Market Society

Markets and Modern Social Theory

Don Slater, Fran Tonkiss

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745668536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Market Society provides an original and accessible review of changing conceptions of the market in modern social thought. The book considers markets as social institutions rather than simply formal models, arguing that modern ideas of the market are based on critical notions of social order, social action and social relations. Examining a range of perspectives on the market from across different social science disciplines, Market Society surveys a complex field of ideas in a clear and comprehensive manner. In this way it seeks to extend economic sociology beyond a critique of mainstream economics, and to engage more broadly with social, political and cultural theory.

The book explores historical approaches to the emergence of a modern market society, as well as major approaches to the market within modern economic theory and sociology. It addresses key arguments in economic sociology and anthropology, the relation between markets and states, and critical and cultural theories of market rationality. It concludes with a discussion of markets and culture in a late modern context.

This wide-ranging text will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in sociology, economic theory and history, politics, social and political theory, anthropology and cultural studies.

1

The Emergence of Market Society

Introduction

Modern social thought arose in response to the complex transformations that produced the conditions of modernity. From at least the eighteenth century, these transformations have been thought about in terms of such developments as industrialization, capitalism, scientific revolution, the rise of democracy and the modern nation-state, and urbanization. Bound up with all of these is another overriding characterization of modern society as a market society or commercial society: that is to say, one which was increasingly dominated in all its aspects by the monetarized exchange of goods. The new centrality of market exchange seemed to introduce a quite new principle of social order, of social integration and co-ordination, that was both specific to modern societies and tied to its most profound values. Moreover, this new principle of social order was not narrowly economic – though of course it was that, too – but rather promised new patterns of political, social and cultural organization. The notion of market society particularly marks a transition from an older order, literally an ancien régime, regulated by traditional rights and obligations rooted in ascribed status and a cosmological order (the ‘great chain of being’), to one in which social order emerges from the independent actions of autonomous individuals. The individual’s sphere of action was circumscribed solely by their material means and the rationality with which they could deploy their market power. Such a transition could be understood either as the liberation of reason, freedom and progress from the irrational constraints of tradition, or else as the erosion of communal life and the decline of all social values that might stand above the merely economic measure of price.

This Chapter explores the emergent social features that have been central to the understanding of modernity in terms of a market society. While we can consider market exchange in relation to a range of types of exchange, market society is characterized by the dominance of one mode. This can be registered in the contrast between markets as places and markets as disembedded processes. As markets came to take on a central importance in the modern West, social thinkers focused on several features that seemed to typify a new social and economic order: an extensive division of labour, commodification and monetary calculation. These developments raised profound issues concerning individual freedom, social values and political order. The latter part of the Chapter maps out some of the initial positions taken up within modern social thought, particularly in terms of the relationship between the individual and society.

Markets and exchange

Social life – indeed, human life – is inconceivable without exchange: people are not – nor do they want to be – self-sufficient monads who produce for themselves all that they need or desire. At the limit case, social reproduction depends on the complex forms of domestic provision that allow infants to survive to adulthood: we give our children food. The social forms that exchange may take are enormously diverse, not only historically or cross-culturally, but at any one moment within a culture. Today I might filch some stationery from work, buy food at the grocery store, pay my mortgage by direct debit, invite some friends round for a dinner that reciprocates one they gave me last week, lend money to a friend, donate to a charity through a sponsored bike ride, carry on an email correspondence, get my salary paid, pay my kids’ allowances, be paid by the thousand words for a magazine article while submitting a paper (unpaid) to an academic journal in the hope of promotion, and pay for a shareware licence over the Internet by cybercash or credit card. The list is seemingly endless, and yet all the items on it belong together as recognized ways in which things and services are passed along between social members.

Indeed, a complete categorization of a society’s modes of exchange (just like a categorization of the material culture that is exchanged) would give us a rather vivid map of a particular social order, of its social relations and networks, values and meanings, ethics and cultures. A person’s involvement in the full ‘repertoire’ of exchange types – as Davis (1992) calls it – can also tell us something about what it means to have a ‘full life’ or to be a ‘whole person’ in a particular society: ‘In my view it is this image of what a whole person is, and the desire to be considered good of one’s kind, that leads us to try to be market-wise in commerce, reciprocal with our friends, a little bit charitable, and altruistic up to a point’ (p. 46). Conversely, to define all social life in terms of one sort of exchange alone – to be entirely altruistic or to quantify all social transactions in profit/price terms – would be deemed pathological.

