Chapter 12

Geographies of Marketization

Christian Berndt and Marc Boeckler

Introduction: Markets and Marketization

Markets are everywhere. While market exchange has existed for millenia, market society came into full existence only at the end of the twentieth century, in an era of neoliberal market orientation. What differentiates market societies from other ways of stabilizing and integrating economic life – gift giving, subsistence, socialist, kinship-based economies and other forms of institutionalized redistribution or reciprocity – is not only that distribution is structured through market exchange but that the social is thought of as an appendix of an unregulated market (Polanyi 1944 (2001): 59ff). Crucially, the impersonal rationality and calculativity accompanying market exchange as a specific form of human action (Weber 1922 (1988)) triggers fundamental transformations of the social in general. Markets involve anonymization, the cutting of social ties, and rational, calculative, and efficient post-social coordination. We refer to this modality of economization as “marketization” (Caliskan and Callon 2010: 2). Offering new perspectives towards the emergence of market orders and their continuous expansion, “geographies of marketization” consider the global age as governed by a market dispositif or a “market socio-technical agencement” where market devices and economists – academic economists, business experts, and “economists in the wild” – play a fundamental part in shaping, designing, and formatting marketization. Indeed, marketization can be read as radical translation processes, which ensure that economic and social realities are brought into line with the laboratory conditions of economic modeling – allowing the radical project of neoclassical economics to realize itself (Callon, Millo, and Muniesa 2007; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007). This “extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live” (Agamben 2009: 15) is accompanied by “a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses,” of market devices inhibiting our shared hybrid collectif and steering complicated algorithms of distributed action and cognition. Accordingly, geographies of marketization deal with the constructions, materialities, socialities, and real effects of radical market orientation in our global modernity (cf. Berndt and Boeckler 2009; 2011a).

With this focus in mind we do not want to reduce economic processes to market coordination in a narrow sense. But even if one accepts that modern economies comprise multiple principles of evaluation and coordination modes (see Boltanski and Thévenot 2006), it is the market as a real thing, political metaphor and functioning interface, as the central institution of a whole body of models, that guides societal engineering (Carrier 1997: 22–37).

In the light of the omnipresence of markets and marketization it is surprising that the social sciences have until recently not developed a very sophisticated understanding of markets. This includes Economics, North’s (1977) comment not having lost its relevance: “It is a peculiar fact that the literature on economics contains so little discussions of the central institution that underlies neoclassical economies – the market” (see also Coase 1988: 7). The same applies to economic geography, where “explorations of diverse markets in real-world settings remain in their infancy” (Peck 2011: 10).

In this chapter, we call for intensified efforts to understand how real markets, in all their hybrid and heterogeneous appearances, are produced, stabilized, and dissolved. Rather than taking markets for granted, what such a project focuses on is market-making, or marketization.

Studying Markets: Places and Prices, Networks and Structures

In its most basic definition markets come into being with the buying and selling of goods and services by persons or organizations. With the linguistic simplification of “markets” to the singular form “market,” real and concrete markets were transformed into a formal ideal type of the market that entails two sometimes competing and sometimes supplementing conceptions. The first is close to the etymological root of the Latin word mercatus as the physical place for gathering in order to conduct some form of regulated selling and buying. With the rise of neoclassical economics and accompanying ideas of marginalism and equilibrium theory, however, this idea of the market as an interface bringing together buyers and sellers, demand and supply, or producers and consumers, was gradually replaced by a new representation.

A Disembedded Market

Markets turned into empirically empty conceptualizations of exchange, arenas for perfectly competitive transactions between many rational buyers and sellers sharing complete information (on price, quality of goods, etc.). This market abstraction was considered a tool for price discovery and adjustment and eventually resource-allocation: relative prices of goods follow laws of supply and demand until a mutually acceptable price emerges. At this state of equilibrium the market is said to “clear.” The equilibrium price is to be discovered by this market, a price that allows buyers and sellers to satisfy their needs by pushing supply and demand in a direction that guarantees an efficient allocation of scarce resources.

This mechanistic model relies on an array of assumptions that can only be controlled in a “high-security laboratory” setting, where confined economists safely guard the boundaries between the outside of real society and the inside of Economics. Inside the laboratory, society consists of an infinite number of atomized individuals with stable and given preferences who maximize rationally. The whole edifice is equipped with a “ceteris paribus switch” that freezes all movements but one. A state of harmony and equilibrium prevails that can only be disturbed by external shocks because laboratory movement itself always strives for adjustment.

