M/market frontiers

Abstract

This theme issue originates from an invitational workshop on the spatiality and diversity of markets, convened at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy in Montreal in 2017. Workshop participants, regardless of their disciplinary backgrounds and diverse research interests, shared a conviction that markets should be analysed in their plural and hybrid forms, as social and political constructs always 'in making'. In contrast to more orthodox conceptions of markets as free-standing entities, discrete institutions or ideal types, this was translated into an imperative to centre 'marketization', along with attendant processes of market re/construction. While this was interpreted as a positive research programme, if a challenging and quite radically open one, there was also an underlying concern. The concern was that critical approaches to the study of markets, which foreground and problematize their variegated character, seem to have reached something of an impasse. A gulf has opened up between those orthodox market purists who seem to see little beyond the abstract market prescribed by the neoclassical model (a self-regulating system of rational buyers and sellers) and the heterodox sceptics who, if they do not sidestep the market altogether, focus instead on an unruly plethora of real markets, criticizing the neoclassical market model as an idealized and ideological construct. As we point out elsewhere (Peck et al., 2020), the problem with these polar(ized) positions is that, notwithstanding their philosophical and normative differences, they all tend to work with, or against, a received reading of the capital-M Market as advanced by standard economic theory, indexing to this analytical yardstick in either positive or negative terms. On the heterodox side, the sway of the neoclassical, capital-M Market is manifest across a range of perspectives. Political-economic accounts, for instance, tend to invoke an understanding of the market as a destructive juggernaut.

“They had already sold”: Uncovering relations among the local state, the market and the public in the case of municipal housing privatization in Rosengård, Sweden

“…Third, following privatization and the formation of the public-private partnership, the municipality remained a key actor and investor, maintaining its political and economic presence. Taken together, these instances mirror the remaking and maintaining of an actually existing rental market (Berndt et al, 2020) and the local state's role as a planner and housing provider.…”

“…These political-economic writings provide a relational understanding of the state and market, explained more in detail below. Against this backdrop, the paper approaches the 'market', particularly the rental market, as an open domain that is being undone and redone through various marketization processes (Berndt et al, 2020). Entwined with these processes is the simultaneously complex sphere of the state, or urban governance, as "[t]he boundaries of the state in the urban policy sphere are not simply being rolled back.…”

“…Using these two implications as a stepping stone, this paper reveals the function of the local state by focusing on its relations with an actually existing market (Berndt et al, 2020), as well as on its relations with the public, a likewise shifting and complex domain. Importantly, these relations comprise of several contradictions, through which entrepreunerial municipal statecraft is formed (cf.…”

“…This paper centres on housing privatization as a pivotal moment in which to understand local statemarket relations, especially as these relations mirror the process of state and market (re)making (e.g. Berndt et al, 2020). The studied privatization reflects the process explained by Weber (2021, 504) as follows: "to catalyze property value appreciation, the local state enters into transactions with real estate developers and their financial backers, who seek assurance that future returns will be sufficient to make investments in today's built environment".…”

Alternative Economies and Commoning Practices in Catalonia: Unpacking Ecoxarxes from a Social Studies of Economisation Perspective

“…through calculations, machinations and valuations, but also to the frailties, contingencies and hybrid character of concrete economic market arrangements (Berndt et al. 2020b).…”