This article proceeds from the question: how do prices in markets work? In socio-economic theories, I find two answers to this question. The structural-coordinative approach explains prices as outcomes—coordinative effects of pricing scripts installed by exogenous, institutionalized social structures. The performative-epistemological approach explains prices as market devices—endogenous performative-epistemological tools of marketization. While not necessarily antithetical, the two theories define market knowledge, pricing and price in distinct ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the Swedish meat industry, this article examines the merits of the two aforementioned theories and the prospects for unifying them. The conclusion presents an empirically grounded proposal for such a unification, emphasizing that prices, in practice, simultaneously express embedding social structures and mobilize marketization. A unified theory of market prices allows for identifying and analysing the recursive relation of social structures and performed episteme in pricing; how prices both express and realize market organization.

Prices and pricing are central to markets and market-making, while granted sparse attention in economic sociology. In this paper, I approach prices and pricing as market knowledge: the practical, everyday knowledge used by market actors. First, the two dominant sociological conceptualizations of market knowledge are outlined: (1) market knowledge as a coded interface, making prices outcomes of structurally installed pricing scripts, and (2) market knowledge as a reconfiguring force where prices are means, or devices, of marketization. Second, I use empirical cases of pricing to investigate if both conceptualizations hold explanatory value, and if they can be considered antithetical. The analysis finds that the episteme performed in pricing-practices concerns and reproduces structures. Consequently, I suggest a synthetic definition of market knowledge as a ‘structural episteme’.

This chapter synthesizes SRT and SAS-theory, enabling SRT to analyze abundance and sufficiency in tandem with scarcity for analyzing resource exchange. First, we outline how SRT rests on an assumption of scarcity as the primary resource state causing exchange motivations and the problems caused by that assumption. Second, we used SAS-theory to formalize Scarcity, Abundance and Sufficiency (SAS) in an agnostic manner, tying them to different behavioral strategies that individuals use when engaging with a specific resource state. Third, we formalize the relation between individual and systemic level SAS. This relation is influenced by entitlement functions, allowing the distinction between an individual’s experience of absolute and quasi-SAS. This difference is essential, as quasi-SAS implies different exchange motivations and strategies than absolute SAS. Lastly, we demonstrate the formalized relations through two examples of abundance-based motivations, and how quasi-scarcity requires different explanations than absolute scarcity.

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Sociology’s tendency to branch into applied scientific disciplines is regularly debated. This debate focuses either on the organisation of sociology in academic institutions or on how the content of sociologically informed interdisciplinary research diverges from disciplinary sociology. This article bridges these debates in a study of the sociology of food in Sweden. The aim is to analyse how Swedish food sociology reflects the tension between disciplinary sociology and interdisciplinary research. The data comprise the doctoral dissertations and post-PhD career paths of Swedish sociologists whose dissertations are about food. The article finds that these dissertations treat food either as an inherently social phenomenon or as a social lens (i.e. a social phenomenon viewed as instrumental for analysing something else). Second, it is found that sociologists whose dissertations treated food as an inherently social phenomenon were more likely to pursue careers in food sociology but also to hold affiliations outside of sociology departments. The article concludes that the academic locus of Swedish food sociology is organised outside sociology departments but that its approaches are not necessarily any less sociological. Thus, the analysis questions the basis for arguments that interdisciplinary research represents a threat to the critical and analytical core of sociology.