The paper present ethnographic material on the making of a market by the activist Potato Movement in Volos, Greece. It explores the "breeding and looking after" the relational arrangements that connect stuff, people and ideas as matters of the market.
Paper long abstract:
The Potato Movement is a group of volunteer activists organising no-middleman sales in Volos, Greece, creating a market as a vehicle for social change. In the paper, I will present ethnographic material on the mundane practices by which they connect stuff, people and ideas in what I will describe as a platform business model. In the arrangements of this market making, the selection of products, dates of their sale and the processing of orders is done as volunteer work by the organisers. The final market transaction takes place between buyers and sellers.
The paper explores the mundane "breeding and looking after" (Rottenburg et al. 2001) of these markets through monitoring harvests and negotiating prices, assessing product qualities and establishing exchange relations. It presents ethnographic material about the mundane governance (Woolgar and Neyland 2013) of the relational arrangements in which transactions are organised, processed and terminated. The paper will focus on the subtle techniques invoked to create a relational arrangement that masks its own market-ness. In doing so, the Potato Movement manages to attract a significant amount of consumers and create a stable network of buyers and sellers. In concluding, the immersed study of the mundane through ethnographic fieldwork is brought forward as both an epistemological and conceptual approach towards the everyday.