Market system dynamics

Abstract

How do markets change? What becomes valuable and virtuous, what worthless and immoral? Why do some consumer identities and experiences become more widespread than others? And why can some of the most passionate consumers cause the greatest harm to a successful market whereas some of the most critical observers contribute to a market's stability over time? During the last decade, a thriving and diverse subfield of marketing research, originally termed by Giesler (2003, 2008) Market system dynamics, has emerged to help answer these and other questions about markets, how they are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them, thereby challenging three problematic biases plaguing marketing scholarship at the beginning of the 21st century: the economic actor bias, the micro-level bias and the variance bias (see Figure 1).

Managing to make market agencements: The temporally bound elements of stigma in favelas

“…Market studies literature draws heavily on ANT to explore "the web of human and nonhuman entities engaged in any given project or course of action" (Kjellberg & Helgesson, 2006, p. 3). These actors constitute a market system, with distributed but interconnected market actors, each with differing roles and competences, performing the mediated practices that constitute markets (Giesler & Fischer, 2017;Geiger et al, 2014;Vargo et al, 2017).…”

Liquid retail: cultural perspectives on marketplace transformation

“…Aligned with recent invitations in consumer culture theory and market studies to investigate markets as complex social systems (Geiger et al 2014;Geiger, Kjellberg, and Spencer 2012;Giesler and Fischer 2017;Giesler and Thompson 2016. ), enacted via collective and open processes of market formation (Callon and Muniesa 2005;Cochoy 2014;Cochoy, Trompette, and Araujo 2016), we approach retail market transformation as an indeterminate process that implicates diverse, at times surprising actors (de Kervenoael, Bisson, and Palmer 2015).…”

“…), enacted via collective and open processes of market formation (Callon and Muniesa 2005;Cochoy 2014;Cochoy, Trompette, and Araujo 2016), we approach retail market transformation as an indeterminate process that implicates diverse, at times surprising actors (de Kervenoael, Bisson, and Palmer 2015). It is thus paramount to suspend biases that prevent researchers from openly considering the role of varied actors (eg supply-centric accounts that overstate the role of corporate strategy in market change, or demand-centric accounts overstressing the role of consumers in shaping markets), and from attending to the interplay of macro-, meso-, and micro-level transformations (Bajde 2013;Giesler and Fischer 2017).…”

Branding an industry?

“…Instead, the process through which brands are constituted also implicates a variety of other stakeholders: citizens, consumers, cultural intermediaries (e.g., the media, celebrities), institutional activist, etc. (Rao, 2004;Giesler and Fischer, 2017). Together these actors shape the ways in which brands are represented in (popular) culture (Humphreys and Thompson, 2014).…”