Until the current economic crisis triggered some critique within Economics, it was mainly the broad interdisciplinary field of the “new social studies of markets” that took issue with these undersocialized and anti-social assumptions.

Reembedded Markets

While there has been a revived interdisciplinary interest in markets in the wake of accelerating marketization, economic sociology in particular has effectively reinvented itself as a “sociology of markets.” Reversing the logic dominating neoclassical economics, socioeconomic approaches lay stress on the social and cultural contexts of actually existing markets rather than the ideal-type Market model. At the center of this perspective is the “problem of social order” (Beckert 2007). It is argued that market exchange is necessarily accompanied by uncertainties arising from the triad of value (prices, preferences, qualities), exchange (buyer vs. seller/user vs. producer), and competition (between producers/sellers). Given these uncertainties, markets depend on socially agreed institutions to provide stability for the various participants (White 2005). Within this general thrust of argument, different schools of thought highlight different priorities.

First, more micro-level network theorists focus on relational ties between actors, emphasizing how social networks generate the trust between buyers and sellers that makes exchange possible. Applying network analysis to markets for securities, Baker (1981) developed an early theory of “markets-as-networks” showing that markets are far from the undifferentiated entities depicted by economists, taking the shape of different types of networks whose operation is determined by their social structure (Swedberg 1994: 268). This reembedding of exchange into networks of ongoing social relations is arguably dominant within socioeconomics. Notwithstanding other influential contributions (e.g. White 1981), the social embeddedness of economic behavior developed into the categorical instrument for taking note of those ordering processes (Granovetter 1985).

Second, so-called institutionalists focus mainly on how relatively formal institutions format concrete markets, according a more prominent role to the state (Fligstein 2001). Institutionalists argue that contractual market exchange depends on the rule-setting and sanction enforcement of states, which also may define what types of products are appropriate for exchange (Aspers and Beckert 2008). Conceptualizing the state as a relatively autonomous player, able to choose – along its path-dependent trajectory – between apparently more efficient and inefficient non-market institutions (Fligstein and Dauter 2007: 120–1), they differ from more traditional Marxist scholars who regard the state as always subjugated and hijacked by market forces, regardless of its concrete national form (see Harvey 2006: 105–6).

These differences notwithstanding, socioeconomic approaches move individuals and the wider society to the background, placing emphasis on the intermediate level of institutional arrangements at different social scales, such as conventions, cultural values, and routines, which equip the individual with prosthetic tools. Socioeconomists thereby conceptualize markets as social structures or social constructions.

Geography’s Markets

Despite their surprisingly cavalier treatment of the market, economic geographers have dealt with market exchange and competition in the past. By and large, however, in their attempts to spatialize the market economy, they added layers of complexity to the tidy world of neoclassical markets rather than investigating the workings of markets themselves. The incorporation of space inevitably posed a challenge to neoclassical ideas of perfect competition and the conviction that markets move towards equilibrium (Sheppard 2000a: 176). Clearly, the depth of such challenges varies. On one side are early and contemporary protagonists of spatial science. Lösch applied theories of perfect competition to firms located in space, mobilizing Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor as a normative ideal for society. While sympathetic to neoclassical economics, he could not avoid discovering that economies of scale enforce the spatial concentration of certain activities (Krugman 1998: 10). Yet Lösch’s irritating insight concerning the operation of the invisible hand in space did not deduce extreme spatial variation, constituting a geographical amendment to, rather than full-blown refutation of, the perfect market. The underlying logic, that market rationality is capable of reducing sociospatial inequality, was left largely intact. Such prompted Paul Krugman and followers to abandon assumptions of constant returns and perfect competition, developing a model world of market equilibria under imperfect competition where firms face “a tradeoff between economies of scale, which push towards a limited number of production sites, and transport costs, which can be reduced by multiplying the number of sites” (Krugman 1995: 41). Again this is a minor adjustment, key neoclassical features such as equilibrium and methodological individualism remaining resolutely in place (Martin and Sunley 1996; Sheppard 2000b: 103).

On the other end of the continuum are those who take the existence of persistent spatial inequalities as a proof of the erroneous nature of the neoclassical project. Protagonists of a political economic approach, in particular, have pointed to the uneven geography of markets, asking how “capitalist economic processes (production, distribution, exchange, consumption) mitigate geographical inequalities in livelihood possibilities” (Sheppard 2006: 11–12) and demonstrating how the capitalist market economy forces places into competition with each other. Here, the focus often has been on the losers in this competitive game, for example US American inner cities in the 1970s, deindustrialized regions in the United Kingdom and other northern countries in the 1980s, and the restructuring of cities, regions, and nations more generally.

