Search

The introduction to this theme issue discusses a series of papers examining the increasing marketisation of social reproduction and its effects on systems that sustain human and social life. This is done by examining the frontiers, framings, and frictions that arise when market systems are constructed to enable capital accumulation in the realm of social reproduction. Frontiers identify the expansion of market logic into new areas, framings explore how financial actors attempt to bring the logic of social reproduction within the purview of market competition, and frictions highlight the various tensions that generate resistance to the roll out of market logics. Through establishing these three areas, we argue that both market structures and systems of social reproduction should be understood as geographically variegated and, at times, uncertain. This variegation necessitates an understanding of marketised social reproduction as forged through complex articulations of market and non-market logics. Using cases from surrogacy to smart electricity meters, the papers in this theme issue illustrate that while these articulations may generate benefits for some individuals, households and communities, such processes of marketisation can introduce new layers of inequity and undermine the ethical relations and social commitments that sustain life—in the service of enabling accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How land markets should be regulated is a fraught political question. This paper argues that the heterodox political economy of Karl Polanyi – underutilised in urban studies and planning scholarship – provides a useful language to analyse the role of urban planning in development land markets. We ground our analysis in the concept of embeddedness, building on Polanyi's core contention that economic behaviour is not, and cannot be, distinct from social, political and cultural relations. We juxtapose an account of the institutionalisation of urban planning in England during the mid-20th century with contemporary neoliberal reforms, analysing the dynamic reconfigurations in how development land markets have been differently embedded via the planning system in relation to a shifting political, ideological and economic environment. The paper foregrounds the co-constitutive nature of state regulation and markets, moving past the simplistic regulation-deregulation dichotomy frequently adopted to frame government intervention via the planning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campaigns for personal health expenses make up the largest and fastest-growing segment of donation-based crowdfunding. Set against the backdrop of retrenchment and disinvestment in public healthcare systems across the global North, health-related crowdfunding is a way to navigate increasingly marketised systems of social reproduction. Despite high profile success stories, campaigns vary significantly in their ability to capture the hearts, and ultimately wallets, of donors. While existing analyses of online campaign pages offer some insight into the marketing of healthcare needs, far less is known about practices and experiences of crowdfunding platform users, including campaigners. Bringing literature on crowdfunding together with accounts of the marketisation of care, our paper asks: how do campaigners work to secure crowdfunded healthcare? Through the accounts of 15 people campaigning on behalf of family or friends in Aotearoa New Zealand, we show how attempts to appeal to donors depend on campaigners' abilities to 'market' illness and need in ways that resonate with the crowd. We have two main foci. First, we examine the responsibility and responsibilisation of campaigners to engage and perform accountability to crowdfunders. Second, we show how campaigners mobilise recipients' traits of deservingness and other culturally favoured personal qualities to appeal to the crowd's perceived predilections. In sum, the paper demonstrates how the use of crowdfunding is both necessitated by the marketisation of healthcare while simultaneously exerting its own form of market discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livestock markets are pathological sites in which contrasting biopolitical regimes compete to reconfigure agricultural practices and identities. Whilst the circulation of cattle is central to agricultural geographies, little is known about the practices of cattle trading or the role of livestock markets in cattle purchasing. Drawing on recent attempts to conceptualise the process of marketisation, this paper seeks to invigorate research into livestock markets. Specifically, the paper conceptualises cattle purchasing as a market encounter in which socio-technical arrangements, devices and bodily performances entangle cattle and farmers, enabling markets to work. Using data collected from interviews, focus groups and participant observation at livestock markets in England, the paper makes two contributions. Firstly, the paper shows how farmers' cattle purchasing practices are organised by practices of 'fluid engineering' that seek to maintain the 'farm system'. Secondly, the paper shows how at livestock markets, these strategies are mediated by front and backstage 'market displays' by farmers and auctioneers which produce market price through a series of performances that are carefully spatially and temporally ordered. Specifically, these displays perform specific rural and agricultural identities, such as the 'genuine' or 'good' farmer. In creating these spatial frames, frontstage displays diminish the relevance of backstage displays that rely on abstract calculations by distant others. The paper therefore reveals the intense entanglements and socio-technical work that is required to make cattle markets function and their wider relevance for the management of livestock diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on limitations to voluntary disclosure in efficient markets. The study focuses on aggregation, coding schemes, auditing and sender-receiver models. Aggregation is a well-known feature of accounting. The accounting process can be thought of as the creative destruction of information. Coding is more problematic when one thinks of aggregation occurring during the accounting process. With a coding scheme, knowledge of the code is combined with the message to enhance the message's information content. Accounting theorists have gotten endogenous partial disclosures by considering incentives issues and strategic efforts. Sender-receiver models get partial disclosure from the sender's concern over the receiver's use of the signal. The use of signal is specified by the market's conditional-expected-value pricing. The seller's disclosure is then limited by the market pricing process. The purpose of the discussion is to understand the forces behind partial disclosure, especially when private information has more than one dimension, as a starting point for considering aggregation and coding schemes in accounting.

