A central theme of this book has been the contention that, although the rejection of market-centricity, market essentialism and market fundamentalism should be considered necessary, this move itself is not sufficient. Neither is it entirely sufficient merely to catalogue counter-indicators and contrary cases – of “varieties” of markets, let us say: of markets behaving badly and marketization processes going astray, or of markets randomly dissolved into “mixed” economies – in the absence of a more concerted conversation around the critical study of markets and marketization. To this end, we offer some concluding comments in this chapter, not in the form of a fully fabricated research agenda (which would surely be premature) but in the interest of continuing this conversation.

In contrast to the view that, in “classical and neoclassical economic theory, markets are at the center of the stage” (Simon 1991: 25), Viviana Zelizer (1988: 618; 2011) has long pressed the argument that it is important to recognize the multiplicity of markets, rather than sanctifying and reifying some supposedly ultimate form or imagining research programmes only in relation to this orthodox orbit. To recognize and engage with real-world plurality is certainly a constructive first step, as too is Zelizer's suggestion that this diverse array of markets must be positioned within a wider universe of “possible social arrangements [variously involving] economic processes”. Given that markets demonstrably “operate on very different principles”, Fred Block and Margaret Somers (2014: 61, 87) have observed, the “issue is not the existence of markets, but the relationship of markets to the social whole [since, ] even at its peak, market society is a hybrid”. Yet determining the principles according to which markets are “structured”, contoured, divided up and articulated remains an open (and challenging) question. William Jackson has remarked that “[n] o simple model can cover all markets, and theory has to delineate structural alternatives” (2007: 236; 2019), both to that reductionist model and across the polymorphic market form itself – a task he characterizes as one of “daunting complexity”.