Geographies of marketization: Studying markets in postneoliberal times

Abstract

This paper is as an invitation to rethink social studies of economization and geographies of marketization at a time when the heydays of neoliberal marketization seem to be over. After briefly summarizing the thrust of the economization/marketization approach, we make two suggestions to develop the perspective further. The first is to make use of economic geography’s heterodox tradition and contribute to the ongoing “provincialization” of the neoclassical market. Second, theorizing actually existing market arrangements as necessarily involving struggles between competing logics and rationalities, we open social studies of economization and geographies of marketization for questions of social inequality, marginalization and exclusion.

I Introduction

When Michel Callon tested Actor-Network Theory (ANT) positively on the market—“is ANT of any use to us for understanding markets?” (Callon, 1999: 183)—the world was a different place. These were the times of the globalist 1990s, a period of expansion in which transnational mobility appeared to know no limits and where the opportunities offered by economic globalization seemed to dwarf their costs. Today the situation has changed. The capitalist market has become increasingly unpopular, above all in its orthodox economic cloth. Attention increasingly turns to the costs of neoliberal globalization, clearly outweighing the benefits for a rising numbers of observers. This is a position that is shared both from the political left and the political right. As a result of this the world seems to be shrinking again. We are increasingly retreating behind borders and walls, as nations (e.g., Brexit) and individually (family, social media bubbles). Although the globalist ghosts have certainly not disappeared, after a succession of economic crises, pandemics, and wars the years of unfettered market neoliberalism appear to be over.

What sense does it make to continue studying markets from an ANT/Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, or what was subsequently called “social studies of economization” (Çalışkan and Callon, 2010), when the heydays of neoliberal marketization seem to be over? Convinced that there is still much to be gained from a continuing engagement, we write this paper as an invitation to rethink social studies of economization and geographies of marketization: From a preoccupation with the question whether concrete markets come close to the neoclassical model or not, to an interest in the irritations and frictions of necessarily incomplete marketization.

Such a shift in emphasis arguably is also closer to the original spirit of Actor-Network Theory. As Callon (1999: 183) himself noted in his 1999 intervention, ANT emerged in addressing situations “in which it was difficult to separate humans and non-humans”. Neoclassical markets are obviously doing the exact opposite, they draw lines—between market and non-market (nature, reproduction etc.), between individual market actors (homo economicus) and between these actors and their surroundings. To make ANT work on such a hostile terrain was exactly what Callon considered to be the ultimate test.

Such a focus can still be extremely productive and helpful, given that radical market thinking has of course not disappeared. There has been tremendous value in research that helped us to open the neoclassical black box and to tease out the mechanisms that gave it such power. Defetishizing the perfect market by highlighting the tremendous amount of work that goes into its formation and by pointing to the inevitable misfires when doing so is an indispensable step for any attempt to rethink economy (Callon, 1998a; MacKenzie et al., 2007). However, at a time when the neoclassical hegemony has increasingly been challenged from within the economic mainstream and when economic practitioners perform economy with a wide array of models and scripts that often have very little to do with neoclassical economics, the one-sided focus on the neoclassical market has become stifling.

The subdiscipline of Economic Geography is well-equipped to contribute to a more pluralist engagement with marketization and economization processes. This first and foremost because of its longstanding openness for heterodox approaches and the acceptance—by and large—of diversity when thinking economy differently (e.g., Barnes and Christophers, 2018; Barnes and Sheppard, 2010; Gibson-Graham, 2008; Massey, 2013; Peck, 2012). A particularly productive way forward for us is to bring an ANT/STS perspective on markets and marketization into a more intensive dialogue with critical political economy. The latter in particular refers to the renaissance of Polanyian thinking and the interest in uneven geographical development following the recent financial and economic crises.

There are three ways in particular in which Economic Geography widely conceived can add to the economization/marketization literature. The first is to make use of its heterodox economic tradition and contribute to the ongoing “provincialization” of the neoclassical market. As we will argue below, there is a growing body of work that highlights how rival economic models have been used to marketize a growing number of policy fields. Second, we are well-equipped to turn the attention more strongly to the failures of marketization and to go beyond a position that solely looks for ways to fix these misfires. It makes sense to engage with the process as it realizes itself practically, always incomplete, contradictory, and ambivalent. And third, given the emphasis on consumption and consumer markets in the economization/marketization literature and the concomitant neglect of inter-firm relations, there is much to be gained from the longstanding tradition within Economic Geography that focuses on transactions between firms and production sites in networks of different geographical reach.