This paper unpacks the notion of racial capitalism and highlights its salience for Management and Organization Studies. Racial capitalism is a process of systematically deriving socio-economic value from non-white racial identity groups, and has shaped the contours and trajectories of capitalism for over 500 years. Drawing on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Bourdieu, and a number of labor historians, we argue that whiteness operates as symbolic capital and status property in market conditions, and is therefore responsible for perpetuating economic inequalities along color lines all over the world. We demonstrate how the extra value placed on whiteness can create a shadowland of split labor markets, colorism, and transnational patterns of expropriation that systematically disadvantage populations of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an Exchange section dedicated to the question of the new state capitalism. It is suggested that the new state capitalism, both as an ascendant concept and as marker of socioinstitutional facts on the ground, signals a significant geohistorical moment, perhaps not a new "era" as such, but a notable inflection point. This warrants critical attention, even if first-generation treatments of the phenomenon itself may have been somewhat wanting. Contributions follow from Ilias Alami, Jennifer Bair, Isabella Weber, Marion Werner, and Heather Whiteside, each of whom provide a critical take on (debates around) the new state capitalism from their own theoretical perspective and vantage point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minimalist, atomistic classical liberal definition of markets is dominant in the global political economy literature, if often implicitly so. But major shifts are occurring in the 21st century, including China's rise, which highlight the deficiencies of this definition and challenge us to develop fresh tools to conceptualize global markets. There are three ways in which China's emergence challenges established market conceptualizations: the continued resilience of China's authoritarian state-led capitalist economic model, China's positioning around notions of power and fairness in the global economy, and China's mixed preferences regarding global markets. The study of China's rise, far from only impressing upon us how different China is, shines a light on dynamics that are prevalent everywhere, yet suffer from a lack of attention. This paper argues that the political economy literature is limiting the development of richer conceptualizations of the market because it operates within three conceptual 'straitjackets': the notion of the pure market as ideal- type, the state-market dichotomy and the notion of a sequential progression towards a market economy. The fact that markets are an underdefined concept deprives us of useful tools for elucidating important questions about markets in the global economy and limits our capacity to evaluate China's impact on global markets. Drawing from diverse literatures, from comparative politics, to classical political economy and economic sociology, this paper develops an institutionally grounded set of tools, including a list of characteristics and a typology, to define, evaluate and compare markets, and inspire others to contribute to the endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market categories literature is reaching the adolescent stage. To 'look forward' and chart the next stages of this literature's growth, we first need to 'look back' at what we have learned so far. We thus begin with a systematic review of the literature on market categories from the 1990s to the present. Our search of leading management and sociology journals yielded 100 empirical papers, which we group into eight themes. We then discuss in more detail the findings under the top three of these themes: category spanning, new category construction and category change. Based on our review, we then 'look forward' and offer suggestions for future research on market categories. Specifically, we call for more explicit attention to (1) agency, particularly in studies of category spanning, (2) market categories at the intersection of multiple institutional logics, (3) market categories as an outcome rather than antecedent and (4) construct clarity and consistency. We hope these recommendations will ensure a long and healthy future for this burgeoning literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite theoretical developments in conceptualising alterity, what counts as 'alternative' in unconventional systems of food provision remains contested. This paper argues that the literature has reached an impasse. I argue that overly 'alternative' readings conceptualise Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as a more embedded form of economic exchange, while neoliberal readings represent them as a case of marketisation. This paper systematically reviews AFNs literature and contends that a deeper engagement with Polanyian geographies enables a more nuanced approach to evaluating alternatives and their socio-political significance. Analytically and normatively, 'alternatives' need not be radically 'other', nor seen as having been co-opted by the neoliberal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the contributions to the review symposium on How China Escaped Shock Therapy. I discuss the strategy of economic system reform that started from the non-essential parts of the industrial system in order to eventually transform the commanding heights; the spatial dimension of reform in relation to "dual circulation" and the coastal development strategy; the nature and meaning of Chinese gradualism; and China's price stabilization strategies of the 1980s in relation to later inflationary challenges. Finally, I reflect on the symposium as a dialogue between economic geography and a history of ideas in action that I pursued in my book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call for papers for the 12th Bi-Annual Conference of the International Society for Markets and Development (ISMD) on May 21-25, 2012 regarding the redefinition of development grounded in contemporary understanding of markets and marketing is presented.

