This chapter operationalises a theory of value formation that suggests processes of valuation have two dimensions: evaluation and valorization. It argues that the value placed on a diamond after the practices of valuation have taken place has been altered by the very act itself – how the valuation has been done, by who and for what the purpose. The grading, pricing and trading of polished diamonds exist within a socialized sphere of interconnected relationships reinforced and impacted by power structures and institutional status at every point in the market. Using the diamond market case study, the chapter demonstrates how the institutions that structure the market are not static but dynamic, constantly challenged by the network of actors within the market. The resulting valuations and exchanges that are therefore both highly performative and hierarchical.

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).

It is no longer news to argue that economics is performative, that it does not only describe markets, but takes part in producing or manufacturing them. Once accepted as close to a matter of fact, the performativity argument risks becoming too much of a general statement. So, what’s next for performativity? This chapter turns the performativity into an empirical research agenda which moves from demonstrating the existence of performativity to putting the performativity argument to the test and investigate sites and modes of performativity. We need to distinguish between the performativity of research as constitutive, that is how knowledge production has an effect on the world; while simultaneously being aware that this is not by itself enough to effectively shape actual markets. To find empirical and analytical ways to observe performativity in action, we go back to one of the original sites from where the performativity of economics argument was developed: economic and marketing experiments. We find that both much more is made in these settings than the making of actual markets, for instance the making of economics as a discipline and so also knowledge of markets, and much less, as the markets produced in these settings do not always move out of them.

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.

Gender remains absent from the agenda of Market Studies. This chapter asks (1) why gender is absent, (2) why Market Studies should bother with gender, and (3) how Market Studies scholars might go about incorporating questions of gender in their research. The chapter traces the roots of the field’s avoidance of gender issues to the idea that gender is either a problematic or an unnecessary concept. The chapter further suggests that studying the co-performation of markets and gender promises to lead to an improved understanding of both gender and markets. Imagining avenues for future research, the chapter seeks inspiration in ethnomethodological theories of gender and Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as proposes the strategy of seeking constructivist answers to feminist questions.

This chapter draws on a mixed-method project that explored retail market encounters in Edinburgh during the pandemic. It borrows from Walter Benjamin’s methodological and conceptual approach in the arcades project to explore how online settings, notably Instagram, function as market spaces. Arcades, for Benjamin, work by using their architecture to create atmospheres conducive to specific actions – lingering, browsing and purchasing. Arcades and Instagram share material and technical features that are orchestrated to shape action and in this both parallel the functions of ‘market devices’. The significance of space, as an element in ‘the equipment and devices’ which give market ‘action a shape’ has long been acknowledged in market studies (Callon 1998: 22) but how retail space works to devise action has had little attention. In describing how Instagram provided ‘digital-affective premises’ during the pandemic we advance three broader propositions. First, that market spaces are necessarily market devices because they are designed to produce action. Second, that while scholarship has exposed the material and technical elements of market devices, it had said much less about their sentimental or affective elements. Finally, that market spaces showcase how technical-sentimental, digital-affective elements interact in giving action its shape.

The purpose of this chapter is to speculatively explore the future of digital platforms and how they transform the nature of many conventional markets. Digital platforms create novel connections between actors in multi-sided markets, whilst generating and capitalizing on vast amounts of data. Platforms are thus not just match but market-makers, exercising asymmetric power over their multi-sided users whilst framing the institutional and regulatory environment in which they operate. However, platforms are also the outcome of the market shaping activities enrolling a variety of actors, and may involve multiple economization modes (e.g., market, gift giving). The chapter draws upon examples of retail digital platforms to develop a conceptual discussion of the role of platforms in the contemporary economy and considers their implications for the future of markets and market-making. The dual purpose of this chapter is to examine what the rise of digital platforms means for Market Studies and what a Market Studies perspective brings to the study of platforms. We propose and discuss three specific themes at the intersection of Market Studies and digital platforms.