In what follows, we sketch building blocks of such a research program. In the first section, we briefly summarize the thrust of the economization/marketization approach, reemphasizing the need to engage with marketization as an incomplete and non-linear process and the continuing value of mobilizing the twin concepts of framing/overflowing in doing so. We then make two suggestions to develop the economization/marketization approach further. The first turns to alternative market scripts that have replaced the neoclassical market model in economic practice (Section 2). We select with economic behaviorism and supply chain management two particularly influential frames that have profoundly changed the way in which humans, things and ideas are commodified. Second, we argue that marketization should be theorized through real configurations rather than ideal types and theoretical models (Section 3). We advance a conceptualization of actually existing markets as diverse and as arenas of performation struggles where a wide array of rival logics and rationalities meet and dis/articulate. Throughout the paper, we are attentive to the key role of geography in de/marketization processes (see Peck et al., 2020; Prince et al., 2021). We do all this from a position that seeks to combine the attention to tactics and strategies of practice, of the role of knowledge in staging the world that is so inspiring in STS and ANT, with an interest in persistent structures of inequality and uneven power relations from (critical) political economy (see Christophers, 2014, for a similar argument).

II Geographies of marketization: Market as process, not as self-contained entity

Drawing on Callon, we developed “geographies of marketization” as an empirical program (Berndt and Boeckler, 2009, 2012) to study the specific spatial figurations that are embedded in socio-technical market agencements. Against the hegemonic orthodox conceptualization of “the” market as perfect and all-encompassing, geographies of marketization are interested in markets-in-the-making with an emphasis on marketization as a process rather than market as a self-contained entity.

With the term “sociotechnical agencement” (STA), Callon introduced a compelling concept to describe such economic “quasi-entities.” Borrowed from Deleuze, “agencement” has two meanings: first, it refers to the idea of a (spatial) assemblage of heterogeneous elements that have been carefully arranged; and, second, this arrangement, as a hybrid collective, shapes “distributed” agency in the sense that a given task is performed not by a single unaided human being but by a “human-nonhuman working group” (Bennett, 2010: xvii; see also Asdal and Cointe, 2021; Callon, 2007).

In these constellations, equipment, instruments, and infrastructure play a crucial role. As “methods for knowing and handling the world” (Law and Ruppert, 2013: 238) these devices have their own social life in at least three ways: (1) they “assemble and arrange the world in specific social and material patterns” (Law and Ruppert, 2013: 230); (2) they enact particular forms of organization and format social relations; and (3) they can be used strategically by social actors in the “pursuit of political, economic and cultural advantage” (Law and Ruppert, 2013: 239). Our particular focus is on methods for knowing and handling the economy, in particular actually existing markets. We emphasize the performative nature of economic entities and conceive of them as effects of heterogeneous networks that appear to be stable and permanent but always remain incomplete and open to contestation. This is another reason why we prefer the term marketization over markets.

As we have argued elsewhere (e.g., Berndt and Boeckler, 2020) an important contribution of an ANT/STS perspective has been to adapt the concept of performativity to economic life, and in particular to alert us to the crucial role of economic models and material devices. The shift in the broader field of cultural studies from a narrower, “Austinian” understanding of performativity to a process that is also enacted practically and nonverbally (Butler, 1993, 2010) has arguably been followed with a certain time lag. Seminal contributions such as those of MacKenzie (2006), for instance, worked largely with such a narrower linguistic sense. It is because of its rejection of the “distance between the object and the discourse about it,” its recognition of shifts, reversals, and failures, and its general openness to Foucauldian thinking that we prefer Callon’s concept of “performation” (Callon, 2005, 2007: 327). Economists—academics and practitioners—do not simply perform economy with their statements. They intervene materially, thereby constituting the object that economic knowledge is accounting for (Berndt and Boeckler, 2020: 70).

Performation is a double-sided process. On the one hand, there is the need to make connections between a wide array of diverse agents. In our case of markets, this includes humans who intervene practically to figurate markets in different forms. Economic practitioners mobilize particular economic models and scripts, applying knowledge and skills from disciplines such as accounting, marketing, finance, supply chain management, logistics etc. (see Section III below). But these interventions would be fruitless without their respective material elements, such as computer screens, transport infrastructure, RFID sensors etc. There is also a need to include sociotechnological procedures that make calculation possible, for instance pricing formulas, behavioral nudges, or auction systems. And there are wider regulatory structures to take into account. What would marketization be without institutionalized property rights, legal norms, or various kinds of standards all circumscribed by the state at different spatial scales?

But assembling these heterogeneous agents is not enough. Before they can be entangled into market agencements, unwanted connections have to be cut and distracting considerations have to be bracketed out. For instance, consumers should “forget” that they may have had different reasons why they entered a shop; financial investors may have to leave aside doubts and fears; a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip should only communicate with certain devices; a container or a cooling truck cannot allow unwanted intrusions of non-human life and so on. All these are preconditions for market exchange. Callon referred to this double process as “framing,” adapting Goffman’s (1975) concept to economic processes (e.g., Callon, 1998b).

