The Cultures Of Markets

This book explores the establishment of emissions trading as a form of environmental, market-based governance. It conceptualizes markets as institutions, and analyzes them as a system of climate governance. To this end, it argues that international efforts to promulgate markets run up against local cultures of markets that shape economic practices and knowledge to different degrees. The book also examines the material implications of emissions markets on the environment and climatic systems. In sum, the study finds that cultures of markets present a substantial challenge to a universalist prescription for resolving climate change and highlights issues at the interface of political and economic governance in different political economies. This includes issues of citizen, state, and industry participation, and the materiality of economic and financial productivity.

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.

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.

In a neoliberal era, when the ideology of the free market governs community development as much as international trade, a conflict between capital and tradition is inevitable. Issues such as the value ascribed to honour and social prestige are difficult to negotiate with economic opportunity. Using the example of a 'traditional' Nepalese market town, Katharine Neilson Rankin explores how economic liberalization has blended with local cultures of value. Utilizing the ethnographic method of anthropology and the comparative and normative thrust of geography, Rankin undertakes a critique of neoliberal approaches to development. She demonstrates how market-led development does not expand opportunity, but rather deepens existing injustice and inequality, which is further exacerbated by planners – eager to implement market-led approaches – relying on naively idealistic notions of 'social capital' to expand poor people's access to the market. The Cultural Politics of Markets makes a clear case for a strategic merger between anthropological and planning perspectives in thinking about the issue of market transformation.

Markets are usually discussed in abstract terms, as an economic organizing principle, a generalized alternative to government planning, or even as powerful actors in their own right, able to shape local and national economic destinies. But markets are not abstract. Even as the idea of the market seduces politicians around the world to take advantage of their abstract qualities, they constantly run up against material reality. Markets are always somewhere, in place, and it is in place that the smooth theories of markets falter and fail. More than simply being embedded in particular places, markets necessarily emerge in the various political, social, cultural, and environmental relations that exist in and between places. Markets shape places, but the reverse is also true. This collection of essays approaches markets from the ground up, and from a part of the world often still regarded as peripheral to global capitalism: the South Pacific. With a wide variety of case studies, including on indigenous economies, childcare, agriculture, wine, electricity metering, finance, education, and housing, the authors show how complex local, social and cultural politics matter to how markets are made within and between places, and the insights that can be gleaned from studying markets in this part of the world. They explore the way superficially similar markets work out differently in different places, and why, as well as examining how market relations are constructed in places outside and on the edges of the centres of Western capitalism, and what this says back to how markets are understood in those centres. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students working in and between economic geography, cultural economy, political economy, economic sociology, and more.

Anthropogenic climate change poses a grave threat to societies around the world. The greenhouse gases that generate climate change are produced by virtually every sector of every economy. The predominant response of governments around the world is to mitigate climate change through the capping and trading of emissions. This book explores the establishment of emissions trading as a form of environmental, market-based governance in the United States, Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and China. The book conceptualizes markets as institutions, and analyzes them as a system of climate governance. To this end, it argues that international efforts to promulgate markets run up against local cultures of markets that shape economic practices and knowledge to different degrees. While the global agenda under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has sought to develop similar systems to enable interconnected and synchronized emissions reductions, each of the cases analyzed here has produced different results. The markets and climate policies established reflect the syncretic impact of socio-political and cultural context on the institutional transfer of markets. Each country expresses a varying degree of ease or unease with the establishment of markets as systems of climate governance. Exploration of market adaptation adds new insights to theories of varieties of capitalism. The book also examines the material implications of emissions markets on the environment and climatic systems. In sum, the study finds that cultures of markets present a substantial challenge to a universalist prescription for resolving climate change and highlights issues at the interface of political and economic governance in different political economies. This includes issues of citizen, state, and industry participation, and the materiality of economic and financial productivity.

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.

With the aid of case studies, which include the Bhopal disaster and the Rushdie Affair, John Gabriel explores the connections betweeen cultural representations of `race' and their historical, institutional and global forms of expression.