I.1.1 Some Brief Histories of Market Studies

There is a common ancestor in the tangled intellectual genealogy of Market Studies. It is Michel Callon’s introductory and concluding chapters to his 1998 edited volume The Laws of the Markets (the plural is necessary), in which he sets out a challenging, groundbreaking programme that would guide the trajectory of a developing field for over two decades. But intellectual innovation rarely occurs in a vacuum. In 1998, when The Laws of the Markets was published, the world was at the height of the so-called Washington Consensus, a globalizing neoliberal thought system that had at its centre liberalization, market deregulation, privatization and the sacrosanct status of property rights (Mirowski Reference Mirowski2013). Followers of this consensus, unlike earlier liberals, would not have argued that the spread of markets was at its core somehow a ‘naturally’ unfolding process. Far from it. Following thinkers such as Hayek (Reference Hayek1945, Reference Hayek1973) and Friedman (Reference Friedman1962), they were clear that well-functioning markets often had to be imposed top-down against the resistance of the poor, of the Global South, and of established, traditional, local elites. Nevertheless, markets were understood as a privileged vantage point from which to theorize economy and economization – and, even for the critics of neoliberalism, markets were seen as a pivotal institution (Schwarzkopf Reference Schwarzkopf, Kravets, Maclaran, Miles and Venkatesh2018).

In the world outside the academy, markets were everywhere; it was, famously, the end of history, witnessing the triumph of global capitalism (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1992). Yet the markets themselves were strangely absent from this conception, even though their material, architectural and political traces were everywhere to be seen. Against such a totalizing narrative, and the disciplinary ambitions of a particular kind of economics, new directions of academic thought flourished. In the United States, the ‘new economic sociology’ initiated by Mark Granovetter (Reference Granovetter1973, Reference Granovetter1985) and Viviana Zelizer (Reference Zelizer1979) set out to describe the institutional forms of market organization. This tradition saw the social mediations of market exchange in various areas as related to different forms of ‘embeddedness’ – social networks (Uzzi Reference Uzzi1996), cultural values and legitimacy (Zelizer Reference Zelizer1979, Reference Zelizer1985, Reference Zelizer1994), political institutions (Dobbin Reference Dobbin1994) and fields (Fligstein Reference Fligstein2001), among other forms of social processes.

Although the new economic sociology developed in opposition to mainstream economics suspected of imperialist ambitions, the European context was characterized by a renewal of heterodox approaches in economics. The promotion of ‘alternative models of capitalism’ (Piore and Sabel Reference Piore and Sabel1984; Sabel and Zeitlin Reference Sabel and Zeitlin2002), the regulation school (Aglietta Reference Aglietta2000; Boyer Reference Boyer1990) and the economics of conventions (Dupuy et al. Reference Dupuy1989) promoted institutionalist perspectives on capitalism and markets. In France, they provided fertile ground for dialogue between scholars in economics, economic sociology and organization theory. Initially developed from the analysis of labour markets and then extended to product markets, the economics of conventions theorized the plurality of conceptions (or regimes) of quality among the market players along the chain from design to the end of the product’s life. In turn, sociologists set out to investigate the various socio-technical mediations that support quality judgements and the professional intermediaries and devices involved in these qualification processes (e.g. Cochoy and Dubuisson-Quellier Reference Cochoy and Dubuisson-Quellier2000). The early work of Franck Cochoy (Reference Cochoy1999), for instance, tracing the history of marketing in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present day, showed how marketing knowledge and the proliferation of marketers within companies ‘disciplined’ market exchanges. With the notion of ‘trust/judgment devices’, Lucien Karpik (Reference Karpik1996, Reference Karpik2010) identified the judging process as a way of dealing with uncertain economic exchanges.