But research from an economization/marketization perspective has always maintained that framing is fraught with uncertainties and difficulties. The delicate tightrope walk of carefully distinguishing desired from undesired relations fails regularly as excluded elements refuse to stand by passively. It has been for these instances of failure and loss of control that Callon introduced the term “overflowing.” As carefully as they may be framed, economic entities always overflow. For this reason, it makes more sense to speak of “quasi-entities.”

It is often overlooked that it would be too simple to conceptualize overflows only as an irritation that puts a wrench in the works of the capitalist machine. Capitalist markets actually live quite well with overflows. But this is only possible, when an appearance of order can be maintained, when these contradictions can be veiled. As long as overflows are perceived as exceptions, marketization can do its ideological work and create “the” market as a (quasi-)natural entity. This is an important insight that allows us to counter the often-made critique that by privileging process (marketization) over form (the market) social studies of economization inadvertently downplays the powerful ideological force of “the” market (Fine, 2003; Miller, 2002; Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2007). Rather than playing marketization and market off against each other, we point to the work that is necessary to create such an appearance in the first place, including moments when the background conditions of possibility become (almost) perfectly invisible.

When such framing is successful and “the” market is naturalized as self-evident fact, concrete market realities are lost from view that may work quite differently than prescribed by the neoclassical model. All kinds of hybrids emerge, for instance, when seemingly rational market behavior intersects with emotions and affect, reciprocal expectations or outright force in asymmetrical power relations. We will elaborate this in more detail below, but it is quite obvious that no institutional logic—be it market exchange, reciprocal community, hierarchical authority—exists in isolation. Boundaries are blurred and all logics are hopelessly entangled with each other. Using the example of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as an illustrative example, we have demonstrated that the double process of framing is particularly forceful when translated geographically in asymmetric b/ordering processes (Berndt and Boeckler, 2011).

Such an understanding of marketization as necessary incomplete and shot through with friction also allows us to go beyond a narrow understanding of the processes at work as unilinear. There is a tendency in the literature to approach marketization solely as a uni-directional transition from a state of affairs that is characterized as non- or incompletely marketized towards a situation that is more model-like. One example is the varieties of capitalism literature and its ideal-type distinction between liberal and coordinated market economists (for a critique, see Peck, 2019a; Peck and Theodore, 2007).

What is missing here are the complexities of marketization. Markets collapse and retreat, sometimes they do this only to gather new strength and expand again, sometimes the underlying market logic fades from view and alternative logics assert themselves. Although markets are always in some ways about buying and selling for a price, the question is how this is achieved in concrete situations.

III Multiple market scripts

From a marketization perspective the dualism between an ideal market model and messy economic realities that informs both the economic mainstream (underwriting representations of market failure) and parts of the heterodox critique (mobilizing representations of the market as destructive or as being in need of institutional protheses; see Berndt and Boeckler, 2009) makes little sense. What is interesting instead are the particular ways in which economic knowledge of different stripes frames the way we make sense of markets, how we put them to work, how we design them. In today’s seemingly postneoliberal times, the key agents here are not so much academic economists, but a growing number of practitioners and experts. Socialized in business schools, informatics, neuroscience, agronomy, or engineering, these “economists in the wild” perform market arrangements with their models, procedures, and material devices (Callon, 2007).

The key question is how this is achieved at particular historical and spatial conjunctures. Our emphasis is on how markets emerge as socio-spatial realizations of market designs (see Berndt and Wirth, 2019) and “the ways people conceptualize and enact their understandings of the economy and its workings in daily life” (Collins, 2017: 2). The framing of markets in the neoclassical way, for instance, involves clear prescriptions of competitive price formation, calculation of profits, or notions of efficiency and competition. The kind of calculative agencies constituting these markets create a world in which relations and encounters are reduced to a bare minimum: a “rarefaction” and “singularization” that does away with social complexity, enables the circulation of goods and agencies as monetary value (Callon, 2005: 15), and establishes a clear boundary against the world outside the market. All this contributes to framing processes that seek to bring economic and social realities in line with the models of the neoclassical laboratory.

A first step to pluralize market models would obviously have to start with the neoclassical orthodoxy. On the one hand, it important to recognize that what exactly neoclassical economics is has always been a matter of dispute and has changed historically. To a large extent it was heterodox critics who used stylized representations to delineate their own projects against it (e.g., Veblen, 1900: 261). On the other hand, the neoclassical script is not the only one performing markets and economy. There is a variety of ways in which markets are framed and envisaged (Callon, 2021; Frankel, 2018). In what follows, we highlight two models that have become particularly influential recently.

