Mundane market matters: from ordinary to profound and back again

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Neyland, D.; Ehrenstein, Vera and Milyaeva, Sveta. 2018. Mundane market matters: from ordinary to profound and back again. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(5), pp. 377-385. ISSN 1753-0350 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Markets continue to be a matter of concern for both scholars and the public at large. Financial trading and meltdowns, public sell-offs and regulation, demands for intervention and access to trade, all continue to provide focal points for orienting a range of questions. As we sit in our offices in London writing this introduction, a quick glance at one news source reveals dramatic and compelling headlines that vie for our attention regarding the impact of Brexit on financial markets, the role of market-based thinking in the future of UK higher education2 and the continuing repercussions of low interest rates.3 Although the term ‘market’ is common across these stories, and notions of competition and price or cost appear central, we are left with no certainty regarding just what a market is, from where or what it is formulated, who participates and how, and with what consequence. In these stories, markets are presented as both a part of the problem (e.g. with UK higher education becoming problematically re-oriented by market imperatives) and a part of the solution (e.g. with access to new markets key to the post-Brexit UK economy).
In this special issue we present a series of papers which in different ways dig into the detail of these market matters. We pose our own questions about the stuff of markets – the ordinary, taken for granted things that go toward making markets what they are. Drawing on notions of the mundane, we ask: how does the stuff of markets come to be both ordinary, pervasive, everyday and profound – helping to establish and hold in place the very nature of markets and how they come to matter? What can a focus on the mundane tell us about how markets come into being and how they are maintained over time? Under what conditions do mundane market things come to matter? Or conversely, for whom, in what ways, and in relation to what is this market stuff ordinary? How do things come to be pervasive and taken for granted? And finally, how do scholars come to participate in the shaping of markets by studying such mundane matters?

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Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1506944