Callon, with his writing on markets, took an active part in these discussions. His perspective was inspired by his early works in science and technology studies, which addressed the market as a ‘pole’ in the ‘technico-economic networks’ of innovation (Callon Reference Callon1990). This means considering the metamorphosis of goods, their qualification and requalification from the laboratories to the consumer, whose ‘alignment’ within the socio-technical networks of innovation drives the markets. Within the debates on quality(s) as a mechanism of coordination, this led Callon to defend a general process of singularization, claiming that markets consist of a mass of singular connections (Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa Reference Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa2002), whereas others distinguish between standard markets and status markets of singularized goods (Aspers Reference Aspers2009; Karpik Reference Karpik2010). The market is understood here as a process that puts calculative agencies in opposition and/or cooperation, and economization as the process of furnishing agents with that calculative capacity – a process of organizing (‘framing’) associations and relationships in such a way that calculative agency can be exercised (Callon and Muniesa Reference Callon and Muniesa2005). Since a large number of elements that have to come together for such framings are described and developed within the science of economics, Callon even talked about the ‘embeddedness’ of economic markets in economics (Callon Reference Callon and Callon1998). Elements of these ideas had been developed with the help of important empirical work conducted during the 1980s by Marie-France Garcia-Parpet on strawberry auction markets in Fointaines-en-Sologne (Garcia-Parpet Reference Garcia-Parpet1986). Callon’s assertion opened up an empirical programme: the notion that markets are rhizomic assemblages, or ‘agencements’ (Callon Reference Callon, Pinch and Swedberg2008), which exist in plurality and are worth investigating in individual detail.

These ideas arrived in the anglophone world in 1996, when Callon introduced some of the key elements of his research programme at the ‘ANT and after’ workshop at Keele University in 1996. Callon was sick, and the text – ‘Actor network theory: the market test’ (1999) – was read out by John Law. Callon, a central actor in the growth of the STS discipline, had made his name (together with Bruno Latour, Law and to some extent Arie Rip) as a co-author of the ANT programme. His argument was that the analytical templates honed on technoscience could equally be applied to other domains, especially to markets. His text at that conference explained how he wanted to ‘put ANT to a test’ to ‘offer an analysis of the economic market’. The ANT version of the economic actor was a ‘calculative agency’ ‘made up of human bodies but also prostheses, tools, equipment, technical devices, algorithms, etc.’ (Hardie and MacKenzie Reference Hardie and MacKenzie2007) as both product and part of a process of market framing. Callon’s paper met with a mixed reception from the assembled STS scholars – as it did elsewhere. Critical accountants, such as Peter Miller and Mike Power and others, were already focused on markets (Miller and Power Reference Miller, Power, Dezalay and Sugarman1995; Miller and Rose Reference Miller and Rose1990, Reference Miller and Rose1997). Moreover, Miller (Reference Miller2008) was an early critic of the programme and flagged the danger of assuming that all modes of ordering are a direct derivative of economics. Anthropologists had covered the ground previously (see, for example, Dilley Reference Dilley and Dilley1992), and this would lead to heated exchanges between Callon and anthropologists such as Daniel Miller (Reference Miller2002).

Callon’s text sparked interest among other prominent STS scholars, however. His interest in performativity chimed with the work of Donald MacKenzie (Reference MacKenzie1996) on the self-fulfilling prophecies guiding technological investment decisions. MacKenzie, like Callon, was a prominent STS scholar associated with the Edinburgh strong programme (which emerged as the main competitor at the time in parallel to the French ANT programme). Originally trained in mathematics, he pioneered work on supercomputing and missile design, catching the public eye with a (still) terrifying piece in the New Left Review (MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie1984). Rather than produce more of the same kind of studies, however, he became interested in understanding whether financial markets might be amenable to STS-type analysis. He began a sustained analysis of options pricing theory, directly provoked by Callon’s work. Indeed, MacKenzie’s influential ‘Historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange’, co-written with Yuval Millo, begins: ‘The most challenging recent theoretical contribution to economic sociology is Callon’s (Reference Callon and Callon1998) assertion of the performativity of economics’ (MacKenzie and Millo Reference MacKenzie and Millo2003).

