Market System Dynamics Research Articles

Market system dynamics (MSD): A process-oriented review of the literature

The renewed interest in the market as a unit of analysis has increased adoption of a market system dynamics (MSD) perspective. Since studies drawing on MSD have significant overlaps with other research traditions equally focused on market changes, we trace the theoretical boundaries of the literature on MSD, and unpack its evolution, in order to appreciate conceptual achievements and research directions. Building on change-process theorizing and on a reiterative processual multi-stage research strategy, we conduct a systematic review of the literature on MSD. We organize the findings into three stages of MSD’s maturation–infancy, adolescence, and adulthood–and show that MSD has grown into a market approach that is ever more multi-actor, theoretically-plural, and based on longitudinal methodologies. The existing literature has gradually shifted towards a balance in agency and structure in market change, and towards a more cautious view on the consumer’s role. Under-researched areas are pinpointed, along with research avenues that can further reinforce MSD.

An analytical review of market system dynamics in consumer culture theory research: Insights from the sociology of markets

Drawing on insights from the sociology of markets, we offer an analytical review of market system dynamics (MSD) in consumer culture theory (CCT) research. We surface important theoretical gaps in current understanding and suggest future research areas. To extend the breadth and depth of MSD’s explanatory power in CCT research, we invite researchers to place greater emphasis on exploring four key issues: (1) differing institutional contexts and their influences on market dynamics; (2) the place and impact of the institutions of the family and religion in market shaping; (3) the role of race, ethnicity and nationality in market dynamics, within and across national borders; (4) conceptualizations of marketplaces as ambiguous environments wherein multiple ideologies, power regimes, and politics interact. In so doing, as a community of researchers, we can advance knowledge on not only what markets do in society but also on what markets do to society.

Consumption logistics and the ordering of market systems

This article argues that consumption logistics are fundamental modes of ordering markets. Constructivist Market Studies (CMS) and Market System Dynamics (MSD) approaches improved our understanding of, respectively, the practical and symbolic processes of market organization. On this backdrop, previous research has predominantly framed logistics as a practical performance of this organization. Conversely, we argue that logistical performances are as much practical as they are symbolic. Drawing on both CMS and MSD research, we therefore conceptualize consumption logistics as the system of interrelated practices ordering the heterogeneous entities of consumption in space and time. Put differently, by integrating market and consumption practices, consumption logistics recursively (per)form the context of markets, that is, the situated conditions affording subjects the possibility to consume and objects to be consumed within specific markets. Our theorization brings forward the complex practical-symbolic ordering of markets, with implications for discussions of spaces, subjects and meanings of market phenomena.

The logic of sustainability: institutional transformation towards a new culture of fashion

ABSTRACT Benefiting from the Market System Dynamics (MSD) approach, this study examines changes taking place in the fashion industry to become more socially and ecologically responsible and the roles of different institutional logics and multiple institutional actors in this transformation. Ethnography is used as the research method, supported by in-depth interviews and secondary data. The findings show how the two dominant logics of the fashion system – logic of art and logic of commerce – have social and environmental impacts, necessitating the emergence of a new ‘logic of sustainability.’ These three logics both intersect and clash, which facilitate or hinder the institutionalisation of a sustainable fashion system. The study explores these underpinning tensions towards a ‘new culture of fashion,’ which does not reject the logics of the existing market, but seeks to expand them by introducing the new logic of sustainability.

Institutional Constituents of Change for a Sustainable Fashion System

The sustainability challenges of fashion industry are associated with multiple, interrelated, and complicated issues, involving a large number of different institutional constituents. The collective efforts of different actors at macro level is necessary to address these challenges. However, research that empirically examines multiple actors in the same study are limited. Employing market system dynamics (MSD) as a theoretical framework, this study addresses this gap by providing a more comprehensive perspective on the roles of different institutional constituents - designers, retailers, luxury brands, fashion associations, and consumers - in transformation towards a more sustainable fashion system and the dynamics that mobilize these actors to seek market change. Ethnography with emphasis on participant observation and interviews is adopted as research methodology, supported by secondary data on sustainable fashion practices. The study contributes to macromarketing literature not only by demonstrating the roles of multiple institutional constituents, but also by providing the conflicting perspectives and motives, and innovative ideas and practices in transformation towards a more sustainable fashion system.

Comparison and cross-pollination of two fields of market systems studies

ABSTRACT Market System Dynamics (MSD) and Constructivist Market Studies (CMS) have both emerged to return markets to the center of marketing thought. Arguing that the two fields have only rarely engaged in intellectual exchange, we compare MSD and CMS and consider the potential for their cross-pollination. We first outline the intellectual origins of the two fields and show how they have, in part, been propelled by three overlapping concerns: (1) market ontology, (2) market ideas, and (3) market agency. We then compare how MSD and CMS have pursued these concerns differently. Whereas MSD tends to treat markets as meaning-based, shaped by big cultural ideas and animated by institutional agents, CMS typically portrays them as practice-based, shaped by small technical ideas and animated by socio-technical agents. Based on these differences, we offer some suggestions for how the two fields may learn from each other in pursuing the three concerns in question.

