Paper short abstract:

Markets have become naturalized as an object of research and also as an object or a tool with which specific collective concerns can be handled. Both rely on the ‘s’ in markets. But how is the ‘s’ put there? What (mundane) stuff allows markets to be singled out, studied, intervened in … and made mundane?

Paper long abstract:

Markets have become naturalized as objects of research and as areas of social life. Both rely on the 's' in markets. But how is the 's' put there? This paper inquires into two areas. One is market studies as found within STS. The other is what can be termed 'markets for collective concerns', i.e. instances in which a market is used to handle a specific collective concern (e.g. carbon markets). Focus is on how these two areas single out and specify what counts as one particular market. What often mundane stuff is relied upon in order to tell the scope or boundary of a market? Such specifications can result in quite different markets being singled out as well as in differing assessments of the particular market. Raising these questions this paper undertakes a methodological inquiry into how markets are made into objects of knowledge, which is believed to be increasingly relevant. Not least with the advent of market design, specific markets are made to fullfil specific purposes (Roth 2002; Frankel, Ossandon & Pallesen 2015). Consequently, economists, policy-makers and others, after having largely ignored the 's' (Mirowski 2007), have become invested in markets as particular constructs. It is, in other words, not for market studies any more (if it ever was) to offer a focus on particular markets otherwise not offered. Rather market studies enter into fields or ecologies already populated with notions of (specific and general) markets used in the work of constructing, organizing and operating markets.