Inspired by socioeconomic approaches economic geographers turned to questions of spatial proximity in the early 1990s. They focused on processes that converge in producing and reproducing spatially uneven economic landscapes, replacing classical notions of external economies or the iron laws of capitalism with corporate (Schoenberger 1997), regional (for example Gertler 2004), or national economic culture (Bathelt and Gertler 2005). These and related contributions (for example the varieties of capitalism literature) may be interpreted as investigating the variations in territorialized markets. But the literature rarely came close to real markets. Instead, the market/plan-dualism was replaced by a dualism distinguishing more free market-oriented capitalist systems from those which are more strongly coordinated by social and political (mostly formal) institutions (Peck and Theodore 2007: 745).

Finally, evolutionary approaches in economic geography, currently undergoing a second or third adolescence, focus on processes and mechanisms that help regions adapt to changing circumstances or prevent them from doing so (Boschma and Martin 2007: 539). As in related approaches dealing with how regions or nations succeed economically through spatial competition, evolutionary theorists focus on strong competition that “drives capitalists to revolutionize production in order to gain an edge on competitors,” generating “surplus profits for the fortunate and sagging profits for the laggards” (Storper and Walker 1989: 48, 61).

Real Markets?

As the above overview indicates, the market is very rarely treated as a process, to be taken seriously in its own right. For all their force and spatial relevance, curiously geographers steered clear of attempts to achieve a better understanding of how markets are assembled and put to work. We identify five shortcomings in the geographical literature:

First, abstracting from their theoretical differences, the above approaches deal with processes of exchange as something happening “back stage” or, worse, as simply taken-for-granted and unquestioned. For neoclassical economic geographers the market does not constitute an object of inquiry. Being just a question of prices and adjustment, the market is no problem – it solves problems! For political economy the reverse is true. The market is the problem, creating inequality through uneven accumulation processes. It is an object of critique and resistance rather than one to study: you are liable to be blamed for playing with the neoclassical enemy if you put the market center stage (see Miller 2002).

Second, the focus of socioeconomic research on networks or institutions but not the market reflects a confused understanding of neoclassical economics. When protagonists argue that neoclassical economics’ attempts to realize a market society via modeling, abstraction, and devices are futile, they discern a representational gap between reality and model/theory that can be resolved by contextualization (i.e. by creating more realistc theories of markets). But what if the abstract market model was never intended to be a camera, representing “the” reality as it is, but as an engine, producing realities (MacKenzie 2006)?

Third, there is a tendency towards tautology – the social theories applied to studying markets often determine the conceptual outcome – network theorists see the market as a complex of network relations, new institutionalists conclude that the market should be conceived of as a set of institutions. Put bluntly, it seems impossible to reflect seriously on modernity in its globalized and multiplied appearance without addressing marketization in a way that suspends other prior theories of modernity (Fourcade 2007: 1025).

Fourth, economic geographical work on the market emphasizes production over exchange. Deep-seating skepticism towards processes of exchange and circulation made geographers more comfortable with the market’s other, the (hierarchical) firm. “The stuff of economic geography has been the geographical variation in what firms produce, how they produce it (and thus their linkages with other firms), labor relations, and access to finance” (Sheppard 2000a: 176). Political economic geographers, in particular, while sharing with orthodox scholars an understanding of the all-encompassing market, stress that the key towards a better understanding of capitalism is the production process and the role of labor, not the “sphere of circulation.” The embeddedness, network, and evolutionary approaches also take the firm as a point of departure and address fixed role markets (where buyer and seller maintain their roles, unlike role switching in financial markets). The recent geographical turn in the “global value chain” debate additionally reframed the focus from exchange to “global production networks” (Coe and Hess this volume).

Fifth, the ongoing prioritization of production makes it difficult to advance an empirically grounded critique of marketization. This is mainly because the blue-print for neoclassical economics and neoliberal policies of marketization has not been provided by nineteenth-century production markets. The neoclassical equilibrium model was developed in analogy to auctions and the current neoliberal belief in the market rests on the models of stock exchanges and financial markets more generally (Knorr Cetina 2006). Such markets are a playing field for investment and speculation not a mechanism for distribution and exchange, a “framework for self-contained economic transactions” as Knorr Cetina (2006: 554) put it. To really understand the recent financial crisis, for instance, it would be rather pointless to single out the self-interested actions of individuals or organizations as principal “causes” because interests are not given, but calculated within agencements (MacKenzie 2009: 25). It is necessary to examine the hybrid collectif, of models, tools, beliefs, discourses, traders, and bankers – the complete socio-technical arrangement that brings actors and agency about, giving meaning to action (Caliskan and Callon 2010) and allowing the complicated interplay of complex financial instruments to have far-reaching performative effects (MacKenzie 2011). Such questions have been addressed within “social studies of finance” (Knorr Cetina and Preda forthcoming 2012), an interdisciplinary project including economic geographers. We are interested in how such insights may help address more mundane, conventionally geographical markets, through geographies of marketization.