1 From market failure to failing human subjects: Behavioral and experimental economics

Neoclassical hegemony has long co-existed with—and been challenged by—other approaches within mainstream economics. Experimental and behavioral economics are prime examples in this context. Experimental economics became influential during the 1950s as a combination of the experimental method used in psychology and advances in economic theory, above all the rise of game theory, which set new standards for mathematical rigor in economics (Guala, 2008; Leonard, 2008: 7–8). Economic behaviorism emerged during the same time and—after being initially sidelined by the neoclassical mainstream—was reinvigorated by advances in the neighboring discipline of cognitive psychology during the 1970s. In contrast to the anti-empirical bent of the neoclassical orthodoxy, experimental and behavioral economics draw on experimental methods in psychology and probabilistic game theory to better understand the economic decisions of individuals and why such decisions (so often) deviate from neoclassical expectations.

Some advocates of these approaches wield significant political influence today. As market designers and “choice architects,” they have helped to transform parts of economics into a “practice field,” one that engages in the active engineering of markets and sees them as a panacea for solving all kinds of social and environmental problems (Frankel et al., 2019; Pallesen and Jacobsen, 2021; Pykett, 2013; Whitehead et al., 2019). From this perspective, the problem is how to design markets to be able to process ever-increasing amounts of data and “nudge” imperfect human subjects towards outcomes that are deemed socially desirable (see Nik-Khah and Mirowski, 2019).

At first sight, these approaches reintroduce some degree of complexity by allowing for systematic deviation of human behavior from the rationality principle. With its assumptions (e.g., procrastination, time-inconsistent behavior, and hyperbolic discounting), behavioral economics has played an important role in breaking the spell of the hypothesis of perfect rationality (see also Simon, 1978). However, to call it antagonistic to neoclassical economics would be short-sighted. According to behavioral “libertarian paternalism,” it is not the market that fails, but “weak” all-too-human subjects who need to be helped to learn rational behavior. Ultimately, behavioral economists share the normative view that humans should rationalize and maximize utility (Berndt, 2015). It is assumed that “the” market is best equipped to solve problems, economical in the narrow sense as well as wider political and social ones. But it is acknowledged that markets do not work particularly well for “people in need” (Berndt and Wirth, 2019). In trying to explain why markets are not working as they should, the “blame” is cleverly directed at the humans themselves, the particular problem at hand being located within the effect of suboptimal individual decision-making. Rather than solely being interested in improving institutions to solve “problems between people,” behavioral economics therefore puts emphasis on “problems within individuals,” as an influential economist had it in the context of development, a field where the language is commonly blunter (Mullainathan, 2005: 67; emphasis removed from original).

The behavioral economists “in the wild” who translate behaviorist thinking into concrete policy interventions are fully aware that much more is needed for successful behavioral change than the presence of socially embedded human beings. This refers to the material side of the behavioral turn. One could frame the interventions in question as sociotechnical medicine that assembles a carefully arranged network of humans and non-humans. In this, assemblage agency is purposefully designed as being distributed between heterogeneous elements.

For behavioral economists, choice architects, or libertarian paternalists, a key role is played by so-called “nudges” (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). Nudging is about the construction and management of incentive structures in order to channel the behavior of “humans” into a direction that is deemed socially beneficial. Nudges include framing of information, anchoring, simplification of products and procedures, and also simple reminders and commitment devices. With a commitment device for savings, for instance, consumers voluntarily stop withdrawing money from their accounts until a certain target level is reached. In all these cases, there is a strong preference for small-scale, context-driven interventions that mobilize relations in the family, in the neighborhood, or at the urban and regional scale.

2 Markets as chains: Performing supply chain capitalism

Another influential template originates from disciplines of economic practice that in various ways operationalize the idea of “markets as chains” understood as chains of interactions between a variety of heterogeneous elements. These economic models do not portray the market as a “flat” interface where supply and demand meet. They convey a much more complex picture of rugged landscapes of production, exchange, and distribution in the wake of unequal globalization processes since the 1970s. The national-territorial figuration of fordist production was rearticulated by an efficacious assemblage of neoliberal policies, financialization and increased shareholder pressure towards short-term profits, and innovation in transport and communication technologies as well as new master narratives (Aglietta, 2000; Birch and Siemiatycki 2016; Langley, 2018). Scholars from powerful business schools played a key role, calling on struggling fordist corporations to globalize their nationally enclosed factories. “The challenge of strategy formulation,” argued Kogut (1984: 161; our emphasis), for instance, “is to distinguish between the economies, specify which link captures the advantage, and determine where the value-added chain should be broken across borders.” Cascading waves of outsourcing, subcontracting, and offshoring followed that merged largely national economic activities into a functionally integrated global economy (Dicken, 2011; Peck, 2019b).