Back again to the social and economic conditions of the late 1990s, when financial markets were bubbling with dotcom excitement, and new cityscapes were appearing in the bridgehead cities of global finance (Roscoe Reference Roscoe2023). MacKenzie was not the only scholar to turn their attention to the financial markets. As the grand arch of La Défense towered over Paris and the World Trade Centre over New York, the study of finance became an essential catalyst for developing our understanding of markets in general and a proving ground for some of the theoretical and empirical conceits that Market Studies take for granted. In Chicago, Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda turned their attention to the topic, producing now classic STS-inflected studies of trading rooms and technologies (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger Reference Knorr Cetina and Bruegger2000, Reference Knorr Cetina and Bruegger2002; Preda Reference Preda2001, Reference Preda2005, Reference Preda2006) and, eventually, a handbook of the ‘sociology of finance’, carefully bridging STS, interactionist perspectives and more mainstream economic sociology (Knorr Cetina and Preda Reference Knorr Cetina and Preda2012). Knorr Cetina in her book Epistemic Cultures (Reference Knorr Cetina1999), based on ethnographic work conducted during the 1980s, had pioneered some of the first laboratory ethnographies and a focus on what she termed ‘machineries of knowing’. Here, she asked how experts know what they know. From the late 1990s she began to extend this analysis to financial actors such as financial analysts. Knorr Cetina sought to understand the epistemic cultures of finance and often found it useful to compare these experts to scientists. Ironically, studying how these experts make financial predictions, she observes that there are no processes similar to those found in science, because, in her view, the accuracy of a financial prediction seemingly ‘does not matter all that much’ (Knorr Cetina Reference Knorr Cetina2010). In New York, a PhD researcher named Daniel Beunza conducted a long-term ethnography of a trading room, memorably taking stock of 9/11, which he initially published with his supervisor David Stark (Beunza and Stark Reference Beunza and Stark2003, Reference Beunza and Stark2004) and much later as a monograph (Beunza Reference Beunza2019). This tradition remained closer to mainstream economic sociology and organization studies, as Beunza and Stark trained their eyes on the organizational conditions of financial trading (heterarchical versus hierarchical organizational structure; origins of collective failure; etc.). Another key STS contributor was Trevor Pinch, who introduced an STS-type focus on markets and, specifically, the selling and buying process (Pinch and Clark Reference Pinch and Clark1986). Interestingly, Asaf Darr and Pinch (Reference Darr and Pinch2013) explicitly criticised Callon’s performativity thesis for backgrounding the ‘social organization of markets’ and encouraging an (excessive) focus on what are seen as central actors, such as economists, at the expense of other market actors, such as sales experts and their local practices.

At the École des Mines in Paris, home to Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, a sustained independent trajectory was evolving, and a research group including PhD students such as Vincent Lepinay and Fabian Muniesa coined the term ‘social studies of finance’ to capture this sudden focus on the material artefacts and calculative practices of finance. In 2004 MacKenzie was awarded a professorial fellowship from the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council with the goal of launching and fostering the ‘social studies of finance’ as an area of study. This led to a 2009 project (with Ian Hardie) on ‘Understanding and governing complex financial instruments: a “social studies of finance” investigation of multi-name credit derivatives’, and several others. Numerous empirical studies followed: traders’ telephones (Muniesa Reference Muniesa, Pinch and Swedberg2008), day traders (Preda Reference Preda2009; Roscoe and Howorth Reference Roscoe and Howorth2009), cotton traders (Çalışkan Reference Çalışkan, Callon, Millo and Muniesa2007), high-frequency traders (Lange, Lenglet and Seyfert Reference Lange, Lenglet and Seyfert2016) and more. This (loose and distributed) programme has continually breathed novelty into the adjacent Market Studies trajectory, for instance through its shifting focus on matters of valuation, capitalization or assetization (Muniesa et al. Reference Muniesa2017; Birch and Muniesa Reference Birch and Muniesa2020; Geiger and Gross Reference Geiger and Gross2021; Bourgeron and Geiger Reference Bourgeron and Geiger2022).