Geographies of Marketization

In its broadest understanding “geographies of marketization” open up new perspectives towards the emergence of market orders and their continuous spatial and social expansion (and their contribution to the construction of society). Here, markets are conceived of as socio-technical “agencements” (Callon 2007): arrangements of people, things, and socio-technical devices that format products, prices, competition, places of exchange, and mechanisms of control. This takes seriously the constellations of distributed agency that make processes of marketization possible. These arrangements of heterogeneous elements (conventions, rules, technical devices, infrastructures, logistical procedures, calculating systems, texts, discourses, scientific knowledge, embodied skills, human beings, etc.) organize the circulation of goods, together with the property rights attached to them, through the contradictory encounter of quantitative and qualitative valuations. The term agencement conveys the idea of a (spatial) assemblage of heterogeneous elements that have been carefully arranged, as well as the notion of agency: “socio-technical assemblages endowed with the capacity to bring about agency, to act and to give meaning to action” (Callon 2007: 319ff).

Beyond previous conceptualizations of markets that highlighted the importance of material investments in stabilizing markets, other elements play a crucial role, recursively informing and intervening in marketization: “things” and “science,” or, to be more precise, “market devices” and “economics.” Callon (1998a) stresses the embeddedness of the economy in Economics – not in society, as network theorists tend to believe – highlighting the fundamental reflexive and theoretical activity involved in market design and pointing to the performative character of Economics. It is not merely the aim of mainstream economics and its adherents to better understand and explain the world; their theories are projects that transform the world (MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007). This can happen in multiple ways: Economics may intervene through economists themselves, as when academic economists who act as consultants for firms, marketplaces, governments, or regulatory bodies (T. Mitchell 2009). In other instances, economists’ tools and instruments (for example pricing formulas or macroeconomic models) are utilized by market actors or policy makers – “economists in the wild” (Callon 2007).

Processes of marketization are not only recursively informed by economic knowledges but are also socio-technically distributed. A wide spectrum of market devices – from analytical techniques to pricing models, purchase settings to merchandising tools, trading protocols to aggregate economic indicators, computer screens to shopping carts – intervene in the framing of concrete markets and the formatting of exchange mechanisms and evaluation processes, bringing about distributed calculative agency (Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007; Pinch and Swedberg 2008). They contribute to individualization processes that bring economic and social realities in line with the models of the neoclassical laboratory.

From this perspective, homo economicus is not enclosed in the body of a sovereign individual but is the effect of distributed cognitive and calculative processes, a given task being performed by multiple human beings, objects, and technical systems (Hutchins 1995; MacKenzie 2009: 16). Callon’s (1998a) claim that homo economicus actually exists in economic spaces has to be seen in this context: not the expression of pregiven natural human behavior but a relational effect of distributed collective calculative practices. It then appears reasonable to conceptualize markets as “calculative collective devices” (Callon and Muniesa 2005).

For empirical reasons, we differentiate two interwoven dimensions of marketization: societal transformation and the investment needed to make markets work. Societal transformation is concerned with the meso- and macro-level extension of market agencements (and resistance to it). Labeling this dimension markets as discursive borderlands, we approach (neo)liberal thinking on global trade as a set of practical associations – a network of people, skills, datasets, techniques, procedures, tools, and so on – that has been built around the idea of a perfect market as the most efficient tool for the coordination of economic processes (Berndt and Boeckler 2011b; Traub-Werner 2007). Here, geographies of marketization entail asking: How precisely is the world outside Economics being transformed into a borderless, unbounded market? Which processes see to it that this world conforms to the neoclassical laboratory? How are the frames guaranteeing the working of abstract market models established in practice?

The investment to make markets work is more microgeographical. We refer to this dimension as framing of markets and examine how concrete markets reflect the performative realization of a closely interrelated set of three framings that operate in an all-encompassing socio-technical agencement:

Overall, marketization is the process of designing, implementing, maintaining, and reproducing specific socio-technical agencements that embrace a calculated and monetarized exchange of goods and services. We now turn to illustrate these two aspects of geographies of marketization through two examples from our own research on agricultural markets of the global South. We do this to emphasize our interest in the microgeographical framing of concrete, mundane markets, extending the above-discussed social studies of finance into broader social studies of economization.

