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Issues of supply and demand are basic to markets, but economic sociologists ignore consumers, while sociologists of consumption rarely treat consumption as demand. I conceptualize markets as cyclic interactions of producers and consumers around a product, each group embedded in different types of macrosocial patterns, with different purposes and structures. I apply this conceptualization to the French and U.S. bicycle markets from 1865 to 1914. The model helps explain differing market trajectories in these cases.

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Despite advances in understanding markets from many perspectives, total market demand remains understudied. Influences on demand, such as conditions of product use, also remain neglected. Scholars of three traditions-institutionalism, product life cycle, and performativity or ''marketshaping''-can help us understand aspects of demand, conditions of use, and efforts to shape those conditions. In this article, I make two arguments that the ''use-environment'' is a major influence on total market demand and that action to modify use-environments, or ''market-widening,'' can increase that demand. I illustrate these arguments by narrating and analyzing cases of bicycle markets in the United States and France circa 1890. Finally, I develop the implications of these cases for market studies.

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