Markets as Definitional Practices a Comment on Charles W. Smith

Abstract

I greatly enjoy the invitation to respond to Charles Smith's paper for several reasons. First, this is clearly an important, even path-breaking paper that pushes our thinking about markets beyond what we currently take for granted. Second, I have learned quite a bit from the paper about things I didn't know existed and worked in the way they do--for example about the word/phrase Internet search engine auctions Charles Smith discusses. They illustrate the complex considerations and logics to which financial thinking can give rise when markets are transposed to new domains such as the web. A purely descriptive account of these developments would have been valuable in itself. But Charles Smith's paper is not purely descriptive. In fact, it makes strong theoretical claims, and its message, for those willing to hear it, is loud and clear. This message is not, in my understanding, that markets are not price finding mechanisms or allocation mechanisms or in the business of profiting from exchange. It is rather that they are all those things but within systems of interaction in which the details of accomplishing these and additional effects are continually worked out and extended. They are worked out not only in conventional repetitive system-sustaining ways but in innovative ways that invent instruments and strategies and generate new ethnomethods of doing things. This process involves and produces meanings and rules that determine market boundaries and specify market practices. It also requires, Smith suggests, that the actors involved take the role of the other and of an audience of co-present observers--markets therefore have a technically interactionist dimension. Speculation in such systems means being a practical sociologist and not simply a rational economic actor--it means assessing what others think and are up to, taking their perspective, imagining that they reflexively, too, expect and counteract our strategies. Charles Smith wants us to see the theoretical, praxeological and sociological thickness of markets. Markets are density regions of the social world that could not have the impact they have, and the dynamism they have shown, without the generative socially interactional infrastructure through which they are managed and grown. Of course, on some level, any seasoned interactionist or ethnomethodologist (and even a Giddens-reading theorist) might have expected that. But we did not. We sec markets as relatively empty, focused settings in which very specific things--buying, selling, investing--get done repetitively without much ado. What Charles Smith points his finger at is the fundamental role of this ado--of the techniques and circumstances and reflexive circuits through which participants create the volume, and economic success and survival of relevant markets. We see markets as relatively empty and focused not only in economics, but also in economic sociology--where the emphasis on embeddedness has directed the analytic light away from what happens within economic action in favor of shining that light upon the context on which action draws. The notion of embeddedness was crucial, of course, in pointing out the relevance of that context--of the fact that economic actors may take into account the relationships on which they depend in calculating their behaviour, or of the fact that markets can be constrained, enabled, and shaped by political, cultural, and social structural variables (Granovetter 1985). But Charles Smith's focus is on the interiorized social interactional processes of such markets, which the notion of embeddedness does not capture well. His paper points out that we need to sec, and investigate, the complexity and multiple social constructedness of the internal market process. This argument has wider implications since the tendency to blackbox systems and activities whenever they seemingly involve content (here: financial and economic matters) is widespread in sociology. We do not trust that we may have something to say about the performance and production of content, and we often do not believe that knowing the content-part of a system may be relevant to assessing its impact on the social world. …