The Discursive Borderlands of Global Capitalism: B/ordering the Market

Our first example examines a particular geographical translation of the marketization argument. As we have outlined in more detail elsewhere, with reference to La frontera, the US-Mexican borderlands, and the sensitive horticulture sector, a reconfigured notion of spatial borders can help shed light into geographies of the all-encompassing marketization process (Berndt and Boeckler 2011b). In particular, this concerns the geographical translation of framing (i.e. shaping the outside according to the logic of economic models) and overflowing processes (i.e. irritations, disjunctures, and paradoxes which surface when heterogeneous actors practically enact those models; see Callon 1998b). Global movements of capital, goods, people, and ideas involve an ambivalent double play of de-bordering and bordering processes. These ambivalent border regimes are a necessary condition for the extension of market agencements and the construction of global trade systems. Yet ambivalences have to be hidden and veiled in order for these markets to work. Indeed, the more objects and subjects travel and cross borders, the more borders are themselves in motion, becoming blurred and sometimes acting as semi-permeable membranes (Mol and Law 2005: 637).

We chose the mobile fresh tomato as our case study. On a macro-level, the realities of the US-Mexican tomato trade appear a far cry from the model world portrayed by free traders, despite being conjured up repeatedly by architects of “de-bordered” market orders. It would be shortsighted, however, to simply take this as yet another proof of the unrealistic nature of neoliberal representations. Notwithstanding the discrepancy between reality and model, Economics successfully manages to rearrange the world outside its models. Accordingly, the neoliberal discourse veils a more complex integration logic that obtains its very force from the contradictions and ambivalences which surface whenever an economic model leaves the laboratory.

Economists created the term “deep integration” to describe regional integration agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and to contrast them with the “shallow integration” logic of free trade advocates (“shallow” because it is restricted to dismantling classical trade barriers; persisting institutional differences are dealt with by the global market). As concrete materialization of a borderlands of capitalism, the NAFTA integration regime extends beyond the political border itself, deep into Mexico’s rural areas. Deep integration brings special attention to the vexed issue of private property rights in relation to natural resources and land, forcing Mexico to get rid of “traditional” forms of land use (i.e. destroying Mexico’s ejido system and permitting domestic and foreign investors to lease out or buy some private and communal land holdings). A direct result has been a deep polarization of rural Mexico; modern and highly productive agroindustry enclaves confront more traditional agriculture in marginalized areas (Macias 2003). The complicated public discourse of marketization, modernization, and progress needs those very “backward” regions as a mirror, against which a modern productive agriculture can be constructed as progress. This extension of private property rights may also be interpreted as the mobilization of north-south borders. The US southern border, the “inner border” of global capitalism, moves southwards, meandering across rural regions, including some fields and installations while excluding others as market integration’s Other.

For a tomato to be on display on a supermarket shelf, an extended and complex network of socio-technical arrangements is necessary. These include cooling facilities but also standards, consultancy firms, surveillance technologies, marketing experts, packing stations, and so on. Crucially, the translation of these networks into a flexible border regime requires practical knowledge of what has come to be known as “Supply Chain Management” (SCM). SCM mediates between the free trade laboratory and the asymmetric deep integration logic. Thus SCM practitioners are actively engaging in the mobilization and dissolution of borders:

Of course, other devices are involved in the “b/ordering” of marketization. The US-Mexican tomato agencement is practically designed, implemented, maintained, and reproduced with the help of calculated consumer preferences, public and private standards, track’n’trace technologies, detailed and meticulous food alerts published online by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), socio-technical surveillance applications at different places along the chain, and so on. The study of marketization can unveil how economics and economists in the wild – while advocating an ideal free market – stabilize and performatively manage a tightly bordered world, in practice, in all these ways, constructing societies as a complex amalgam of multiple, often deeply unequal, exclusionary differentiations.

The Framing of Markets

Our second example turns to Ghana, which has become a role model for development practitioners in Subsaharan Africa. Transformation of Ghanaian society is managed by numerous agencies for international development, with their programs and a host of “economists in the wild” busy working to implement development projects at all spatial scales. Specifically, a swath of national and international actors, state agencies, and private NGOs, are implicated in attempts to implement “value chain enhancement” as part of a wider “market oriented program” in Ghana’s agrosector. Obviously, the making of agro-markets in Ghana cannot be separated from the practice of economists, the marketization process being instructed by economic models that have their own history of transformation, including the global value chain (GVC) approach. GVC started as “commodity chains” in world-system theory. These were “cross-pollinated” with ideas from business administration (i.e. supply chain management), mutating into GVCs (Gereffi et al. 2001; Bair 2009). Framing marketization through the rhetoric of “global value chains” contributes to the performativity of Economics, and economic geography (Barnes 2002; 2008).