Claims about 'the commodification of everything' are a staple of 21st century left (and some liberal) analysis and critique. These claims, however, are asserted much more often than they are backed up, and little attention has been devoted to thinking through how they might be substantiated or to what 'the commodification of everything' actually means. This paper contributes to contemporary debates over capitalism, commodification and politics by suggesting ways that commodification-of-everything arguments can be better specified and evaluated. It identifies four variants of commodification-of-everything claims; reviews and critiques the literature's uses of the terms 'commodity', 'everything' and 'thing'; and articulates three possible definitions of 'the commodification of everything' that raise additional questions about defining 'sale' and 'market' and the implications of thinking of things as commodities. The conclusion suggests reframings of the relationship between capitalism and commodification that seek to preserve the force of commodification-of-everything claims while avoiding their pitfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The president and found of the Boomer Project has the answer to newspaper circulation problems: "For the last 10 or so years, as the internet has become a major part of daily life, newspapers in the United States have been struggling with the loss of the young adult reader - those 18 to 34 year olds. Paper after paper, large and small, urban and rural, have tried to address the strategic imperative issued from on high: Attract more young adult readers! Our advice to newspapers is the opposite. Don't worry about young adults, worry about Baby Boomers, those adults ages 41 to 60." While recognising the difference between U.S. and UK markets, Thornhill produces statistics to show that papers should be chasing Boomers: "In the United States today, according to the Census Bureau, one out of every three adults over the age of 21 are Baby Boomers. Those 78 million post-WWII babies are a population bubble that is still a long way from bursting. If Boomers comprise such a large portion of the total potential audience for newspapers, ignoring them seems foolish. According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, consumption of newspapers in the U.S. by Boomers has withstood the birth of new media fairly well." And targeting Boomers will work in Britain, he suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Environment & Urbanization is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As markets for kosher food have expanded globally in recent decades, multiple rabbinical authorities and kosher certification bodies have emerged to protect – and project – the boundaries of what is permissible for Jewish consumers. In this paper, we explore how, as kosher food has become more widely available in supermarkets and global food businesses, there has been a concurrent growth in demand within some Jewish communities for kosher goods produced in line with ever more strictly observed Jewish dietary laws (kashrus). Drawing on research on kosher markets and consumption practice in Manchester in the North of England, UK, we interrogate the multiple kosher ontologies enacted in markets, and the wider effects of this multiplicity on consumption practice(s). We conclude with some theoretical reflections on the ontological politics of qualification in markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors reply back to the comments made on their article by the economists David Card, Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger (CKK). The first question CKK raise regarding the enrollment rate is whether it should be included in the employment equation. CKK argue that the authors are estimating an employment demand equation, and that it is far from clear that supply-side variables, such as the enrollment rate, belong in this equation. CKK also object to the enrollment variable that the authors use, on the grounds that it measures the proportion of persons who are both enrolled in school and not employed, and they suggest an alternative definition of the enrollment rate that would not preclude joint enrollment and employment. CKK present two arguments suggesting that the authors definition of enrollment as excluding employment is inappropriate. Although CKK's characterization of enrollment variable appears to be incorrect, the authors are, as in original paper, interested in exploring the range of estimated minimum wage effects that can be obtained under plausible alternative specifications. In this connection, CKK's criticism of enrollment rate highlights another specification issue that ought to be thrown into the ring.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor calls for papers on social, economic and material exchanges, discusses the concept of markets, and provides an overview of articles published within the issue.