By the late 2010s it had become difficult to distinguish between a pure ‘social studies of finance’ and a more general concern with (financial) markets in Market Studies. Crucially, many of the STS scholars who had turned to markets and the social study of finance were making their careers in business schools, and the ideas began to creep into the broader literature of management and organization studies and wider empirical contexts. Beunza, for example, successfully carried concepts from performativity into mainstream organization theory (e.g. Beunza and Ferraro Reference Beunza and Ferraro2019), where he joined a parallel conversation about organizational performativity (Ferraro, Pfeffer and Sutton Reference Ferraro, Pfeffer and Sutton2005; Gond et al. Reference Gond, Cabantous, Harding and Learmonth2016). Performativity-influenced empirical studies appeared in leading journals of accounting (Millo and MacKenzie Reference Millo and MacKenzie2009) and organization (Palo, Mason and Roscoe Reference Palo, Mason and Roscoe2020). Again, prominent STS scholars had already prepared the ground for such a move. Steve Woolgar, having taken up a chair in marketing at Oxford, sought to understand not just how STS could influence the understanding of markets but also how STS was itself being transformed through engaging with markets and businesses. With Catelijine Coopmans and Daniel Neyland, Woolgar organized a number of workshops at Oxford in 2004 and 2005, labelled ‘Does STS mean business?’. These meetings led to a special issue in the journal Organization (Woolgar, Coopmans and Neyland Reference Woolgar, Coopmans and Neyland2009), which included important foundational pieces for Market Studies, including Cochoy’s (Reference Cochoy2009) article on shopping carts. Neyland later convened a large study on the policy use of markets to fix social problems (Neyland and Milyaeva Reference Neyland and Milyaeva2016). The École des Mines group also moved to other contexts, such as the study of information and telecommunications technology (ICT) marketing, retail trade and consumption (Mallard Reference Mallard2012, 2016), environmental markets (Doganova and Laurent Reference Doganova and Laurent2019) and valuation and capitalization more broadly conceived (Muniesa Reference Muniesa2011; Muniesa et al. Reference Muniesa2017; Muniesa and Doganova Reference Muniesa and Doganova2020). Callon himself wrote, with Koray Çalışkan, two highly cited programmatic pieces on the topic of ‘economization’ (Çalışkan and Callon Reference Çalışkan and Callon2009, Reference Çalışkan and Callon2010).

These tangled intellectual pathways occasionally crossed at conference subthemes – as, for instance, at European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) colloquiums and at 4S (Society for the Social Studies of Science) meetings – and through edited volumes (e.g. Helgesson, Kjellberg and Liljenberg Reference Helgesson, Kjellberg and Liljenberg2004; Muniesa, Millo and Callon Reference Muniesa, Millo, Callon, Callon, Millo and Muniesa2007). But they scarcely answer the central question of how the Market Studies discipline emerged as an institutionalized field in its own right. The impetus for this move came from the discipline of marketing, which had traditionally shown a surprising lack of concern with market matters (Geiger, Kjellberg and Spencer Reference Geiger, Kjellberg and Spencer2012). At the 2003 Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) conference, a heated debate about the absence of theorization of ‘markets’ in the marketing literature rankled a group of scholars who had also been inspired by Callon’s The Laws of the Markets. Like economists, many marketers assumed markets to be ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered. There was no recognition that markets could be made; this basic insight of Market Studies remains a significant contribution of the field. Colleagues from Stockholm School of Economics, Lancaster University, BI Norway and Kedge University met in Lugano, and later in Marseilles, where they imagined and organized a Market Studies track at the IMP 2004 conference, in Copenhagen. Conversations at these meetings and their more localized equivalents in Stockholm, Lancaster and elsewhere provoked a worldwide search for interdisciplinary scholars with a shared interest, expanding the group and creating critical links to new academic worlds. Two papers that attracted attention at IMP 2004 were published shortly afterwards: Hans Kjellberg and Claes-Fredrik Helgesson’s (Reference Kjellberg and Helgesson2006) ‘Multiple versions of markets’; and Luis Araujo’s (Reference Araujo2007) ‘Markets, market-making and marketing’. A year later, at IMP Rotterdam in 2005, Kjellberg and Helgesson (Reference Kjellberg and Helgesson2006) presented their paper ‘Multiple versions of markets’. The first edited Market Studies book, Reconnecting Marketing to Markets (Araujo, Finch and Kjellberg Reference Araujo, Finch and Kjellberg2010), appeared at the same time as Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon were working on their two-part programmatic paper ‘Economization’ (Reference Çalışkan and Callon2009, Reference Çalışkan and Callon2010), with a second edited volume entitled Concerned Markets: Economic Ordering for Multiple Values (Geiger et al. Reference Geiger, Harrison, Kjellberg and Mallard2014), and several further special issues following in quick succession in Marketing Theory, Consumption Markets & Culture, Journal of Marketing Management and Journal of Cultural Economy.

