Markets: Between Moral and Immoral
Markets are central to our everyday activities, and so is morality. While markets provide us with material necessities, morality offers a certain order for our social relationships. The moral order of our daily relationships with markets is important precisely because markets constitute a central part of our daily lives. From waking up with the help of an alarm on our smartphone, through getting dressed for our daily activities, and drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, markets and morality are connected in various ways. If I have my coffee in a café, I am expected to show respect and decency both to the person selling me the coffee and in my interactions with the other café users, and I can expect the same respect to be shown to me in return. This is part of how I am expected to behave in a morally acceptable way.
If I drink my coffee while reading a newspaper, I may find out that some market activities are not in line with my own moral values. It is not unusual to read in the news that children may have had to suffer working in mines while helping in the supply of world-leading brands of smartphones (e.g. Kelly 2016): perhaps the very smartphone that woke me up this morning. The evening before, I may have heard on the news about how the clothes I am wearing were produced in a factory where some people died in a fire because of inadequate safety measures (e.g. Ethirajan 2013). The next day, someone might send me a report informing me that the coffee I drank this morning was grown by farmers who cannot afford to send their children to school because they are paid so little for their produce (e.g. Nelson et al. 2016). Many of us get upset when we hear about these sorts of market conditions, which we are likely to judge to be immoral. Even if these market activities may seem distant to us, happening on the other side of the world, we expect market relationships to follow certain moral principles, whether the market activities are local, as in a neighbourhood café, or global, as in global production networks.
To others, immoral behaviour in markets may come as no surprise, being exactly the sort of thing they expect from actors. Whether upset by such behaviour or not, many of us may think that this is just the way things are, and that there is not much we can do about it. We may think that our lives are all too caught up in market practices, and that, since the society we live in depends on markets and their practices, we have to accept things as they are. Others may start thinking about what they buy in terms of morality, trying to find out how we can make a difference through our daily interactions with markets, being responsible, perhaps as consumers, or as professionals, maybe as managers in international business organisations. Some of us may organise ourselves in social movements, perhaps by protesting against some forms of market practice through our participation in non-governmental organisations, as representatives of civil society.
In these examples of daily interactions with markets and morality, we become connected to a long history of concerns about the moral qualities of markets, concerns that have created debates about markets and morality, not least in academic circles (Fourcade and Healy 2007; Hirschman 1982). In this debate, markets have been described both as civilising (Friedman 1962; McCloskey 2006; Montesquieu 1961 [1749]; Smith 2008 [1776]; Stigler 1981; von Hayek 1944) and also as destructive (Bourdieu 2000; Elyachar 2005; Harvey 2006; Marx 1932 [1872]; Veblen 1994 [1889]). These views have evolved into a theoretical problem of market morality as a dialectic situation, where one of the perspectives cannot outcompete the other. Rather, they both contribute to a moral basis of capitalist society as âconstantly depleted and replenished at the same timeâ (Hirschman 1982: 1483). From these views we may, in our daily interactions with markets, come to an understanding of them as either moral or immoral, yet also being somewhere in between the two perspectives.
Part of this can be found in concerns about the regulation of markets. Historically, debates and concern over markets as moral or immoral, have relied more or less on individual jurisdictions, suggesting states as having the necessary institutions for creating jurisdictional market frames. This view of markets as necessarily regulated by state jurisdiction has in turn been confronted with the promotion of global markets as necessarily self-regulating (Campbell 2007; Guillén 2001; Nagel 2005). Thereby global markets are understood as different from local markets in terms of their governance, with self-regulation as a mechanism for the moralisation of global markets introducing elements of creativity. While global markets have been proposed as immoral, the response by opponents have been that global markets can be moral with the right practices, hence possible of self-regulation. This has moved the focus away from specific businessmen or organisations as susceptible of change, and rather introduced the possibility of transforming markets themselves. As such, markets are no longer just a moral or immoral setting for business activities but actually a transformable framework. Accordingly, not only are market actors suggested as possible of adjusting to a market framework that is understood as either moralising or demoralising, but the very market framework is represented as capable of regulating itself, along with the actors who participate in it. Thereby the moralisation of markets becomes both a result of what is represented as moral action while also in itself a process where actions are understood as not only moral in quality but also as having a moralising effect of society.
The suggestion that markets are capable of transformation from being immoral to being moral further opens up discussion of two of the central aspects of markets: value and competition. In line with Hirschmanâs (1982) suggestion that the moral basis of capitalist society is constantly being depleted and replenished at the same time, so has this moral basis of capitalist society become understood as a source of value and competition based on social misery (Margolis and Walsh 2003). Rather than being approached as a dialectical world, markets have been redefined as capable of including both moral and immoral actors as well as moral and immoral practices, allowing competition between those who can be defined as moral and those who cannot. This has also led to a multitude of values that markets are proposed to represent, in areas such as socially responsible investment , sustainable consumption, and responsible sourcing, to name just a few. In order for markets to promote such moral values, those values must be striven for, and ways of measuring and expressing them in various forms are looked for: for instance, in monetary value (Ioannou and Serafeim 2015).
The Role of International Business Discourse in the Moralisation of Global Markets
The value of markets has for a long time been understood to be dependent on information, leading to market asymmetry and to governance of those markets (Akerlof 1970; Rotschild and Stiglitz 1976; Spence 1974). The language of, and communication about, markets have been limited to rather fixed conceptualisations in terms of information and signals transmitted from one market actor to another. The understanding of communication and language has been seen differently in other fields of knowledge, however, where they have been argued to amount to a complex practice of social interaction (Austin 1962; Ryle 1949; Wittgenstein 1953). Through a view of markets as socially and culturally embedded (Granovetter 1985; Fligstein 2002; Polanyi 1957 [1944]; White 1981), language and communication have been given a recognised position as a ...