Ancillary services are electricity products which include balancing energy, frequency regulation, voltage support, constraint management and reserves. Traditionally they have been procured by system operators from large conventional power plants, as by-products of the production of energy. This paper discusses the use of markets to procure ancillary services in the face of potentially higher demand for them, caused by rising amounts of intermittent renewable generation. We discuss: the nature of markets for ancillary services; what we really mean by ancillary services; how they are impacted by the rise of distributed generation; how they are currently procured; how they relate to the rest of the electricity system; the current state of evidence on ancillary services markets; whether these markets ever be as competitive as conventional wholesale energy markets, and offer some conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is continuing debate over whether and to what degree estimations of black-white wage convergence are biased because they leave labor market dropouts out of the picture. If a high proportion of blacks become discouraged and cease searching for jobs, and if those dropouts have, on average, poor job prospects, the average wage of black workers who remain in the labor market will be an upwardly biased estimate of the average wage across the population. This paper introduces a simple method of imputing wages to non-workers. When non-workers are accounted for in the calculations, real wage growth for prime age black men over the 1969-98 period is reduced approximately 40%, and black-white wage convergence is reduced by approximately one-third. The author finds that a source of bias as important as falling employment rates is the growing gap between wages of workers and potential wages of non-workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes some experimental work aimed at creating a research system that would facilitate board level decisions about brands. These decisions necessarily tend to be of a strategic nature, and are mostly of the investment type; but sometimes they are about the future direction of the company. The unified part of this study was an attempt to collect measures that would allow decisions about brands to be made within the context of the market and its dynamics. It was also intended to provide the means by which brand problems could be identified with confidence before they became too big to manage. For companies that are operating across quite different markets, it is extremely useful to have the means of comparing their brands. This is normally very difficult due to the heavy bias towards product or advertising characteristics that brands research tends to have. The approach adopted was to completely avoid questions about these matters and to create instead a series of measures based on the humanistic model of a brand-as-a-person. The result was a series of robust discriminatory brand measures that allowed brands within markets to be differentiated from one another and to be compared with other brands in different product categories. Furthermore, the hypotheses used have intuitive appeal, which makes their use easy for the non-marketing specialists who make up the majority of company board members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we perform a text analysis of Adam Smith's two books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, to better characterize their highly disputed differences in terms of moral cognition. In particular, given that Smith's ideas are still very cited and influential in the current scholarly debate on moral cognition, we are interested in understanding whether a text analysis would unveil a semantic structure that is in line with a dual process theory interpretation or, alternatively, with a neuro-emergent cognition one. We find that, despite that the intellectual koine in which Smith's thought was originally embedded would be more in line with a dual process theory approach, the analysis reveals a better consonance with the neuro-emergent cognition approach. This opens new and interesting perspectives in future research on the moral cognition of market interactions in a Smithian tradition of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes three contributions to debates about financial exclusion. First, it provides the first exploratory spatial analysis of the personal lending data made available; it scrutinises the parameters and robustness of the dataset and evaluates the extent to which the data increase transparency in UK personal lending markets. Second, it uses the data to provide a geographical overview of patterns of personal lending across Great Britain. Third, it uses this analysis to revisit the analytical and political limitations of ‘open data’ in addressing the relationship between access to finance and economic marginalisation. Although a binary policy imaginary of ‘inclusion-exclusion’ has historically driven advocacy for data disclosure, recent literatures on financial exclusion generate the need for more complex and variegated understandings of economic marginalisation. The paper questions the relationship between transparency and data disclosure, the policy push for financial inclusion, and patterns of indebtedness and economic marginalisation in a world where ‘fringe finance’ has become mainstream. Drawing on these literatures, this analysis suggests that data disclosure, and the transparency it affords, is a necessary but not sufficient tool in understanding the distributional implications of variegated access to credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop a formal model of the auditing market that is useful in predicting the economic consequences of the Securities Acts of 1933-34. The demand side of the market I study consists of a large number of firms, and the supply side consists of two auditors who compete in quality and price. I use the model to examine the impact of certain regulatory actions on (1) the quality of the auditing that each auditor chooses to offer, (2) the quality of the auditing that each firm chooses to undergo, and (3) welfare related variables. In particular, the following results are obtained. Under all regulatory regimes the auditors choose to differentiate their audits by quality. Relative to an unregulated market, the mandating of auditing widens the disparity between the qualities by inducing an improvement in the high-quality audit and a degradation in the low-quality audit; as a result, some firms undergo more effective auditing (including those firms which switch from the low-quality auditor to the high-quality auditor), whereas some firms undergo less effective auditing. These results are helpful in assessing the costs and benefits of the Securities Acts of 1933-34. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents empirical evidence that previously disclosed financial ratio information is useful in explaining differential market reactions for a cross-section of firms facing subsequent common industry-level changes. We focus our attention on the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 (Public Law 95-504), which was aimed at complete deregulation of the U.S. airline industry after 40 years of federal regulation. Our empirical results indicate that market reaction to the deregulatory changes is positively associated with operating performance and asset utilization. This suggests that an airline firm's operating efficiency as measured by these ratios is a key determinant of how investors expect it to perform in a deregulated competitive environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wave of innovation that swept the field of finance in the last fifteen years has resulted in the creation of different instruments that could serve effectively as substitutes in performing different functions. One important function, that of hedging risk, may be performed by futures and options. The regulations of the markets in which these instruments trade are important determinants of the competitiveness of the different substitutes. One such important regulation is that of the margin requirement of futures and options markets. This paper studies the effect of an increase in the margin requirement on the hedging effectiveness of the hedging instrument and its demand by the hedger. Empirically, the paper compares the hedging effectiveness of currency options and futures with and without margin inclusion. The results indicate that margin regulations for these two instruments are such that the instruments are competitive in terms of what they offer the hedger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the empirical validity of the binary lottery preference inducing technique is tested in a real world market institution. In each market the potential gains to exchange arise from induced risk preferences, and the predicted competitive equilibrium is equivalent to the Pareto optimal risk sharing allocation. Price convergence to (and near) the competitive equilibrium price was rapid in each market, and most trades were individually rational with respect to induced certainty equivalents. This evidence implies that preferences can be induced in an oral double auction institution, using this technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon current research into the organizational implications of 'modularity'. Advocates of modularity argue that the 'invisible hand' of markets is reaching activities previously controlled through the visible hand of hierarchies. This paper argues that there are cognitive limits to the extent of division of labour: what kinds of problems firms solve, and how they solve them, set limits to the extent of division of labour, irrespective of the extent of the market. This paper analyses the cognitive limits to the division of labour, relying on an in-depth case study of engineering design activities. On this basis, it explains why coordinating increasingly specialized bodies of knowledge, and increasingly distributed learning processes, requires the presence of knowledge-integrating firms even in the presence of modular products. Such firms, relying on their wide in-house scientific and technological capabilities, have the 'authority' to identify, propose and implement solutions to complex problems. In so doing, they coordinate networks of suppliers of both components and specialized competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the market is a linchpin notion in the analysis of contemporary capitalism. This article seeks to question how the term has tended to oscillate between two problematic types of use: either underspecifying the history and politics tied to the concept or, conversely, overloading the notion with a proliferation of too many meanings and applications. As a way to chart an alternative approach which can objectify and critique some of these patterns, this paper re-excavates the notion of 'the market' through a historicization of its ideological production and consumption. In particular, the argument brings political economy scholarship into a conversation with theoretical advances in the analysis of ideology, notably Michael Freeden's so-called 'morphological approach'. The article illuminates not only past usage patterns but also how the potency of the expression has been refreshed within recent decades associated with neoliberalism. In this way, through a dissection of this master category, the article also aims to contribute to identifying more precisely what is new in the neoliberal ideological ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of markets and market-based policy instruments in environmental governance is premised on the establishment of metrological regimes and the practices of measurement, commensuration, and commodification that underlie these regimes. This paper develops the concept of metrology and examines its role in the function and dysfunction of emissions trading markets. The concept invites us to question the social, political, and scientific conditions under which agreements about measurement and commensuration do or do not occur, and the consequences or effects of particular metrological systems. The paper provides three examples of how measurement, commensuration, and commodification have framed the design and function of emissions markets