The Market, Values and Coordination of Actions

Abstract

The aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion about the social functions of the market. I am interested in the special kind of social order the social interaction in the market produces, which has been mostly ignored in sociology. In the first part I look for historical reasons for the peripheral role of the market in sociological analysis. My argument in this regard is that this omission of the economic realm becomes more understandable if one takes into consideration not only the prerequisite of entrance into the academic field, namely not to step on the toes of older and more established fields of research, but also the very ambivalent and, in some strands of social thought, even openly hostile attitude to the market. The second part of the paper presents two paradigmatic but problematic cases of a sociological analysis of the economic realm: Émile Durkheim's views and Talcott Parsons' early conception of a society—economy relationship. In the third part I figure out another way to think about the role of the market in society from a standpoint that accepts the centrality of aspects such as values and norms in social life. I do not, however, postulate a societal value consensus at large, but see the economic sphere itself to be the source of those stabilizing mechanisms. As a starting point I use Talcott Parsons' theory of communication media and the concept of social order it implicitly contains. It offers possibilities for finding connections to earlier discussions of the social functions of the market, labelled `commercial ideology', referring to eighteenth-century social thought. With my discussion I hope to show that interactions in the market have wider ramifications for social order, while the market produces its own distinct kind of order not captured by the dichotomy of value vs. interest-based actions and orders so common in sociology.