„Markets in the Making“: Zur Ethnographie alltäglicher Marktkonstruktionen in organisationalen Settings

Abstract

Zusammenfassung. Drawing on the example of a research project on the extension of the margins of the global agricultural market through the workings of agribusiness in Ghana, this paper explores what contribution ethnographic approaches can make to the study of quotidian market constructions in organizational settings. It demonstrates how ethnographies of marketization can be grasped conceptually, epistemologically and methodologically, as well as what practical and methodological challenges such a practice-oriented approach towards the everyday organization of markets might encounter. By doing so, the paper offers a methodological contribution to the interdisciplinary field of marketization studies. Moreover, this paper urges economic geographers to further harness the epistemological potential of ethnographic approaches.

The emergence of new wine design practices: Flexitanks and the assembling of bulk wine across global rural regions

“…Third, markets are constituted through market encounters: the sites where calculating agencies and goods meet each other. In accordance with Ouma (2015, p. 43), market encounters can serve as "empirical prisms" to study marketisation processes, and his fine-grained ethnographic analysis (Ouma, 2012(Ouma, , 2015 of market encounters in two Ghanaian outgrower-exporter complexes has indeed convincingly demonstrated this.…”

“…Over the past 20 years, various ANT-inspired studies have focused on processes of economisation and increasingly also on markets (Berndt & Böckler, 2009, 2012Çalışkan & Callon, 2010;Muniesa et al, 2007;Ouma, 2015). These studies are all inspired by a Callonian performative understanding of market-making processes in which markets are considered to be arrangements that are assembled in marketisation processes.…”

Making land-use change and markets: the global-local entanglement of producing rice in Bagré, Burkina Faso

“…Tracing and understanding the connection between the land-use changes observed in Bagré and the making of a national rice market is achieved by connecting two strands of literature, namely telecoupling (Liu et al 2013;Kapsar et al 2019;Friis and Nielsen 2019a) and geographies of marketization (Berndt and Boeckler 2012). Bringing the telecoupling literature (Liu et al 2013;Eakin et al 2014;Friis and Nielsen 2014, 2017a, 2019aFriis et al 2016;Kapsar et al 2019) into dialogue with the geographies of marketization literature (Berndt and Boeckler 2012;Boeckler and Berndt 2013;Ouma 2013Ouma , 2015Ouma, Boeckler, and Lindner 2013) has not yet been done but, as we will show, offers insights into global-local relations.…”

Lampland, M.: The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956

“…Ethnographic work has been established lately within economic geography in general, and also within geographies of marketization and commodification (Cook, I. 2004;Ouma, S. 2012). Lampland's fieldwork is largely confined to archival sources and expert interviews.…”