Markets are socially constructed arenas where repeated exchanges occur between buyers and sellers under a set of formal and informal rules governing relations among competitors, suppliers, and customers. These arenas operate according to local understandings and rules that guide interaction, facilitate trade, define what products are produced, indeed constitute the products themselves, and provide stability for buyers, sellers, and producers. Marketplaces are also dependent on governments, laws, and cultural understandings supporting market activity. Our essay provides a brief exposition of this perspective. Then, it considers cutting-edge work on three topics: (i) the formation of markets and prices, (ii) the organization of capitalism in different societies, and (iii) financialization and globalization. We suggest that in the future, path breaking research will: (i) explore the sociology of consumption, (ii) combine insights from the sociology of markets and from studies of the role of economic thought in constructing markets, and (iii) investigate national and transnational regulations.
At the heart of the $2 trillion Islamic-finance industry is a ban on interest. But why is there only anIslamicban on interest today? After all, for over a millennium, interest was also gravely sinful in Judaism and Christianity. While scholars have addressed the evolution of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic economic morality in isolation, very few since Weber have tackled the interest question directly and comparatively.I argue that the fate of the religious interest ban has always depended on the fate of religious jurists. When religious jurists are absent, no systematic interest ban emerges. When religious jurists emerge as technical experts, the interest ban appears and thrives. And when religious jurists come under attack or lose their traditional role in society, the interest ban withers and dies.To conclude, I call for a reconstruction of Weber’s theory of religion and economic morality that dissolves the tradition-modernity binary.
In Islam, the extension of religious regulation and certification to new product types and economic sectors—“halalization”—has become widespread. There are now Islamic mortgages, halal ports, halal refrigerators, halal blockchain, and shariah-compliant cryptocurrencies. Yet classical secularization theory says religious authority cannot regulate modern economic activity. So what explains halalization? I point to an elective affinity between fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and twenty-first-century markets. Contemporary fiqh offers widely respected religious jurists who issue fatwas certifying products. Entrepreneurs empanel the jurists on certification boards, allowing fiqh to function as a regime of voluntary regulation layered atop secular state law instead of conflicting with it. Indeed, secular liberal markets provide ideal conditions for halalization and religious meaning-making through consumption. Case studies of Islamic finance and halal logistics show how entrepreneurs assuage consumers’ religious anxieties—and generate new ones—in the context of globalization and liberalization in secular markets.
Observers call upon Islamic financial institutions to move beyond offering merely Sharīʿah-compliant instruments toward offering more Sharīʿah-based ones. But when did these terms come into usage, and why? What precisely do people mean by ‘Sharīʿah-based’? In this article we argue that the term ‘Sharīʿah-compliant’ emerged in the 1990s and allowed Islamic finance institutions to leave behind scandals of the 1980s, presenting Islamic finance anew as a technically rational project grounded in Sharīʿah expertise. In contrast, the call for Sharīʿah-based finance became popular in the 2000s, and especially after the 2008 global financial crisis, which made systemic stability and product transparency pressing concerns. Usages of ‘Sharīʿah-based’ fall into three categories: those that stress separation from conventional finance, those that stress authenticity, and those that stress welfare. This definitional multiplicity is not a problem but rather a starting point for debate and a sign of Islamic finance’s growing maturity as an ethical project.
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