Moreover, these different forms of exchange are appropriate to quite different social relationships that they each play a part in reproducing or affirming: to do a favour for a friend is different from selling a service to a client, and a dispute over whether what I did was a favour or a service is always also a dispute over whether our relationship is friendship or commerce. Modes of exchange are therefore central to reproducing particular patterns of relationships, and co-ordinating social identities, functions and actions. The exchange of goods, services, information and other social forms links people up in culturally specific ways. At a more global level, a society in which, say, personal services predominate over commerce will have not only a different economy, but a quite different social order. Anthropologists have produced a huge literature on societies in which goods tend to be circulated in terms of kinship relations (see Chapter 4). As noted, this does not mean that other forms of exchange are not also present, but it does mean that the bulk of economic and social life is co-ordinated by family ties rather than, say, market transactions between independent individuals. These different modes of exchange are important not only in distributing resources and meeting material needs, but in promoting certain ways of understanding social relations and values.

From this perspective, thinking about modern social order in terms of ‘market society’ implies the primacy of one mode of exchange – based on market transactions – which has come to dominate, restructure or marginalize all others. The real extent of this dominance is disputable. On the one hand, market behaviours and institutions are themselves quite various, rather than reducible to a single type. On the other hand, a wide range of other forms of exchange persist in modern societies (in households, public and non-profit bodies and social networks), which can significantly mediate market relations (Carrier 1994; Gibson-Graham 1996). Whether total domination by market exchange gives an accurate picture of contemporary social life is therefore dubious, but the point is that it represents a specifically modern view of social action and relations. The idea that modern social order is dominated or even defined by market relations has been a central preoccupation of modern social thought, generally supported by what Carrier (1997) has called ‘the Market Idea’. By this he means that representations of the market – the ‘meanings of the market’ – have had a central role in organizing the modern West’s conceptual and normative universe. Indeed, Carrier argues that the market idea is central to western ‘cosmology’ – the way in which normative notions of social actors, actions and institutions are organized as modern social myths. The power of such myths, for instance, has been especially evident in the neoliberal restructuring of advanced capitalist and transitional economies since the 1980s.

Marketplaces and markets

One way of tracing the transition to market society is via a distinction between marketplaces and more abstract modern markets. ‘Marketplaces’ are visible public events that happen at a regular time and place, with buildings, rules, governing institutions and other social structures: the marketplace is what happens under the market cross or in the covered market square every Saturday morning in a market town, or in the floor of a bourse or exchange, or on the school car park that hosts a car-boot sale every weekend, or in the extensive architecture of a shopping mall. The spatial and temporal location of marketplaces is a crucial feature; indeed, the geography of market timing and location is a significant area of study in its own right, particularly in the form of ‘central place theory’ (Plattner 1989; Smith 1983), which looks at how markets are spatially distributed in order to concentrate a maximum of demand given the time and transport costs involved for dispersed populations in getting to markets at given distances.

Marketplaces are found in an extremely wide range of societies, both historically and globally, and seem both to be embedded in their particular culture and to comprise very diverse forms of exchange and interaction, only some of which are simply commodity transactions. By contrast, with the rise of modern markets, as we shall see, the very idea of a market comes to be detached from particular places and people and takes on ever more abstract senses such as ‘demand’, ‘opportunities for buying and selling’ and ‘the trade in a specified commodity’ (all from the Concise Oxford Dictionary). Such formulations point to the market as a conceptual space, to the ways in which consumers, economists or enterprises might map out the world of exchange in terms of their own commercial aims. In other words, the modern market seems to comprise a single, economic form of exchange that transcends any particular cultural setting.

A marketplace, on the other hand, is never simply a meeting of buyers and sellers. Being an embodied event, it always has a specific cultural character, and involves a multitude of social actions and relations. The social density and richness of the marketplace unfolds on a number of levels. First, as the congregation of a populace, market-goers may conclude a vast range of business other than exchanging commodities: for example, Braudel (1982) notes that many kinds of legal contracts (such as marriage contracts) and processes were concluded on market days, thus providing a business opportunity for lawyers, letter-writers and notaries. The marketplace as a congregation of a public also provides a place for political and religious communications (for example, proselytising and rabble rousing) as well as flows of information and gossip that may be consequential in political, social or commercial terms.