A particularly striking example is the ongoing attempt to establish Ghana as a mango exporter. In northern Ghana the single biggest project took shape in 1999, when the Organic Fruit Company (OFC) opened a small (155 ha) farm to grow organic mangoes for export. The founding capital came from an established Dutch-Ghanaian importer and exporter of agricultural inputs and products. OFC quickly realized that an outgrower scheme rather than a farm system would provide the best fit to organize production. 2000 farmers in 44 communities were targeted to participate in the project. Crucial support from the Dutch development organization CORDAID (2008) was embedded in its wider Africa-based program “Small Producers in the Value Chain,” which adopts a “market oriented approach” and “recognises the important role of the private sector as a key stakeholder in market or value chains.”

Peasants, only growing a few acres of food crops using a rotational slash and burn system, had to be introduced into new ways of agricultural production. The sudden shift towards a cash crop with no commercial history in the region, and only of limited use for consumption, meant nothing less than having to trust a hitherto unknown player (the OFC) and its promises concerning market prices and global demand. This marketization illustrates the three interrelated “framings” listed above:

Commodities: To transform a good into a commodity it must be defined as a discernable entity to which property rights are attached, as a prerequisite for exchange. This often requires substantially altering established concepts of “belonging,” including considerable “investments” in codified rules and law. The project is credit-financed by an NGO and located on communal land only temporarily allocated to a single farmer. Thus each mango tree has to be “decomposed” into fruits, leaves, and wood before it is possible to decide to whom the fruit growing on it belongs. Mechanisms and technical devices for qualitative and quantitative valuations also must be established, influencing the agreement on market prices.

Agencies must be framed as individual actors, but also as arrangements of distributed cognitive bodies, technical devices, calculative tools, and so on. The transformation of farmers into “mango outgrowers” is an impressive example of such framing and individualization of actors. First, the agrofood company developed an assessment test to sort out qualified “material”: potentially successful and reliable village farmers. Second, a new relationship of claims and obligation but also of trust and mutual dependence with a market mediator – the OFC – was formally established in a contract, which converts independent farmers into “outgrowers” caught up in new global networks of exchange. Third, a long-term credit-scheme involving provision of seedlings, some cultivation equipment, water supply for irrigation, training schemes, extension services, and so on creates a new alignment in time and space. Outgrowers become indebted for at least 15 years, requiring them to stay and work the mango plot.

Encounter: Encounters of goods and agencies also have to be framed and formatted to achieve the qualification of objectified commodities (first framing) by calculating agencies (second framing). A crucial mechanism for reconciling differing and conflicting qualifications is the production of a price, whereby “qualculation” – qualitative and quantitative evaluations (Callon and Law 2005) – is quantified. As the chain connecting producers and consumers lengthens, in this case connecting Ghanaian outgrowers and European supermarket buyers, mediators get involved, altering the quality of the mango along its chained biography. An array of different encounters take place as different prices must be agreed upon. For GVC analysis, this is simply value-added moving up the commodity chain. Yet pricing is complicated, only accomplished through a contractual agreement stipulating an algorithm of sequential calculating procedures. This process is socio-technically distributed between farmers, mobile phones, regional and national market prices, international prices, computerized farmer data, plantation management, individualized loan balance sheets, and so on constantly transforming contractually agreed exchange into renewed market competition.

Even this abreviated summary (see Ouma, Boeckler, and Lindner forthcoming 2012) shows how a diverse spectrum of people, organizations, norms, fields of knowledge, techniques, formal rules, resources of power, and so on is assembled into a heterogeneous socio-technical network. People and organizations are as much parts of this as techniques and things, a forging of certain links and simultaneous severing of others that can be read as a synonym for “marketization.”