Co-supplying the National Grid: An Assessment of Private Off-grid Electricity Generation in Juba-South Sudan

Despite the global campaign for energy transition towards renewable sources, South Sudan's electricity generation is exclusively diesel-based with an installed capacity of 12MW in Juba against 154MW demand. Persistent power outages have led to a rise in off-grid electricity self-generation using diesel generators. This study explored the available electricity generation options in Juba, quantified the off-grid electricity, and assessed the electricity market system dynamics through a survey involving 44 companies, 2 government institutions, and 2 solar energy retailers. The study found that the current off-grid installed generation capacity in Juba is higher than the on-grid with a total of 28.93MW from 142 generator-sets. 98% of this amount is diesel-fired and 2% is from solar. Running these generators for a month cost the companies US$ 533,204 on 589,760 liters of diesel, and the combustion of this fuel results in 1553.8 tCO2e emissions. Knowledge of solar energy adoption was low and showed a mixed perception with most companies having no/limited knowledge. Besides, the governance of the electricity market is monopolized by a government utility company without legal frameworks. The study recommends restructuring the electricity market to attract private players by developing legal frameworks and the creation of awareness for the promotion of solar energy.

Modifying markets: Consumerism and institutional work in nonprofit marketing

The rise and development of markets under neoliberal consumerism represents a topical theme in marketing theory and is at the heart of emergent discussions on market system dynamics. While the nonprofit market sector represents a major part of the economy and is an important locus for alternative market discourses, prior studies tend to focus on well-represented groups of actors, such as corporations or consumers. Moving beyond the dyad of producers and consumers, the present study contributes to recent discussions on institutional work by examining and problematizing the role of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) as agents of market system dynamics. A qualitative discourse analysis of nonprofit marketing, conducted at one of Sweden’s largest NPOs, reveals the institutional work aimed at modifying the market for health and fitness according to alternative cultural values of, for instance, inclusiveness, democracy, and collectiveness. In particular, the article draws attention to ethical institutional work in markets, which enables organizations to strategically switch managerial focus between disparate institutional demands for purposes of creating and maintaining hybrid forms of legitimacy. However, ethical work also problematically entwines nonprofit with commercial values of profit maximization. The study contends that nonprofit consumerism thus works as a double-edged sword and may spur commercialization and market diffusion in society at large.

Consumer rights awareness and conscious consumer : Denizli case

Tüketici hakları ve tüketici bilinci kavramları tüketici, üretici ve satıcılar açısından pazar sistemi dinamiklerinin etkin bir şekilde işlemesi için oldukça önem taşımaktadır. Bu çalışmanın amacı Denizli İlinde tüketici hakları farkındalığını ve tüketici bilinç düzeyini tespit etmektir. Denizli ili merkez ilçelerinde yaşayan tüketicilere anket uygulanmış ve toplamda 388 anket analiz edilmiştir. Elde edilen veriler demografik değişkenlere göre farklılık analizleri ile test edilmiştir. Araştırma sonuçları katılımcıların, tüketici hakları konusunda yeterli seviyede bilgi sahibi olmadıklarını göstermektedir. Ayrıca tüketici hakları farkındalığı düşük olanların ekolojik çevre bilinçlerinin de düşük olduğu; ürün ve fiyat bilinçleri ile bilgi arayışlarının ise daha yüksek olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Demografik özellikler açısından değişkenlere ilişkin elde edilen sonuçlar önemli ölçüde farklılık göstermektedir.

La formación de burbujas especulativas y la crisis financiera: teoría y políticas de prevención

During the last three decades, financial crises have been more frequent, deep and with higher magnitude. Their results have been devastating in social terms, impacting economic development and inequality. In this context, this document aims to conceptualize about speculative bubbles formation and its relationship with financial crisis. To achieve that purpose, main theories and ideas around those topics are exposed. The hypothesis is that speculative bubbles and crises formation responds to market system dynamics. Due to the importance of financial crisis and speculative bubbles, prevention and regulation policies are proposed, to promote financial system reforms enhancing economic growth and diminishing uncertainty in inancial markets.