Second, this range of activity testifies to what Shields (1992) dubs the ‘social centrality’ of the marketplace: the market focuses the attention of a wide range of individuals, each pursuing diverse interests and desires, on to a place that they identify with the public life of the locality. This focusing of the attention of the market crowd can be thought of in terms of both amenities and spectacles (Slater 1993). For example, the marketplace is often seen as a cornucopia, drawing a wealth of goods from all over the world, orchestrated into a vast range of images and sensations, and indeed often providing a utopian image of a world beyond scarcity. The goods are themselves presented spectacularly, drawing attention through the hawker’s songs or calls, through display, advertising or demonstrations that are also theatrical performances or the salesperson’s artful conversations and the ritualized agonistics of bargaining. The sense that all the goods of the world come to the market, as well as traders from far afield, constitutes the market as both an exotic and a dangerous place (Agnew 1986), a representation of the strangeness yet wondrousness of the world as seen through the ‘dream world’ of circulating things and people (Williams 1982). Moreover, the attractions of the marketplace make it seem a spontaneous and rather explosive congregation of crowds. They seem to spring up at any opportunity and then gather ever-larger crowds until they become problems of public order. For example, whenever the Thames froze over in the eighteenth century, there was an immediate appearance of entertainers and stalls selling food, drink and trinkets.

Third, marketplaces emerge in often complex relationship to local urban governance. For example, marketplaces come to the fore in European history with the general revival of trade, politics and communications in the twelfth century, after which, in England, large numbers of Royal Charters to hold markets were granted. Some of these grants gave legal recognition to existing, unofficial markets. Others gave a local political or ecclesiastical ruler the right to establish a new marketplace to support a more recent population centre, or even to construct a new town by building a fixed marketplace with attached houses, workshops and shops. Either way, as Braudel (1981: 479) put it, ‘No town is without its market, and there can be no regional or national markets without towns … : the town in other words generalizes the market into a widespread phenomenon.’ Possession of a market charter gave the local ruler a very wide range of advantages, including the ability to provision a growing urban centre, lucrative revenues (tolls, duties and taxes, rents on stalls) and an extension of regional power through the legal privileges that flowed from market ownership. Marketplaces are never ‘free markets’, but involve regulations, prohibitions and policing functions which, in European history, provided an important basis for local law making and enforcing, for establishing local courts and policing. Yet, at the same time that the marketplace pioneered forms of aristocratic freedom and power, it was also the forging ground for bourgeois civic freedoms: town-based crafts, commercial and trade enterprises and financial services all involved freedoms of movement, information and interaction that were foreign to the feudal system.

Fourth, although marketplaces are bound up with local culture, identity and power, they are also ‘liminal’ spaces, as Agnew (1986) puts it; they are the point at which the community is permeable. Foreign merchants – especially members of the great ethnic and familial trading networks, such as Jews and Armenians – come and go, able to escape local surveillance and accountability: they can always disappear into the exotic nowhere land from whence they and their goods appeared. The merchant appears throughout literature as a trickster, a figure of comic or admirable guile, but also more dangerously as one who profits by famine and disaster, or one who brings along with his foreign goods the contagion of foreign ideas and religions, desires and luxuries, and the corruption represented by cosmopolitanism in a world regulated by local loyalties. At the same time, the local population of buyers on entering the market also enters a liminal space in which local norms and scrutiny are loosened, a place of liberty and licence, of desires and fun: hence carnivalesque disruptions are events of the marketplace (Bakhtin 1984; Stallybrass and White 1986).

Fifth, the marketplace is always both dangerous and highly regulated, as we have indicated, involving policing, regulation and law or enforced custom. The kinds of protections or prohibitions commonly secured by marketplaces and their courts are significant: policing against adulteration, forestalling, engrossing and regrating (offences by which middlemen manipulated market supplies and prices), and enforcement of fair or just prices (Braudel 1982: 30; also Adburgham 1979: 18). Many of these regulations aim to secure adequate provision for a population in times of shortage or even famine: the fury over the high prices that might result from engrossment are intimately connected, well into the nineteenth century, with the fear of actual starvation, or the fear that merchants may not only take advantage of shortage, but actually create it through hoarding. Hence many traditional markets were regulated to ensure provision, at just prices, to the local population: for example, in Preston market, 1795, ‘none but the town’s-people are permitted to buy during the first hour, which is from eight to nine in the morning: at nine others may purchase: but nothing unsold must be withdrawn from the market till one o’clock, fish excepted’ (Thompson 1971: 84; see also Randall and Charlesworth 1996).