Conclusion

We have argued for a more nuanced treatment of markets – an object of critical analysis that has hitherto been largely ignored even as it increased its grip over daily lives during recent decades. We advanced two intertwined dimensions of marketization and their corresponding geographies. The first concerns markets as discursive borderlands of capitalism. Seemingly passive tools such as formal written contracts or quality standards actually do something. They turn Ghanaian farmers into mango outgrowers and Mexico jitomates into northern export tomatoes, with subsequent processes of social transformation, individualization, and calculation. These transformations lie at the core of marketization, which can be read as a diverse, heterogeneous, and messy arrangement of local borderlands. As a zone of inclusive exclusion (T. Mitchell 2007: 247) borderlands are brought into being by an economic discourse of exclusionary representations. Economic practices in the global South are portrayed by economists as defective, determining what lies outside the market. Then, by separating an abstract perfect market from an imperfect outside, market apologists can blame unwelcome external infringements (social, cultural, political, etc.) for “market failure.” Finally, within this “outside” – on which the “inside” evidently depends – global capitalism now literally touches the ground in specific geographical settings, mediated through market models, the rhetoric of international development organizations, free trade adherents or supply chain managers, thereby integrating smallholders into global markets or selectively extending northern borders far to the south.

Second, on a more microgeographical level, marketization concerns the question of how markets are performed in practice and (re)produced as socio-technical agencements embracing a calculated and monetarized exchange of goods and services. From this perspective a market is a bundle of practices (structured spatial and temporal manifolds of action) and material arrangements (assemblages of material objects, persons, artifacts, organisms, and things). Both attain stability through highly selective and exclusionary framing processes, where connections are made and cut, with certain constellations at least temporarily made irreversible. Here, both academic economists and practitioners of various socio-technical economic disciplines frame and perform markets, in conjunction with material devices, utilizing the performative power of economic theories to bring about marketization.

References

Agamben, G. (2009) What is an Apparatus? Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Aspers, P. and Beckert, J. (2008) Märkte. In A. Maurer (ed), Handbuch der Wirtschaftssoziologie. VS Verlag fx9992_Sabon-Roman_8n_000100r Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, pp. 225–246.

Bair, J. (2009) Global commodity chains: Genealogy and review. In J. Bair (ed) Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research. Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 1–34.

Baker, W. (1981) Markets as Networks: A Multimethod Study of Trading Networks in a Securities Market. Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Evanston.

Barnes, T.J. (2002) Performing economic geography: Two men, two books, and a cast of thousands. Environment and Planning A, 34, 3, 487–512.

Barnes, T.J. (2008) Making space for the economy: Live performances, dead objects, and economic geography. Geography Compass, 2, 5, 1432–1448.

Bathelt, H. and Gertler, M.S. (2005) The German variety of capitalism: Forces and dynamics of evolutionary change. Economic Geography, 81, 1, 1–9.

Beckert, J. (2007) The Social Order of Markets. Max-Planck-Institut fx9992_Sabon-Roman_8n_000100r Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln.

Berndt, C. and Boeckler, M. (2009) Geographies of circulation and exchange: Constructions of markets. Progress in Human Geography, 33, 4, 535–551.

Berndt, C. and Boeckler, M. (2011a) Geographies of markets: Materials, morals and monsters in motion. Progress in Human Geography, 35, 4, 559–567.

Berndt, C. and Boeckler, M. (2011b) Performative regional (dis-)integration: Transnational markets, mobile commodities and bordered north-south differences. Environment and Planning A, 34, 5, 1057–1078.

Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Boschma, R. and Martin, R. (2007) Editorial: Constructing an evolutionary economic geography. Journal of Economic Geography, 7, 5, 537–548.

Caliskan, K. and Callon, M. (2010) Economization, part 2: A research programme for the study of markets. Economy and Society, 39, 1, 1–32.

Callon, M. (1998a) Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In M. Callon (ed), The Laws of the Markets. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–57.

Callon, M. (1998b) An essay on framing and overflowing: Economic externalities revisited by sociology. In M. Callon (ed), The Laws of the Markets. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 244–269.

Callon, M. (2007) What does it mean to say that economics is performative? In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, and L. Siu (eds) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 311–357.

Callon, M. and Law, J. (2005) On qualculation, agency, and otherness. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 5, 717–733.

Callon, M., Millo, Y., and Muniesa, F. (eds) (2007) Market Devices. Blackwell, Oxford.

Callon, M. and Muniesa, F. (2005) Peripheral vision: Economic markets as calculative collective devices. Organization Studies, 26, 8, 1229–1250.

Carrier, J.G. (ed) (1997) Meanings of the Market. Berg, Oxford.

Coase, R.H. (1988) The Firm, the Market and the Law. Chicago University Press, Chicago.

CORDAID (Catholic Organisation for Relief and Development Aid) (ed) (2008) CORDAID and Contract-Farming. From Wiki page by Agri-ProFocus bureau. Available at http://apf-contractfarming.wikispaces.com/file/view/Case_5_Cordaid_and_contract_farming.pdf (accessed April 15, 2011)

Fligstein, N. (2001) The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Fligstein, N. and Dauter, L. (2007) The sociology of markets. Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 105–128.