How might researchers begin to tackle markets that are constructed through digital texts, and how might they do so within the richly descriptive tradition of Market Studies? This chapter introduces semantic network analysis (SMA) of digital texts. It discusses the use of SMA to map the rhizomic structures of discourse, to extract mental models of participants, and draw a shared cognitive map from dispersed discourses. Through the example of an empirical study, focusing on an art investment consultancy, it examines how these methods can contribute to Market Studies and other related fields. It concludes with reflections on the relationship between theory, research practice, and the performative work of market texts

Market Studies scholars have adopted a wide range of methods to explore how markets are made and shaped, ranging from traditional ethnographic and netnographic approaches (see, for example, Fernandes, Mason and Chakrabarti 2019; Palmer, Simmons and Mason 2014), to interviews and observations (Mason, Friesl and Ford 2019; Onyas and Ryan 2015) and the use of big data (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016). Despite advances in our understanding of markets generated using these methods, studying markets as distributed, fragmented, multi-site and multi-actor institutions continues to present significant challenges (Hyysalo, Pollock and Williams 2019). These challenges cut across all stages of the research process: from the relationships researchers build with research participants, to the design and deployment of empirical methodological toolkits to collect and make sense of market and market-making data. One way of overcoming these challenges has been for researchers to reconceptualize methods as enabling tools: enabling researchers to identify, uncover and unfold market dynamics and the socio-material arrangements that perform them.

The design and implementation of the French energy efficiency certificate provides an opportunity to test the hypothesis of the performativity of the economic theory associated with the cap-and-trade market-based instrument. The empirical study of its design and implementation, through interviews and regulatory analysis, reveals a progressive dynamic of decoupling from its initial principles, in particular the equivalence between the quantity of energy saved and the allocation of certificates. Recent adaptations of the instrument attempt to integrate an alternative definition of efficiency based on cost estimation and subsidy allocation. By focusing on calculation practices, this chapter contributes to the understanding of performative struggles and theory-practice decoupling associated with market-based instruments. The chapter identifies four conditions for theory-practice decoupling: competing theories of efficiency, attachment to the instrument, a new principle of action, and weak checks on conformity to theory.

In the adjacent to Market Studies research stream, the emerging Market System Dynamics (MSD) tradition similarly studies how markets are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them. This chapter firstly provides an overview of the body of work that has accumulated within this tradition. Secondly, our chapter outlines five theoretical processes that highlight specific aspects of how markets are constituted as from an MSD lens. These processes include the (de)legitimation, the (de)moralization, the (de)politicization, the aestheticization, and the complexification of markets. We conclude this chapter by briefly discussing a set of biases within the MSD tradition (process inflation, enabling lens myopia, presentism, and particularism), and discuss how MSD and Market Studies as distinct research traditions might benefit from greater interaction.

Taking a spatial and pragmatic approach to markets, this chapter develops an understanding of small trade and its logistics in markets at the periphery of global capitalism. Based on field surveys carried out in Senegal, it examines the day-to-day interactions between wholesalers, resellers and logistics intermediaries that organize the circulation of goods within and between distributed marketplaces and spaces. The research question addresses the process of ‘scaling up’ that transforms a multitude of small hawker transactions into mass consumer markets. The analysis reveals a reticular structure interconnecting individual and informal cross-border traders and shopkeepers, resellers of differing sizes and capacities, and the interconnection of these parties by ‘coxers’ and drivers, who are actors in both micro-logistics and hawking. It shows that the daily circulation of a multitude of small batches of goods relies on logistics assemblages recomposed on a day-to-day basis, based on kinship (interpersonal alliances), tech-ship (micro-technologies) and a credit chain. It shows how this socio-technical circulation infrastructure is a key driver of market access for small traders, allows for the conquest of spatial scales, and provides a flexibility of hierarchies and trajectories as a form of market organization.

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).