The Culture Of The Market

How does culture impact economic life? Is culture like a ball and chain that actors must lug around as they pursue their material interests? Or, is culture like a tool-kit from which entrepreneurs can draw resources to aid them in their efforts? Or, is being immersed in a culture like wearing a pair of blinders? Or, is culture like wearing a pair of glasses with tinted lenses? Understanding the Culture of Markets explores how culture shapes economic activity and describes how social scientists (especially economists) should incorporate considerations of culture into their analysis. Although most social scientists recognize that culture shapes economic behavior and outcomes, the majority of economists are not very interested in culture. Understanding the Culture of Markets begins with a discussion of the reasons why economists are reluctant to incorporate culture into economic analysis. It then goes on to describe how culture shapes economic life, and critiques those few efforts by economists to discuss the relationship between culture and markets. Finally, building on the work of Max Weber, it outlines and defends an approach to understanding the culture of markets. In order to understand real world markets, economists must pay attention to how culture shapes economic activity. If culture does indeed color economic life, economists cannot really avoid culture. Instead, the choice that they face is not whether or not to incorporate culture into their analysis but whether to employ culture implicitly or explicitly. Ignoring culture may be possible but avoiding culture is impossible. Understanding the Culture of Markets will appeal to economists interested in how culture impacts economic life, in addition to economic anthropologists and economic sociologists. It should be useful in graduate and undergraduate courses in all of those fields.

A collection of thirteen essays examining how 'the market' has been perceived, represented and experienced differently in different epochs.

Professor Reddy traces the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist culture in the French textile industry from 1750 to 1900. Using anthropology and social history, he shows how and why the conception of the social order based on the idea of the market began to emerge, and examines the attendant political and social conflict.

What are the logics of pricing, and why do some pricing schemes defy standard economic expectations? What explains the different labor market outcomes of people who receive the same training from the same place and who have similar grades? Why do national governments issue statements about the country’s history and personality when developing economic policies, and why are struggles over the images pictured on money so hard fought? This engaging book locates the answers to these and other questions in the cultural logics and dynamics that constitute and guide markets. Using clear prose and illustrative examples, Frederick F. Wherry demystifies what culture is, and how it can be identified both in the way that markets are organized and in the way that people operate within them. The Culture of Markets offers a comprehensive introduction to the puzzles found in studies of markets and to the ways that cultural analyses address those puzzles. The clarity of the arguments will make this a welcome resource for upper-level students of cultural sociology, economic sociology, and business/marketing.

Attempting to define the meaning of culture and the nature of its possible consequences on economic processes and outcomes, this book examines alternative theoretical and empirical approaches to the economic analysis of cultural effects in the labour market. Using extensive new data from 14 countries, this book presents tangible evidence of substantial cross-cultural differences in beliefs about wage inequality.

Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation. It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism's unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism's afterlives.

The hands-on guide for fostering relentless innovation within your company Gerard Tellis, a noted expert on innovation, advertising, and global markets, makes the compelling case that the culture of a firm is the crucial driver of an organization's innovativeness. In this groundbreaking book he describes the three traits and three practices necessary to create a culture of relentless innovation. Organizations must be willing to cannibalize successful products, embrace risk, and focus on the future. Organizations build these traits by providing incentives for enterprise, empowering product champions, and encouraging internal markets. Spelling out the critical role of culture, the author provides illustrative examples of organizations with winning cultures and explores the theory and evidence for each of the six components of culture. The book concludes with a discussion of why culture is superior to alternate theories for fostering innovation. Offers a groundbreaking take on innovation that is driven by a company's culture Shows what it takes to create a culture of innovation within any organization Based on a study of 770 companies across 15 countries, the origin of 90 radical innovations spanning over 100 years, and the evolution of 66 markets spanning over a 100 years Provides numerous mini cases to illustrate the workings of culture Written by Gerard Tellis director of the Center for Global Innovation This must-have resource clearly shows the role of culture in driving relentless innovation and how to foster it within any organization.