The threads were beginning to converge. Perhaps the most important institutional step came in 2010, when four scholars who had met through the IMP network and had started to write about markets – Susi Geiger, Debbie Harrison, Hans Kjellberg and Claes-Fredrik Helgesson – persuaded the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management to sponsor the first biennial Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop (IMWS). This workshop, held in Sigtuna, Sweden, was the first gathering of a global set of scholars from different disciplines – marketing, STS, economic sociology, anthropology, and others – with common interests around the performativity of economics and the work of market making. Indeed, it was an organizational experiment in its own right in bringing together seemingly disparate perspectives on the same empirical object – markets – in a small-scale, discussion-intensive format (Geiger and Kjellberg Reference Geiger and Kjellberg2016). The workshop was a success, and subsequent IMSW workshops continued to bring scholars interested in market-related phenomena together around specific themes: the materiality of markets and market devices (2012 in Dublin, Ireland); the actors behind markets (2014 in Saint Maximin, France); the possibilities and ‘what if’s’ that the performativity agenda raises (2016 in St Andrews, Scotland); the physical and situated nature of markets (2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark); and the flows, circulations and boundaries of markets (2021, Grenoble/online). The latest of these biennial meeting places of what now had become a global Market Studies community was in 2023, a joint workshop with the Journal of Cultural Economy held in Edinburgh, Scotland, which focused on future markets, promises and expectations. Tracks and subthemes at other, larger conferences, including EGOS, SASE (Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics) and 4S, provided further cross-fertilizations and filled the gaps in those years when no IMWS took place. These meetings, in all their scope, have always cultivated a spirit of fertile cross-fertilization of ideas and disciplines, far removed from the academic “grand messes”: discussing papers in progress, putting professional hierarchies at a distance, cultivating work in small groups. Moves towards institutionalization in adjacent areas such as valuation studies – prominently spearheaded by the open-access journal Valuation Studies and its founding editors Fabian Muniesa and Claes-Fredrik Helgesson – provided breadth and useful fora for interchanges with those whose fields of study lie outside markets but who were working on similar conceptual concerns. In parallel, an early career network (known as LancStock) with biennial workshops hosted by Luis Araujo, Hans Kjellberg and Katy Mason (and later with Neil Pollock), at Lancaster University and Stockholm School of Economics, provided a valuable platform for emerging research ideas and evolving methodologies, together with the ‘Lancaster Practice Theory’ digital platform supporting virtual reading groups, gatherings and conferences (see https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/socialpractice). It was, in fact, in this early career network that the idea for this book germinated, with many contributing chapters emanating from those who had taken part in these doctoral and early career colloquia. Besides community building, these gatherings clearly highlighted the need to consolidate the theoretical apparatus and knowledge stock in Market Studies – giving impetus to the present volume.

Clearly, over the past two decades, not least due to the community that gathered every two years for the IMSW series, the field has institutionalized itself, with doctoral students – some ‘third generation’ – writing explicitly Market Studies theses. The breadth of its disciplinary draw has until now assured a continuous influx and circulation of new insights. But institutionalization also always begs the question of what a field can do to avoid falling victim to its own success by becoming stale and formulaic. We seek part of the answer to this question by providing an overview of the current volume, but we also wish to dare to look forward beyond its potential reception and reach.

