scholars to re-evaluate and switch gears from being ‘a fly on the wall’ to enacting different methods ‘on the fly.’ Extant Market Studies have been slow to acknowledge the dynamics of methods. In calling for such acknowledgments in Market Studies writing, I conceptualise methods ‘on the fly’ to highlight how methods contest, and are contested by the field, theory, and research questions. In doing so, I highlight the value of adapting Market Studies methods to capture elusive market practices in a messy and ever-changing world and its impact on producing relevant questions, theories, and market action.

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.

Traditional economics served as the model case of most early performativity theory. In recent years, however, behavioural economics and particularly nudging has become increasingly popular; both as a policy instrument to design markets and as a behaviour change tool used by for-profit organizations. This chapter unpacks the implications of this shift in economic discourse for performativity theory, examining to what extent the performative process of behavioural economics overlaps with standard performativity and how it differs from that of traditional economics across policy and business domains. We focus on four aspects of the shift: (1) the nature of the economic subjects – consumers, workers, market actors – being performed, (2) the changes in the underlying normative standpoints and the politics of performativity, (3) the technologies of knowing adopted, and (4) the performative actions and socio-technical assemblages facilitated by traditional versus behavioural economics. The chapter concludes by offering a theoretical extension of performativity theory and a critical account of the potential impacts of behavioural economics and by laying the groundwork for future research.

This chapter examines the interrelationship between “a market’s materialities and practices” (Geiger and Gross, 2018) by offering an account of how a particular source of energy – wooden biomass – became a perferred energy resource in the Danish energy system. This chapter examines how biomass is qualified, i.e., identified, measured, framed, and, thereby, known. However, the materiality of forests and wooden biomass affords multiple understandings depending on the epistemic equipment – theories, models, and measurements – used. This introduces an epistemic uncertainty in how biomass can be known, providing opportunities for expression and enactment of interests, making policymaking more complex and more contentious. Our analysis highlights the antagonism and power struggles involved in the dynamics of market framing. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how the material ‘unruliness’ of biomass calls for complex accounting methods, leaving biomass incumbents much maneuver room and jeopardizing Denmark’s reputation as ‘a frontrunner’ in energy transition. The chapter contributes to Market Studies research by demonstrating the dual role of materiality in shaping (concrete, situated) interests and valuations while simultaneouly also affecting conditions for future maneuvering/actions. Further, the analysis brings out the politics of valuation.

This chapter contributes a means of teasing out the uneven spatial ordering of markets. Taking inspiration from Schatzki’s (1991, 2001) practice-based spatial ontology, we introduce a four-part scheme made up of ‘anchors’; ‘places’; ‘settings’; and ‘paths’. We ground the concepts in an empirical account of the Finnish Lapland’s emergence as the official ‘home’ of Santa Claus and the related historical constitution of a Christmas tourism market. With the future of market studies research in mind, we argue that this conceptual framework provides a way of thinking about market making as an inherently spatial process, while also supporting investigations of how markets and the concerns they help produce take shape unevenly over time and across physical space.

Commodity items may be singularized and revalorized in markets for second-hand goods. The market for singular goods, often cultural or aesthetic items, depends upon collective assessments of value, where the nature of value is embedded in the cultural community. Exiting studies have concentrated on the work of experts and practitioners within markets as they construct goods as valuable. As research begins to see valuation as a nexus of social relations, so it becomes important to study how valuation practices organize markets that span countries and socio-economic categories. We examine the valorization practices of second-hand bicycle traders in Hungary. These market intermediaries salvage obsolete discarded steel bicycles and reconstitute them into fashionable vintage bicycles: sought-after subcultural fashion accessories and collectors’ prized items. We propose a theory of value bricolage to describe the process of constructing value through the skilful combination of matters at hand, material, social and imaginary: scrap frames, spare parts, online resources, fan websites, and valuation communities.

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.

The proliferation of digital technologies is changing the face of markets and society. This on-going market digitalization represents an opportunity for Market Studies – a field that has long considered the role of technologies in markets. Careful inquiry into market digitalization allows for continued agnostic and descriptive research, but also prompts us to consider the human outcomes of market arrangements. This chapter explores how the digitalization of markets affects human relationships and experiences. Basing our argument on a review of contemporary scholarship on market digitalization, we suggest that digitalization reconfigures both visibility and participation in markets. This typology actualizes how everyday human market interaction is changing, exemplified through the figures of the consumer, the influencer, and the activist. We find that Market Studies is in a strong position to address technologies as it already considers several roles in markets: as market devices, objects of exchange, as well as market infrastructures. We propose that Market Studies should continue to explore differences in market arrangements, as well as the significant variability among the people interacting in digitalizing markets.

Simulated markets are a fascinating paradox for Market Studies. They are markets organized around nothing. No real property rights get exchanged when markets are “only” simulated. They are unproductive in the sense that simulated markets produce no surplus for anyone. They are markets that do not actually exist. Yet, simulations of market processes play an increasingly important role in market practices as well as in wider business pedagogy. This chapter uses historical and contemporary evidence on the development and uses of market simulations in various settings – ranging from business schools to Wall Street – to test the post-performativity paradigm in Market Studies. The chapter shows that real-world market arrangements are changed not with the help of economic models, economic theories or economists themselves, but rather through business school teachers, family accountants, software tinkerers and designs that emerged completely outside the sphere of economic theory and modelling. By studying the early uses of electronic spreadsheets for market simulations, we can see that market arrangements require calculative communities rather than economists.

High-end audio systems aim to reproduce the original sound of music performed in physical spaces. They are an intersection of aesthetic art and emotions, a culture of listening to music in ones’ preferred genres and a system of components or machines that are designed by technologists of acoustics, electrical engineering and material science. There is an abundance of scientific research on sound and acoustics from engineering and physics that discusses the engineering of good sound on the basis of quantitative, parametric measures for the human cognition of listeners (Pinch and Bijserveld 2012; Powell 2010). There is a dearth of research on how hi-fi aficionados determine what really counts as ‘hi-fi’, however. This chapter empirically investigates the high-end audio equipment market. It applies perspectives from the pragmatist literature of valuation to probe the valuation practices of actors and agents using data from field interviews and observations, and archive and online documents.

Today, the online trade press offers a wealth of easily accessible data on market developments. It provides information on consumption trends, innovation dynamics, competitive developments and regulatory changes. This chapter proposes methodological suggestions for using this data in Market Studies. The social sciences have traditionally approached the press through the paradigms of discourse analysis, the articulation between production and reception, or the construction of public events and problems. From a Market Studies perspective, the trade press can also be used to study the representational practices underlying the construction of markets, the staging of the qualities of goods and the emergence of collective concerns about economic activity. The chapter examines the qualitative and quantitative treatments of online data that can be used here, drawing on an empirical case concerning the implementation of a market label in the field of sustainable construction in France in the early 2010s’