in order to illustrate the effects of particular metrologies on market rule. Contrary to claims that measurement serves as a means to ‘cool’ political disputes, this paper argues that because markets inevitably have distributional effects, the metrological systems which frame market design are frequently a site of focused political contestation. Seeing measurement and commensuration as inherently political can also provide insight into ongoing disagreements about the appropriate metrics and responsibilities for mitigating climate change and the form and function of markets more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the history of governance and speculation on US derivative markets from their emergence in the middle of the 19th century through their incursion into finance in the late 20th century. It explores the importance of derivatives’ extended ancestry in agricultural markets before analyzing their entanglement with financial markets, which came much later in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper is particularly concerned with the institutional inheritance of a set of legal–regulatory boundaries that prioritized price making and the speculative trading that was necessary to produce a consistent flow of prices. This governance system for derivatives is set in contrast with the governance of securities markets, which during the 1930s became subject to more strict government oversight, particularly with regard to speculative trading. The legal boundaries between these two markets began to deteriorate in the 1970s when the Chicago derivative exchanges applied the speculative logic of agricultural derivative markets to financial instruments. The implications of this are twofold. First the paper argues that market mechanisms and market regulation are analytically inseparable, and ought to be studied as such. Second, employing this approach, the paper argues that US financial derivative markets are originally ‘derivative’ not of New York and the finance sector, but of Chicago and the agricultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops existing work on building design through a focus on one important yet understudied form of regulation: market standards. Market standards are agreed upon definitions of ‘necessary’ provision in buildings and are fundamental in ‘formatting’ markets and determining the value of a building in the market. The paper presents a case study of the design of 10 commercial offices in London, UK, the effects of market standards on the designs and on the potential for the development of lower energy buildings. Theoretically, the paper integrates literatures on standards, institutions and markets to argue that market standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that require closer scrutiny. In particular, we show that market standards are an important form of normative and cultural regulation in the field of commercial office design; format and act as calculative devices in property markets and result in forms of knowledge diminution that break the relationship between building design and occupiers’ practices. Together, these effects result in particular designs being legitimised and valued, and lower energy designs being delegitimised, devalued and pushed to the periphery of the attention of commercial office designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by observations in the greater China region, this paper studies a multinational firm (MNF)'s preferences between two procurement strategies in a global business environment. The MNF relies on a contract manufacturer (CM) to produce its products, which serve both markets within (domestic market) and outside (overseas market) China. The MNF is assumed to be monopolistic in the overseas market but faces competition from a local original equipment manufacturer (OEM) who outsources both manufacturing and component procurement to the CM. The MNF will decide whether to control its component procurement (consignment strategy) or delegate that function to the CM (turnkey strategy). Our study indicates that a number of factors unique to the global supply chain environment, such as a multi‐market structure with different sizes and natures of competition, and a set of tax rules that gives differential treatment to products serving different markets, have the potential of impacting the MNF's choice of consignment vs. turnkey strategies, sometimes in interesting ways. In particular, we find that when attempting to balance the pros and cons of cooperating with the local OEM under turnkey while competing against it in the domestic market, the MNF's preference could switch twice from turnkey to consignment and back to turnkey, and its global profits could first decrease and then increase, as the domestic market grows. Our study also highlights the importance of making a company's global supply chain management decisions while considering international tax rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents a professional adaptation of the paper Experimental Stock Markets with Controlled Risk Preferences by John R. O'Brien, published in this same issue of Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Finance. In this paper, incentive contracts are exploited to empirically examine two questions. First, can individual risk preferences be manipulated in the laboratory using appropriate incentive contracts? Second, how efficient is a double auction stock market institution for hedging risk? Five laboratory stock markets are conducted and each trader's risk preferences are manipulated using a stochastic bonus contract. Two main findings emerge from the markets reported in this paper. First, strong support was obtained for the successful induction of different risk preferences via the set of incentive contracts between the experimenter and each trader. Second, the double auction stock market institution attained high levels of market efficiency with a relatively small number of traders. The second finding extends the previous empirical work on the double auction market institution. The first finding supports the induction of prespecified risk preferences in a real world market institution.