I.2.1 Looking Forward with Market Studies

As mentioned above, during the 1990s and the early 2000s thinking with, through and about markets was much more obvious than it is today. For some, markets seemed the solution to everything, while, for others, they seemed to take over everything. The ‘neoliberal thought collective’ (Mirowski and Plehwe Reference Mirowski and Plehwe2015) had slowly but persistently reconfigured our world and its critiques such that any attempt to recur to deep structures and hidden mechanisms in order to explain social change seemed futile. The ontology of the social world really was flat; it was economics all the way down, so to speak. The world had become a construction site in which one could understand the principles of assembly simply by following the actants and devices that enacted calculative processes (Callon and Muniesa Reference Callon and Muniesa2005; Muniesa, Millo and Callon Reference Muniesa, Millo, Callon, Callon, Millo and Muniesa2007).

In the quarter of a century since Callon’s Reference Callon and Callon1998 volume, our world has changed, as have the conditions of academic knowledge production. For one, the very visible hand of the state has returned, not to nurture but to delimit market exchange, but also as a central market actor in its own right, variously conceiving and contesting markets (Geiger and Bourgeron Reference Geiger and Bourgeron2023). Second, it is difficult to reconcile a market-centric approach in a world dominated by digital monopolies such as Alpha and Meta (McIntosh Reference McIntosh2019), in which notions that were formerly central to our conception of markets, such as competition, have been all but suspended. Third, although it was possible in what seemed a thoroughly postmodern world of the 1990s to ask whether critique had ‘run out of steam’ (Latour Reference Latour2004), the sheer scale and proliferation of global catastrophes and climate change have made commentary on the role of capital, power, race, gender and geography once more a necessity. Social movements protesting the market have intensified, calling into evidence the ‘contested moralities of markets’ (Schiller-Merkens and Balsiger Reference Schiller-Merkens and Balsiger2019) – a different kind of critique, perhaps, informed by the Market Studies perspective, but critique all the same.

A first step in how Market Studies may contribute to such critique is to consider our methodologies. STS, a field based on the critical examination of scientific methods, is understandably reluctant to talk much about methods. Studies are rarely explicit about the specific details of how to study technoscience. This limitation has carried into Market Studies, and it needs to be addressed; we need to say more about how and where we study markets, what motivates our empirical choices and – importantly – what limitations are inherent in these methodological perspectives. Because they are distributed, markets are difficult to study. But there are certain moments and sites at which key market work gets done. Policy making, court cases and other legal processes are one obvious (if, arguably, underutilized) of these sites (Christophers Reference Christophers2015; Geiger and Finch Reference Geiger and Finch2016; Overdevest Reference Overdevest2011; Brondino-Pompeo this volume). Instances of overt contestations against specific markets are another one; indeed, a great strength of the Market Studies discipline is its insistence on empirical work, especially ethnography, that follows ‘controversy’ or, if they lie in the past, that follows ‘the actors’ back into a time before the controversy was black-boxed (Latour Reference Latour1999).

Combined with its focus on micro-processes and material devices in the making, its rejection of grand narratives and its openness to interdisciplinary collaboration, the Market Studies discipline has yielded many highly detailed and insightful accounts of the ‘inner workings’ of markets. For many, the deployment of a descriptive and explanatory form of analysis that avoids ‘grander’ ideological critique is a great strength, offering a subtle, immanent analysis; yet it has also been criticized by some as standing too much on the sidelines, of being too self-absorbed in thick description of sites, actors and arrangements (Christophers Reference Christophers2014; Mirowski and Nik-Khah Reference Mirowski, Nik-Khah, MacKenzie, Muniesa and Siu2007). As the journalist Aditya Chakrabortty pithily has put it, it is a view that is ‘all cogs and no car’ (Chakrabortty Reference Chakrabortty2012). Moreover, in our choice of case studies, there is an excessive focus on how markets are created rather than, for instance, how markets are maintained or further developed, perhaps because STS prefers ‘hot’ situations and is not very interested in ‘cold’ contexts. This leaves a gap in understanding how markets remain stable or decline (though the recent interest in ‘market infrastructures’ has begun to address some of these issues; see, for instance, Araujo and Mason Reference Araujo and Mason2021; Schwarzkopf, this volume; Gross and Geiger, this volume). Furthermore, the STS legacy maintains a tropism towards the technosciences of the market and the political and technical design of market agencing. Market studies can make more room for more open and decentralized configurations, less invested by technoscience or regulatory agencies and in which market agencements are based on bricolage and self-organization (Gosztonyi and Roscoe, this volume; Trompette, this volume).