At the center of this reconfiguration is a simple device, a steel box, a standardized shipping container. The rise of the global economy is tied to the delegation of “containment” from the (territorial, national) factory to the (flowing, global) shipping box. The box enabled a different spatial choreography of production and trade with new forms of cargomobilities and spatial arbitrage. It is a mode of spatial calculation, arranging distinct elements in a way that organizes the fixed flow of goods in contemporary capitalism, all but blurring the traditional separation between distinct spheres of production, of circulation and exchange (trade) and consumption (use). But infrastructural devices such as containers did not revolutionize world trade alone. They demanded an infrastructural overhaul of the world’s ships and ports and were embedded in new socio-technical systems of circulation. We may perceive this configuration as a rhizomatic global assemblage. But such complexity overwhelms, there is an urgent need for pattern, stability and (infra)structure. This is the interesting case for us: Not that we are confronted with complex, extended networks, we know this. Rather, what needs explanation is how these sprawling networks are tamed and ordered. How they are given linear form. This is the work of a heterogenous working group of economic practitioners, their calculations, and their material devices.

These calculative operations take place in what Callon and Muniesa (2005) had termed “single space.” With an emphasis on material movement (as the basic operation of calculation in the sense of “establishing distinctions between things or states of the world”), the single space is “the surface on which the entities to calculate are moved (...), compared and manipulated” and can come in very different shapes and forms: “An invoice, a grid, a factory, a trading screen, a trading room, a spreadsheet, a clearing-house, a computer memory, a shopping cart” (Callon and Muniesa, 2005: 1231). The “single space” is not only the stage for marketization. If economization in general depends on practices of abstraction, valuation and capitalization (Muniesa, 2014: 38–41), then “single space” is where economization takes place.

One example is supply chain management and logistics with their notions of efficiency and market responsiveness, visualizations in the form of hourglasses and bottlenecks, connections with the military sector and the utilization of digital technologies (e.g., blockchain), and material objects such as containers, x-rays, RFID sensors (Stenmans, 2019). All these elements become market devices in different ways, shaping processes of spatial appropriation and temporarily stabilizing economic formations. Another, related case is the global value chain, a concept that has traveled a very long way intellectually. Initially developed as a critical tool for analyzing unequal geographies of the capitalist world system, concepts such as “upgrading” and “value capturing” now drive economic development policies in both the global South and the global North (Werner et al., 2014). Socio-technical visualization methods such as “value chain mapping” make complex production–distribution–consumption networks readable in certain ways, and statistical methods such as Trade in Value-Added (TiVA) or input-output tables assign monetary value to certain chain segments.

Unlike the territorial economy where the limit marks the exterior and is relatively fixed, we encounter margins and boundary zones that oscillate as the result of the distributed agency of a host of human and non-human agents—an intricate web with no easily identifiable outside (Latour, 2021: 201–202). It is the work of practice disciplines such as supply chain management, logistics etc. to make these connections, to draw lines between things and humans that give complex webs of economic relations linear form. Or to paraphrase Latour (2021: 201): “To say [the global market economy] ‘extends everywhere’ is like saying that one can go by train everywhere (...)—yes, but always following the rails.”

The railway tracks of the global economy as a web of chains are provided by global infrastructures, the container ships, the submarine data cables, the RFID chips, and the airplane corridors. They are inscribed again and again by practices of tracking, tracing, and mapping, by the cost–benefit calculations of supply chain managers and so on. All these devices and practices perform imaginations of global production, distribution, and consumption in stages, steps, and sequences, they configure the global economy as if it were lineally unfolding in time. By mapping supply chains as clearly delimited and rigidly segmented entities, an appearance of order is created that hides from view the fluid, multiple and constantly changing character of the global economy.

The novel space produced in this way emerges as a set of interrelated technological, infrastructural, scientific, and entrepreneurial fields, all “dedicated to flows” (Cowen, 2014: 8). For Tsing (2009), this market script has developed such performative power that we live in an age of “supply chain capitalism,” that is, a specific form of capitalism in which the traditional division between the spheres of production, distribution and consumption is blurred (see also Watts, 2019). This allows us to study neoliberal globalization as a fragmented, global–local process that demands thinking simultaneously in terms of “global integration, on the one hand, and the formation of diverse niches, on the other” (Tsing, 2009: 150). The key actors of supply chain capitalism are lead firms such as Walmart, Amazon, or Apple or perhaps increasingly key intermediaries that provide the services to organize far-flung hierarchical production networks. The way these firms exert control over the chain is highly selective—they maintain a tight grip at prices, marketing or logistics, but follow a more cavalier, hands-off approach when it comes down to labor regulations, environment or subcontractor’s investment strategies. Key actors compete through spatial arbitrage and the efficient spatio-temporal orchestration of commodity chains in this rugged landscape, producing new uneven geographies that rub against older patterns of spatial inequality (Busch, 2007; Tsing, 2009).

