Although markets are at centre stage in capitalist processes of circulation and exchange, they have rarely been made an object of study. In this paper we distinguish three heterodox approaches. (1) Socioeconomics points out that concrete markets cannot be separated from their social context. Markets are dissolved in social networks and socialized. (2) Political economy investigates how the market model is confused for real markets by market participants. The market is represented as a destructive force. (3) Cultural economists point to the practical self-realization of economic knowledge and argue that the abstract market model is performative.
Approaching processes of capitalist market exchange from a cultural economic perspective, we identify three strands of research that are all part of a widespread ‘pragmatic turn’ in the study of economic activities: (1) the conceptualization of markets as heterogeneous arrangements of people, things and sociotechnical devices; (2) the insight that multiple frames of reference are mobilized in everyday market activities in addition to instrumental rationality; and (3) approaches that combine an interest in the performance of diversity and difference in concrete market contexts with an attention to mobility in network capitalism.
Confronted with an imperfect reality, proponents of free trade demand the erasure and dismantling of all obstacles to the free movement of goods, people, and financial capital. The utopian aim is a perfect global market, a homogenous economic space without borders and frictions. In order to reach this ideal state it is necessary to fix market imperfections and do away with trade distortions, aligning the existing real economic world to the laws and norms of the free-trade model. Free traders therefore advance a radical, but consistent position. For them the focus is solely on the essentials: the free movement of goods with as little interference as possible from noneconomic actors.For a long time now critics have commentated on the seemingly unrealistic character of this reasoning. In the real world, it is argued, demands for the unregulated movement of goods, labor, or capital are na|« ve and betray a complete misunderstanding of how the market really works. In a stylized way, there are two varieties of this critique. Socioeconomists point out that markets cannot be separated from their social and institutional context, arguing that the embeddedness of economic processes brings about variation. Political economists dispute the vision of the free-trade argument, challenging the utopian dream of the benevolent effect of free markets by pointing to the destructive nature of the (neo)liberal ideology [see Berndt and Boeckler (2009) for a discussion of different heterodox approaches to markets].At the heart of these critical interventions is the relationship between abstract free-trade/free-market discourse and concrete economic integration realities. We acknowledge this critique, but remain unconvinced of the underlying dichotomy between an economic model core and social context, or uneven economic realities with open borders for capital and goods and closed ones for labor, respectively. It is ironic that both free-market zealots and their heterodox critics draw a sharp line Approaching the contingency of borders from a perspective informed by the performativity approach to markets, this paper starts from the assumption that this paradox is particularly salient in the context of commodity chains which connect the Global South with the Global North. Taking the example of one single agrocommodity, the tomato, and two border regions (Morocco^EU and Mexico^USA), we follow the links and heterogeneous associations which stretch from the border to the fields, supermarket shelves, and standardization agencies to migrant labor, quality-control apparatuses, and so forth. By reading commodity chains from their literal limits, that is, from the border and from the margins, we focus on an element of this global assemblage which is normally taken for granted and excluded from academic and public discourse.
This paper is as an invitation to rethink social studies of economization and geographies of marketization at a time when the heydays of neoliberal marketization seem to be over. After briefly summarizing the thrust of the economization/marketization approach, we make two suggestions to develop the perspective further. The first is to make use of economic geography’s heterodox tradition and contribute to the ongoing “provincialization” of the neoclassical market. Second, theorizing actually existing market arrangements as necessarily involving struggles between competing logics and rationalities, we open social studies of economization and geographies of marketization for questions of social inequality, marginalization and exclusion.
Dis/articulating producers, markets, and regions: new directions in critical studies of commodity chainsIn 2008 Werner and Bair proposed a 'disarticulations perspective' as an intervention into the commodity chains and production networks literatures in sociology, geography, and development studies (Bair and Werner, 2011a). (1) While these literatures effectively called our attention to the dynamics of transnational network relations, and especially to the forms of governance through which commodity circuits are coordinated, we (Bair and Werner) argued that extant chain frameworks suffered from an empirical and theoretical bias towards the study of the incorporation of people and places into these circuits. This 'inclusionary bias' results from our tendency, as researchers, to follow the chain, in effect chasing capital to the newest frontier of a production network. Such an approach, we argued, gives short shrift to the uneven geographies of capitalism, and how these geographies shape, and are shaped by, production networks. Our intervention proposed displacing the departure point of commodity chain analysis from network-type models of interfirm transactions to the relationship between global networks and the patterned and contingent reproduction of uneven development. Thus, rather than focusing on the consequences of incorporation into a commodity chain, we wanted instead to ask what are the conditions that enable commodity circuits to form and reform over time.Originally, the commodity chain construct was deployed by world-systems theorists to chart the expansion of a worldwide division of labor. Although we see our project as an extension of this research tradition, we also conceptualize the commodity chain somewhat differently. Rather than an advancing frontier that proceeds by incorporating territorial and social relations inside a hierarchical core-periphery structure of global capitalism, for us the commodity chain is a constantly shifting boundary that demarcates an outside within and reproduces uneven relations at a variety of scales. Influenced by Stuart Hall's notion of articulation developed in the 1980s and more recent literature on primitive accumulation, we proposed the concept of disarticulations to highlight the instabilities, disruptions, and provisional outsides of global production networks. Specifically, we wanted to theorize the significance of these processes for the formation and ongoing restructuring of commodity circuits.The timing of our intervention was not surprising. Uneven development and, in particular, the relationship between capitalist processes and their constitutive outsides has emerged decisively on the agenda of critical social sciences in the last decade. In the wake of the ongoing restructuring of regimes of capitalist accumulation, we have seen renewed attention given to a set of empirically pervasive, but undertheorized, processes of exclusion from and marginalization within capitalist relations. The concrete expression of these processes includes volatile shifts in the...
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