Fourcade, M. (2007) Theories of markets and theories of society. American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 8, 1015–1034.

Gereffi, G., Humphrey, J., Kaplinsky, R., and Sturgeon, T.J. (2001) Introduction: Globalisation, value chains and development. In G. Gereffi, and R. Kaplinsky (eds), The Value of Value Chains. IDS Bulletin, 32, 3, 1–12.

Gertler, M.S. (2004) Manufacturing Culture –The Institutional Geography of Industrial Practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Granovetter, M. (1985) Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 3, 481–510.

Harvey, D. (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Verso, London.

Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Kearney, M. (1998) Transnationalism in California and Mexico at the end of empire. In T.M. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 117–141.

Knorr Cetina, K. (2006) The market. Theory, Culture & Society, 23, 2–3, 551–556.

Knorr Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (forthcoming 2012) Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Krugman, P.R. (1995) Development, Geography, and Economic Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Krugman, P.R. (1998) What’s new about the new economic geography? Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 14, 2, 7–17.

Macias, A. (2003) Enclaves agricolas modernos: El caso del jitomate Mexicano en los mercados internacionales. Region y Sociedad, 15, 26, 103–151.

MacKenzie, D. (2006) An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

MacKenzie, D. (2009) Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

MacKenzie, D. (2011) The credit crisis as a problem in the sociology of knowledge. American Journal of Sociology 116 (6): 1778–1841.

MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F., and Siu, L. (eds) (2007) Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Martin, R. and Sunley, P. (1996) Paul Krugman’s geographical economics and its implications for regional development theory: A critical assessment. Economic Geography, 72, 259–292.

Miller, D. (2002) Turning Callon the right way up. Economy and Society, 31, 2, 218–233.

Mitchell, D. (2001) The geography of injustice: Borders and the continuing immiseration of california agricultural labor in an era of ‘Free Trade.’ Richmond Journal of Global Law and Business, 2, 2, 146–166.

Mitchell, T. (2007) The properties of markets? In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, and L. Siu (eds), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 244–275.

Mitchell, T. (2009) How neoliberalism makes its world. In P. Mirowski, and D. Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, M, pp. 386–416.

Mol, A. and Law, J. (2005) Boundary variations: An introduction. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 5, 637–642.

Muniesa, F., Millo, Y., and Callon, M. (2007) An introduction to market devices. In F. Muniesa, Y. Millo, and M. Callon (eds), Market Devices, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–12.

North, D.C. (1977) Markets and other allocation systems in history: The challenge of Karl Polanyi. Journal of European Economic History, 6, 3, 703–716.

Ouma, S., Boeckler, M., and Lindner, P. (forthcoming 2012) Extending the margins of marketization: Frontier regions and the making of agro-export markets in Northern Ghana. Accepted for publication, Geoforum.

Peck, J. (2011) Economic Geography: Island life, unpublished ms.

Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2007) Variegated capitalism. Progress in Human Geography, 31, 6, 731–772.

Pinch, T. and Swedberg, R. (2008) Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology meets Science and Technology Studies. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Polanyi, K. [1944] (2001) The Great Transformation. Beacon Press, Boston.

Schoenberger, E. (1997) The Cultural Crisis of the Firm. Blackwell, Oxford.

Sheppard, E. (2000a) Competition in space and between places. In E. Sheppard and T.J. Barnes (eds), A Companion to Economic Geography. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 169–186.

Sheppard, E. (2000b) Geography or economics? Conceptions of space, time, interdependence, and agency. In G. Clark, M. Feldman, and M. Gertler (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 99–119.

Sheppard, E. (2006) The economic geography project. In S. Bagchi-Sen and H. Lawton Smith (eds), Economic Geography: Past, Present and Future. Routledge, London, pp. 11–23.

Storper, M. and Walker, R. (1989) The Capitalist Imperative. Blackwell, New York.

Swedberg, R. (1994) Markets as social structures. In N. Smelser and R. Swedberg (eds), The Handbook of Economic Sociology, Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 255–282.

Traub-Werner, M. (2007) Free trade: A governmentality approach. Environment and Planning A, 39, 6, 1441–1456.

Weber, M. [1922] (1988) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der Verstehenden Soziologie. Mohr, Tx9992_Sabon-Roman_8n_000100bingen.

White, H.C. (1981) Where do markets come from? American Journal of Sociology, 87, 3, 517–547.

White, H.C. (2005) Markets From Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton University Press, Princeton.