In sum, markets can be designed with the help of a wide array of theories and models. These may be closer to the economic mainstream, such as experimental and behavioral economics, but also include approaches that depart more strongly from the idea of the neoclassical market. This does not stop with the bundle of disciplines mobilizing the “market as chain” and in principle also extends to more radical approaches, for instance, when ideas perform “postcapitalist” projects designed to establish community economies and commoning projects (Balaguer Rasillo and Wirth, 2022).

IV Marketization as geographical performation struggle

There is a longstanding tendency—explicit or implicit—in the critical literature to imagine marketization as a process that does away with other logics and rationalities. There is a danger that market coordination gets idealized, making a fetish out of an economic institution and ultimately conjuring up the monolithic self-contained entity that heterodox approaches seek to overcome (Kingsbury, 2021: 983). Just as any other economic entity, however, actually existing markets emerge in a constant process of articulation and negotiation of a wide array of logics, rationalities, and scripts among which an ideal understanding of the market—however defined—is but only one. This may happen in relative harmony, but more often involves struggles between antagonistic rationalities, strategies, and values. There is no final endpoint and no unidirectional logic to these performation struggles, only moments of fragile truce of varying lengths (see also Callon, 2021). An example can be found in social-finance projects, with their manifest contradictions and productive tensions between financial or “for-profit” rationalities, moral expectations concerning wider societal benefits, the fiscal constraints of austerity states, and the concern to engage in the micro-management of “deviant individuals in need” (Cholez and Trompette, 2019; Cohen and Rosenman, 2020; Geiger, 2021; Wirth, 2020).

There are parallels here to the way that concrete business firms are never just hierarchical “islands of conscious power” (Coase, 1937: 388) in a sea of flat market relations, or the ways in which communities are never only constituted by symmetrical reciprocity. In sum, the point is that economic entities are diverse and have to be studied in their diversity. This is why an actually existing market, a real firm or a particular supply chain are diverse “quasi-entities” where the rationalizing discipline of prices and individual profit maximization meet visions of collective reciprocity, desires to live in harmony with nature, fantasies of autarkic lives in isolation, a longing for a heavy hand that counters growing income and wealth inequalities and so on. ¹

There is much to be gained for some agents if these struggles and frictions can be pacified and an appearance of a market entity can be achieved that seems to be identical with the respective model mobilized. But this is not always successful. The contested nature of marketization is most readily visible in moments of overflows and misfires. It is obvious that these misfires have a lot to do with different frames and logics and the particular ways in which they demand to be enacted. The perfect neoclassical market, or markets of any other theoretical stripe, can only exist as incomplete performances because there are always also non-calculative agencies, social values, emotions, and so on at play. It is these misfires that provide openings for resistance in different ways, enabling alternative valuations that challenge market scripts.

In pointing to the contradictions involved in framing processes, social studies of economization/marketization align with other heterodox approaches. Polanyi offered a forceful account when he discussed the limits imposed by fictitious commodities and the necessity of countermovements. The same holds for more recent scholarly contributions. Collins (2017: 2), for instance, reasserts that things and people easily fall out of the frame, how “‘settled principles’ of market value become unsettled” and how this may open “space for public discussion.” In addition to this, the ambivalent double play of framing and overflowing that shapes concrete markets has an obvious geographical quality. Regardless of whether we deal with a territorially regionalized market, a globally dispersed “production-distribution-consumption” network or market configurations that stretch partially or totally in virtual space, framing/overflowing in principle also involves the drawing and transgression of spatial borders (bordering/debordering).

This serves as a reminder that overflows play ambivalent roles in marketization. As necessary elements of marketization, they can have a stabilizing effect. There can be no social boundary or spatial border without relations that transgress and movements that cross. As long as there is a way to control these overflows, they allow us to legitimize the particular framing at work. However, as soon as overflows proliferate, that is, when they get out of control, the situation gets unstable. Callon has introduced the distinction between cold and hot situations to take account of this distinction. The former refers to moments when framing is the norm and overflowing the exception, and the latter to situations when the opposite is true. Markets can be cold and hot: they can work more closely according to the rationalist fantasies of mainstream economists, but they can also be unruly, shot through with the heat of feelings, emotions, open violence, pain, and resistance (Callon, 1998).