Even so, we argue that, precisely because the conceptualization of markets as unfinished processes and as sites of social struggle is central to Callon’s original work, a Market Studies approach is able to overcome this danger of being overly descriptive. It is noticeable that recent contributions in our field have put the moral and political struggles that surround market architectures much more at the centre of their studies, including Doganova and Laurent (Reference Doganova and Laurent2019), Samman et al. (Reference Samman2022), Roscoe and Loza (Reference Roscoe and Loza2019) and Geiger and Bourgeron (Reference Geiger and Bourgeron2023). This somewhat more normative turn towards a ‘resocializing’ of Market Studies has also brought back ontological concepts, such as gender (Murto, this volume), class (Cluley, this volume), colonialism (Gilbert, this volume) and power (Fischer and Giesler, this volume), that the early, more ANT-influenced Market Studies would have eschewed. A recent large project run by one of us – Susi Geiger – has specifically forefronted the politics of markets, including issues of social and distributive justice, care and alternative forms of economizing (see Geiger Reference Geiger2021 and elsewhere).

Clearly, our world cannot afford any longer to try and look past manifest antagonisms, some of which exist or remain as direct consequences of markets at work: rich and poor; humans and nature; North and South. In that sense, our field is currently moving on from merely studying the managerial and technocratic strategies of market makers and market shapers in a way that conforms to a post-political consensus to not touch upon matters of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique’ (Muniesa Reference Muniesa, Blok, Farias and Roberts2020). Rather, the much more normative and politically charged question – here understood with Chantal Mouffe’s ‘Political’, with a capital ‘P’ – of ‘what markets we want’ (Kjellberg Reference Kjellberg2021; Kjellberg, this volume) has returned to the centre of Market Studies research – and, in our opinion, has strengthened its purview.

In closing our editorial contribution, then, we make the case that Market Studies scholars need to pay closer attention to the conceptual frameworks and methodological toolkits they deploy – and that they may benefit from linking up their micro-processual focus to broader societal and economic perspectives. In its two-decade history and many tangled lifelines, the Market Studies discipline has greatly benefited from inspirations from other contexts, beyond STS, and we would encourage such eclecticism to continue. Like all methodologies, the research methods, dominating questions and ways of framing issues used by STS bring with them preconceptions about the nature of markets and how they need to be investigated, and, as these move on in our collective thinking and imagination, so do our research questions and tools need to evolve. We call upon Market Studies researchers to carefully consider their own templates and the methods with which they set out to study the very different kinds of market-building processes that currently occur. This should include addressing epistemic questions around the tools and devices we study; for instance, where we may ask whether a market device is made accurate and for what purpose, a further question might be whether the tool is useful, plausible or just, and in whose judgement. Clearly, a Market Studies perspective should be able to say more here, or, at least, shine a light on this tension. This does not mean that we should ignore the foundational ideas stemming from our broad STS heritage. It is possible, however, that these analytical frameworks on their own are no longer adequate to capture the complexity and value-ladenness of contemporary market situations.

