In the context of commodification, material culture has particular properties hitherto considered irrelevant or neglected. First, the market is a spatial structure, assigning special properties to the things offered: the goods and commodities. Secondly, the market defines a principle of dealing with things, including them in some contexts, excluding them from others. The contributions to Market as Place and Space address a variety of aspects of markets within the framework of archaeological and anthropological case studies and with a special focus on the indicators of practices attached to the commodities and their valuation.
This collection of essays rediscovers the physical space that markets inhabit and explores how political, social, and economic factors determine the shape of a particular market space. The essays present new research from the fields of geography, economics, political economy, and planning and show how markets are contested, constructed, and placed.
America's economic revolution isn't just driven by technology. It's about markets. The past twenty-five years have witnessed a remarkable shift in how we get the stuff we want. If you've ever owned a business, rented an apartment, or shopped online, you've had a front-row seat for this revolution-in-progress. Breakthrough companies like Amazon and Uber have disrupted the old ways and made the economy work better—all thanks to technology. At least that's how the story of the modern economy is usually told. But in this lucid, wry book, Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan show that the revolution is bigger than tech: it is really a story about the transformation of markets. From the auction theories that power Google's ad sales algorithms to the models that online retailers use to prevent internet fraud, even the most high-tech modern businesses are empowered by theory first envisioned by economists. And we're all participants in this revolution. Every time you book a room on Airbnb, hire a car on Lyft, or click on an ad, you too are reshaping our social institutions and our lives. The Inner Lives of Markets is necessary reading for the modern world: it reveals the blueprint for how we work, live, and shop, and offers wisdom for how to do it better.
When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.
Considers the discordant state of the capitalist world in the 1990s, drawing on both green and socialist economies. Altvater's central concern is to examine the claims made for the market, both in the history of capitalism and in the globalized market economy.
Author examines the Eastern Market of Washington and shows that this marketplace is an example of a social institution embedded in a particular time, place, and series of social relationships. Shepherd shows how urban public space is influenced by economic and social processes. Review in: Journal of cultural economics. 33(2009)1(.75-77).
Social life can take on a variety of forms - some violent, others peaceful. One type of social arrangement that is especially conducive to peace are friendships, that is, relationships based on mutual trust and dependence. The market is one important but often neglected space where we can practice habits of peacefulness and develop friendships. Markets are social spaces where peaceful societies are built. Although the market is indeed a space for the economic exchange of property rights, it is also a local, national, and international space for sociality and extraeconomic conversation that crosses narrow friendship lines. Through our participation in markets, we participate in the moral strivings of both our neighbors and folks far flung, and we connect with people we might otherwise have no occasion to know.
This title examines the structure, scale and complexity of economic systems in the pre-Hispanic Americas, with a focus on the central highlands of Mexico, the Maya Lowlands and the central Andes.
Our lives have gradually become dominated by markets. They are not only at the heart of capitalistic economies all over the world, but also central in public debates. This insightful book brings together existing knowledge on markets from sociology, economics and anthropology, and systematically investigates the different forms of markets we encounter daily in our social lives. Aspers starts by defining what a market actually is, analyzing its essential elements as well as its necessary preconditions and varied consequences. An important theme in the book is that a whole host of markets are embedded within one other and in social life at large, and Aspers discusses these in the context of other forms of economic coordination, such as networks and organizations. Combining theory with empirical examples, the book cuts to the core of understanding how different markets function, the role they have played in history, and how they come into being. This accessible and theoretically rich book will be essential reading for upper-level students seeking to make sense of markets and their complex role in social life.