It is not difficult to see that the disruption and disorder characterizing hot situations pose a threat to the smoothly functioning machine that capitalism is supposed to be. Accordingly, there is a need to redraw the line, to re-border. If successful, these (re)framings establish control. Only when overflows once again become an exception, that is to say, when the boundary between market and its outside is reestablished and the market realm naturalized as the desired state of being, is it possible to represent the outside as incomplete, deficient, or pathological. This lends legitimacy to attempts to expand the market frontier into uncharted terrain and to partially integrate the outside with all its well-documented geographical effects (e.g., dispossession of land, production of nature). When markets appear to be cold, the relational and contested character of marketization slips out of view. ²

Such an understanding of markets as contingent outcomes of the articulation of diverse market and non-market logics serves as a reminder that these articulations are a far cry from the harmonious view of market exchange underpinning much of the mainstream economic literature. At the same time, our acknowledgement of the misfires that go along with market struggles is not the same as mechanically representing marketization as destructive. And neither does it amount to a romanticization of seemingly non-market realms. It is by decentering and denaturalizating in all these ways that a marketization perspective can shed light on the possibilities for contestation and resistance.

To acknowledge the intricate entanglement of seemingly opposing imaginations, however, is not enough. What we can safely take for granted is the necessary work of borders for the constitution and reproduction of capitalism, whether they are in the foreground or the background of a given formation. What these borders do is to divide the insiders from the outsiders of economic entities, demarcating that what belongs to and what is excluded from the national economy as well as the global market, for instance. In all cases dividing lines multiply beyond what is normally regarded as “territorial border.” And in all cases, we better stop talking about “lines” and linear boundaries. It is useful here to remind us of Mitchell’s (2007: 247) insistence to approach these spaces that separate the market from the non-market (or the economic from the non-economic) as a “broad terrain” or “frontier region that covers the entire territory of what is called capitalism.” This terrain can be seen as a contact zone that connects and divides the front stage of the capitalist market economy with its hidden conditions of possibility backstage. With critical scholars such as Nancy Fraser (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018) or Sanyal (2007), one can argue that it is the ambiguous dis/articulation of capitalist and non-capitalist practices, the b/ordering of back and front stage that makes capitalism possible. Rather than being a discretely separated realm, the “non-economic” is an inside in-the-waiting, an outside always just about to be integrated (see also Bair et al., 2013). Both fuzzy realms feed one another, creating a productive tension at the margins that spurs the composition of hybrid, diverse entities that can neither be reduced to an ideal (neoclassical) market rationality nor to rival non-market logics (Berndt and Boeckler, 2020).

As Fraser has repeatedly reminded us (e.g., Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 31–39), these contact zones take multiple forms. For instance, there is the variegated dis/articulation of commodity production and social reproduction. This includes the ongoing unequal marketization and reframing of activities that have hitherto been relatively shielded from market logics. Recent contributions to the marketization literature in this context have engaged with phenomena as diverse as housing (Butcher, 2020; Revington and August, 2020), education (Bauer, 2018; Bryant and Spiess-Butcher, 2020; Kleibert, 2021; Lewis and Wynd, 2021), care (Gallagher, 2018, 2021; Schwiter et al., 2018), the datafication and financialization of everyday life (Chandrashekeran and Keele, 2022; Fitzherbert, 2021; Guermond, 2022; Kear, 2018) or the human body (Schurr and Militz, 2018). Another terrain concerns nature/economy. It has obviously become increasingly impossible to continue to appropriate nature as if it was not there. We become more and more aware of the limits of rendering nonhuman nature disposable, of using nature as a tap for cheap production inputs and as a sink to absorb the waste of capitalist production and consumption (Collard and Dempsey, 2013; Johnson, 2021; Moore, 2015; Müller et al., 2021; Ouma et al., 2018). At the same time, we are witnessing how this particular instance of debordering can lead to new accumulation opportunities and have a restabilizing effect, however, fragile it may be (e.g., chemicalization of agriculture; Shattuck, 2021; Werner et al., 2022). A further example is the state-economy contact zone. Here, too, the ritualized anti-state rhetoric mobilized by market enthusiasts can only veil with considerable problems the entanglement of global markets with law and state authority and how capitalism’s political conditions of possibility have long exceeded the territorial nation-state.