We note with some optimism that our field is becoming more open to experimentation and the promises of ‘critical performativity’ (Huault et al. Reference Huault, Kärreman, Perret and Spicer2017). If markets can be organized differently and in a way that benefits a larger set of stakeholders, then they need to be conceptualized and treated as a design object not just for economists but also for Market Studies scholars (Callon and Roth Reference Callon and Roth2021). We believe that the key strength of our research paradigm – namely lifting the veil on how visible and invisible actors and infrastructures contribute to the workings of market – can make a big difference in this regard, especially since scholarship in other areas has now also started to address terms such as ‘ethical infrastructure’ and ‘moral infrastructure’ (Seifert, LaMothe and Schmitt Reference Seifert, LaMothe and Schmitt2023; Ryan et al. Reference Ryan2023). Further, we urgently call on our field to take geopolitical framings into account more seriously, even if these transcend the typical micro-studies in our field. To use but one contemporary example, the proof of our approach is in being able to contribute not just to the understanding of the micro-politics of tokenization that goes into, say, the making of a cryptocurrency but also to the understanding of macro-processes on the level at which states and dictatorships assert digital sovereignty. It is imperative for some of this work to move more decisively beyond a Europe-centric gaze on markets – of which, admittedly, the present volume is a culprit – and strive to incorporate a pluriversal perspective on markets, prominently including the Global South (e.g. Mason, Friesl and Ford Reference Mason, Friesl and Ford2017; Cholez and Trompette Reference Cholez and Trompette2016, Reference Cholez and Trompette2020; Onyas, McEachern and Ryan Reference Onyas, McEachern and Ryan2018). Further anthropologization of Market Studies would provide a way of decentring the lens so that we can reach out to economies that are considered to be ‘external’ and ‘sources of disorder’: the so-called informal economies (currently considered by the International Labour Organization [ILO] to be dominant in the world in terms of employment); the underground economies; or simply the mundane markets of generic, standardized and low-cost products that serve the development of global mass consumption, providing the low-income population with ‘modern’ goods on the cheap (clothes, mobile phones, medicines, etc.). Far from the economics of singularities, generic copies and counterfeits challenge international quality standards (Quet Reference Quet2018; Trompette and Cholez Reference Trompette, Cholez, Leliveld, Bhaduri, Knorringa and van Beers2023). Conversely, niche markets ‘governed by freedom’ supply capitalist export organizations (Tsing Reference Tsing2015). Anthropologizing Market Studies invites us to question more closely the overturning of the old North–South boundaries, the entanglement of globalization from above and from below (in other terms, the fragmentation of market spaces) and, at the same time, the transactional chains and the competing asymmetries that link them (Guyer Reference Guyer2004). We expect – indeed, hope – that some of this work will question the very usefulness of the term ‘market’ in studying a much broader array of economic orderings than the term might encompass. In studying markets, scholars should never shy away from questioning not just their forms and devisings but their very existence as a form of social organization (Pickersgill and Jasanoff Reference Pickersgill and Jasanoff2018).

This introduction has given a very material account of the history of our young field. At the core of its development lie not just a series of intellectual contributions from prominent scholars, such as Callon, MacKenzie, Knorr Cetina and many others, but also the emergence of diverse platforms for cultivating these ideas, such as workshops, edited volumes, journal special issues, etc. In other words, this introduction has foregrounded how the history of Market Studies is very much entwined with a ‘knowledge infrastructure’ (Edwards Reference Edwards2013) organized and curated by a broader community of scholars. The field has flourished due to the diverse range of people, spanning various disciplinary perspectives and career stages, who have entered and conducted exciting research on markets. This prompts us to consider, as we look to the next stage of Market Studies, what our community requires to move forward, to address new questions and to continue to flourish and to be provocative. The history sketched here suggests that, alongside ideas and contributions, we need to continue to create and curate the various knowledge infrastructures and communities that serve and shape ideas. For instance, one might ask whether the conditions for academic work today are as conducive to such endeavours and risk-taking as they were 20 years ago (see Pardo-Guerra Reference Pardo-Guerra2022). Similarly, our field must persist in encouraging and embracing newcomers, who will expose it to an ever-broader range of enquiries and exciting initiatives, including steering it in many new and different directions. As we have shown in this introduction, the Market Studies discipline lacks a singular entry point; each of us, for instance, entered the field through a different pathway. We hope and expect, following the leads provided in this volume, where authors reflect on the origins but also potential future of the field, that Market Studies scholarship will continue to widen its conceptualizations of the many forms that economic organizing takes – in and outside markets.