A final aspect of marketplaces is their very publicness. There is a generally egalitarian imagery attached to the marketplace: all classes of people have access to it and might rub shoulders there. Moreover. marketplaces – such as the ancient Greek agora, which is defined as both marketplace and place of civic assembly – may combine economic, political and social senses of the public. Of course, different money resources entail quite different kinds of participation in marketplaces. The apparent democracy of the market is often belied by the hierarchical differentiation of shopping spaces: for example, there may be differentiated spheres of exchange in which certain kinds of exchange are legally restricted to certain classes of people; or there may be different marketplaces catering to different sectors of the population. Samuel Pepys’ diary records that he spent much of his day moving between the Royal Exchange and the shops in Westminster, both of which provided him with luxury goods (stationery, fine clothing) as well as political and commercial ‘intelligence’. This was an entirely different kind of marketplace and activity (‘shopping’) from the provision markets for fish, meat and vegetables down by the Thames, which were the focus for the activity of ‘marketing’, the basis of domestic reproduction as opposed to political and commercial networking. Once, when their maid was away, Pepys and his wife went marketing in the provision markets. They made of it a kind of pastoral or masque, playing at being servant girl and lackey, a costume drama of class inversion. They were careful, however, to hire a real servant girl to carry their basket home for them, lest a neighbour might see (Adburgham 1979).

Modern markets

Marketplaces exhibit a concrete and public sociality in which exchange is embedded in localized cultural, social and political relationships. Braudel (1977) uses a distinction between this ‘public market’ and what he calls the ‘private market’ to structure his magisterial work, Civilization and Capitalism. In Braudel’s powerful imagery, the public marketplaces formed a ‘layer’ or membrane stretched over the vast landscape of everyday material life, or a gate through which local actors, actions and objects passed – occasionally – into ‘economic life’ as opposed to self”sufficient domestic or village production. That is to say, it embedded market exchange within fundamentally non”market societies.

Braudel distinguishes this marketplace from the networks of global trade, finance, information, wholesaling and vertical integration of trading up and down lines of supply that became increasingly important to modern western society. These networks operate above, behind and between marketplaces and are populated by quite different people and classes. These actors make up ‘private markets’, in the sense that they do not comprise a public assembled in full view of each other and in direct communication. Rather, their connections, meetings and activities are largely hidden from those who cannot operate at this level. Indeed, Braudel characterizes the private market in terms of economic behaviours that concern long ‘chains’ of supply and circulation – an Antwerp merchant linking Chinese silk to the Parisian court via Spitalfields workshops. These merchants, financiers and commercial explorers see the world from a God’s”eye view, operate across economic sectors and regions, and talk directly with political rulers. They meet each other in fairs, exchanges and courts, later in clubs and boardrooms, rather than in marketplaces or streets. But they are – Braudel argues – the engine of modernization, the market level at which capital, energy, facilities and techniques gather into the critical mass of modern capitalism.

There is ‘no simple linear history of the development of markets’ (Braudel 1982: 26). Nonetheless, the centre of power increasingly passes from local, public marketplaces to the ever more sophisticated private markets. Discussing the English case, Braudel argues that the expansion of London markets to draw on all of England plus foreign trade led to the

dislocation … of the traditional open market, the public market where nothing could be concealed, where producer-vendor and buyer-consumer met face to face. The distance between the [public and private market] was becoming too great to be travelled by ordinary people. The merchant, or middleman, had already, from at least the thirteenth century, made his appearance in England as a go-between for town and country, particularly in the corn trade. Gradually, chains of intermediaries were set up between producer and merchant on the one hand, and between merchant and retailer on the other; … Traditional habits and customs were lost or smashed. (p. 42)

Braudel traces this spread of the private market firstly through the great fairs that culminate in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century currency and credit markets in Antwerp, Frankfurt or Besanc¸on. Often the public...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Emergence of Market Society
• 2 Markets and Economic Order
• 3 Rationality, the Individual and Social Order
• 4 Markets and Social Structures
• 5 States and Markets
• 6 Commerce and Culture
• 7 The Cultural Turn
• Conclusion: Markets versus Market Society
• Bibliography
• Index