"From Objects to Things" in the World of Aldus Manutius (1494-1515): Renaissance Publishing, and Institutional Dynamics in Markets

The case study, between historical institutionalism and sociology of translation, faces evolution of press and emergence of publishing in Venice between 1490 and 1515: (i) around appearance of modern book as a cultural artefact (as unit of analysis); (ii) considering entrepreneurial experience of Aldus Manutius (as empirical context); (iii) observing and analysing interweaving of different institutional logics (the cultural dynamics of Italian Humanism), emergence of new institutional boundaries (around revolution of movable type and figure of merchant-entrepreneur in Venice), supported by forms of institutional work (the modern book by Aldus as an agent of market change). Adopting a market system dynamics perspective (a market may be defined as an organizational field), and introducing the role of material objects in motivating and shaping institutional change, framework proposes a nonhuman-centric approach to examine roles objects play in market change processes.

Market system dynamics

How do markets change? What becomes valuable and virtuous, what worthless and immoral? Why do some consumer identities and experiences become more widespread than others? And why can some of the most passionate consumers cause the greatest harm to a successful market whereas some of the most critical observers contribute to a market’s stability over time? During the last decade, a thriving and diverse subfield of marketing research, originally termed by Giesler (2003, 2008) Market system dynamics, has emerged to help answer these and other questions about markets, how they are constituted as complex social systems and how actors and institutions actively shape (and are shaped by) them, thereby challenging three problematic biases plaguing marketing scholarship at the beginning of the 21st century: the economic actor bias, the micro-level bias and the variance bias (see Figure 1).

Introducing a spatial perspective to analyze market dynamics

Grounded in work on geography and markets, this article offers a conceptual framework to study the dynamics of markets through a spatial lens. The characteristics of four key spatial dimensions (place, territory, scale, and network) are explained and leveraged to provide distinct analytical vantage points and to conceptualize how various types of spaces matter differently in market dynamics. Findings from a qualitative meta-analysis identify 12 unique mechanisms tied to the four proposed spatial dimensions, which offer alternative theoretical avenues for unpacking market phenomena. These four spatial dimensions are then combined with 12 space-based mechanisms to offer novel research avenues for marketing scholars interested in market system dynamics.

Consumers’ collective action in market system dynamics

This article examines how consumers may work strategically to alter market dynamics through formally organized activities. We address this issue in the context of the Danish beer market and its evolution over the last two decades, with a specific empirical focus on the role of a formally organized consumer association. We draw on key tenets of recent advances in sociological field theory, which views social order as comprising multiple and related strategic action fields. From this perspective, we describe the Danish beer market and its transformation, with an emphasis on how Danish beer enthusiasts played a significant role in altering the logics of competition in the market, but also played a significant institutionalized role within the field itself. We theorize this activity as consumers’ collective action.

Based on the Coordinated Development of CGE Model of Affordable Housing and Commercial Housing Research

Construction of affordable housing is not possible, their development and the development of commodity housing market should adapt to achieve coordinated development. Based on previous studies, drawing on ideas put forward specific judgment of affordable housing and the coordinated development of commodity housing, that is, under the premise to meet the total demand, through reasonable adjustments to the proportion of affordable housing and the supply of commodity housing, thereby affecting the price of commodity housing, strikes a reasonable price earnings ratio. In this coordination criteria, the paper uses system dynamics theory constructed residential market system dynamics model, and in Xi'an City, for 2003 and 2020 in Xi'an residential market simulation, testing the validity of the model; Furthermore performed by adjusting the supply of affordable housing a large number of simulation experiments, and ultimately determining the affordable housing and the coordinated development of commodity housing supply ratio between the two is 21.88%: 78.12%, and accordingly proposed to promote the coordinated development of both policy recommendations.

Conflict and Compromise: Drama in Marketplace Evolution

How do markets change? Findings from a 7-year longitudinal processual investigation of consumer performances in the war on music downloading suggest that markets in the cultural creative sphere (those organizing the exchange of intellectual goods such as music, movies, software, and the written word) evolve through stages of perpetual structural instability. Each stage addresses an enduring cultural tension between countervailing utilitarian and possessive ideals. Grounded in anthropology and consumer behavior, I illustrate this historical dynamic through the process of marketplace drama, a fourfold sequence of performed conflict among opposing groups of consumers and producers. Implications for theorizing on market system dynamics and the consumption of performance are offered.

A System Dynamics Model of Cyclical Office Oversupply

This article explores office market system dynamics through a simple simulation model. Model lag and adjustment parameters similar to real office markets generate explosive cycles. Simulations show that deviations from equilibrium can be reduced by changing the information structure of the system. System dynamics, principle/agent conflicts, a prisoners’ dilemma game, faulty information (poor forecasting, market research and valuation techniques), regulatory institutions, and differing equilibria in office space and financial markets all contribute to allocative inefficiency. Thinking of office markets as a “managed feedback control system” may be a useful representation of the oversupply problem. Leverage points for system improvement may be a municipal “queue” to address agency and prisoner’s dilemma problems, improved forecasting techniques and more reliance on forecasting.