Geographically, this alerts us to the continual reconfiguration of colonial relations of exploitation and uneven development as the hidden backstage conditions of possibility discussed above get outsourced to the global South (Collins, 2013: 27). Hinging increasingly on non-economic structures of difference, such as gender, ethnicity, or age, the exploitation of labor is also profoundly spatialized. This concerns the well-documented feminization of (labor) migration, the formation of a flexible “illegal” and “irregular” labor force with the help of elaborated territorial migration regimes, the mobilization of migrant care work to reproduce labor in the global North and so on. Regarding nature, one could point to the almost insatiable thirst for “untapped” natural resources in the supply chains of key commodities that sustain our lives. There is the long-debated extraction of the mineral resources that make our hedonistic mobile life-styles possible (e.g., coltan, lithium, and gold) (Arboleda, 2020); the transformation of seemingly ubiquitous material into scarce, valuable hard commodities (e.g., sand) (Lamb et al., 2019); and the chemical treadmill of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that enable the production of ever larger quantities of an ever smaller number of soft commodities (soy, wheat, rice, and corn) and that depend on the mining of salt or phosphorous (Galt, 2017; Shattuck, 2021; Werner et al., 2022).

The appropriation and extraction of these natures often require the violent dispossession and displacement of humans and nonhumans. This allows the formation of superexploited, often forced labor that works in the mines and fields of global commodity production as much as it “frees” human labor as pure labor power that may still migrate to large nearby cities as was the case during the great transformation of the 19^th century. These workers, however, are not driving industrial production, but perform the kind of entrepreneurial “informal” economic practices that dominate the urban economies in the global South and increasingly also in the global North (Ferguson and Li, 2018; Gago, 2014). A sizeable part of this mobile labor is subsequently immobilized to guarantee social reproduction in the centers of the global economy.

However, while there are key agents that control much of what is going on in supply chains, governance is not as straightforward as is the case in large vertically integrated corporate or the public hierarchies of state bureaucracy. This is of course partly because total control is not desired in a system that lives quite well with intransparency and the possibility to blame agents downstream and upstream for any problem that may arise. But this comes at a cost. Global supply chains provide ample room for subordinate agents to resist and do their own thing, often giving rise to irritations, friction, and misfires that obstruct the smoothly functioning machine of capitalist accumulation (Collins, 2013: 31). As difficult as it may be in fragmented supply chains, workers organize and demand their fair share; dispossessed peasants form social movements and struggle for ecological and social justice; activists engage in experimental anti-capitalist projects; nature refuses to accept its passive role, for instance, resisting modernist fantasies of biotechnological engineering; and infrastructural devices such as containers turn into objects of concern when their shielded walls contain unwanted intruders.

V Conclusion: For a continuing engagement with unequal marketization

The cascading number of crises that seem to follow each other in ever shorter time intervals demonstrate that the times of radical market thinking and unfettered neoliberal marketization may finally be over. There is good reason at such a disjuncture to question the continuing salience of an STS/ANT inspired approach study to markets. This is not our position, however. We argue for a continued salience of key concepts such as agencement, framing/overflowing, and performation. It makes a lot of sense to continue to investigate the practical translation of economic knowledge into concrete “market entities.” However, we also acknowledge the need to rethink social studies of economization and geographies of marketization. In order to be able to find answers in our current postneoliberal times, we argue, we need to adjust the research program in two important ways.

The first is to liberate us from the tyranny of the neoclassical market. Acknowledging the continuous presence of neoclassical market thinking and the difficulties of overcoming this extremely powerful market script, we point to two strands of economic knowledge that frame the market economy in quite different ways. Although they differ greatly in terms of intellectual foundations and also in the extent to which they advance alternatives to the neoclassical orthodoxy, behavioral market-based interventions and supply chain management share a more pragmatic conceptualization of the economy. This is an economy that is by its very nature imperfect and incomplete, and therefore in need of active collective investment by human and nonhuman agents.

Second, theorizing actually existing market arrangements “in-the-making” and as necessarily involving struggles between competing logics and rationalities, we open social studies of economization and geographies of marketization for questions of social inequality, marginalization, and exclusion. To this end, we suggest to connect our reading of framing/overflowing with recent debates about the uneasy coexistence of marketized and non-marketized realms of our lives, in particular Fraser’s suggestion to pay close attention to capitalism’s hidden background conditions of possibility.

We suggest that the stabilization of performation with the help of a seemingly natural economic/noneconomic or market/nonmarket divide has distinct geographies. Sharp boundaries are drawn between a rational economic core and that which lies beyond. Other logics with their own spatialities are bracketed out, suppressed, manipulated, and pushed into the background, thereby creating the kind of seemingly empty, traditional, or inefficient spaces that can be conquered or exploited by the capitalist market economy. Geography plays a crucial role here, for instance, when we center our attention at nature’s limits as a tap or as a sink or the contradictory mobilization of humans for care work and other reproductive activities.

We are conscious that it is one thing to offer a conceptual toolbox for the critical study of markets and quite another to put this into concrete empirical research. In our discussion, we highlight that there is already a host of important interventions to this end. But more is needed. With our intervention we hope to contribute to further engagement with unequal marketization and to a continuing interest in the critical ethnographies of other-than (neoclassical) markets.