Technologies, especially Internet-based digital ones, are reshaping choice processes – actual considerations and actions, as well as perceptions of these – in massive, often fundamental, ways. In this paper, our goal is to explore choice processes in general, and especially choice processes in hyperdigital marketspaces (i.e., with massively, pervasively interconnected things) with examples drawn from U.S. macro consumption contexts. We start with a short review of discourses on choice and choicelessness and then shift to the emerging era of technology-shaped choice processes that are especially observable in contemporary hyperdigital marketspaces. For the increasingly large swaths of market segments that consume, indeed live, digitally, we find deft symbolic sublimations and inversions happening, wherein manipulation is perceived as autonomy enhancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land reform has become particularly prominent in development discourse in recent times. Advocates emphasize its importance for poverty reduction in underdeveloped economies. However, how reform comes about and evolves and what it is and does is situated, not universal, as neoclassical economists suggest. This paper sheds light on the meaning, evolution, and outcomes of land reform in Ghana. It draws on historical and contemporary socio-legal and political-economic sources of evidence, analyzed within a critical postcolonial institutional framework. It shows important features of continuity and change in both colonial and post-colonial land reform. While pre-colonial land tenure relations are misrepresented as entailing no market activities, the concerted effort to introduce “capitalist markets” into the land sector to produce “socially efficient outcomes” has led to contradictory results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through examining the example of commercial small-scale horticultural farmers in Mt. Kenya region and Mwanza region, this empirical study aims to provide an explanation for why different perspectives on the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Global South exist. A mixed methods approach was used to show that ICT usage can lead to significant improvements, including access to simple and complex knowledge and the development of business linkages. However, the influence of ICT depends on the different ICT usage types and the capabilities of farmers to use them. This paper gives a differentiated view on factors influencing the effects of ICT on small-scale farming. It provides a typology of ICT that helps to explains some of the potential effects of ICT usage in the Global South. The results contribute to the current applied and conceptual debate on market access for smallholders and Information and Communication Technologies for Development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which market exchanges in the world of antique dealing offer dealers resources for the creation and expression of identity. As such, the paper takes a specific view of identity as discursively produced through interaction. Analysis of interviews with 16 UK antique dealers found that they typically drew on discourses of taste and aesthetics, and of morality and care, to manage their identities. In doing so they mobilized differing (and most often oppositional) constructions of customers, other dealers, antique markets and antique objects. The paper therefore has two key aims: to explore the antiques world as a marketplace institution within which particular sets of discourses circulate, and to examine the intersection of these discourses in dealers' constructions of self, others and 'world'. In closing, the paper argues for a fuller application and conceptualization of 'discourse' within marketing and consumer research. The author suggests that the hitherto underused concept of 'marketplace institutions' might help to understand how discourses and identities are thoroughly embedded in the marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The macromarketing literature has devoted substantial attention to marketing systems including those in emerging and developing countries. However, the market development of 'endogenous' products, which are products that are rooted in Africa's natural- and socio-cultural resources and systems, is still understudied. Drawing on the 4As-framework and an exploratory qualitative study that examines market growth constraints for a product in Benin, this paper develops a descriptive theoretical model of market development for African endogenous products. The findings show that markets can be developed through endogenous marketing systems, because traders are familiar with the products and, once markets in easy-to-reach areas become saturated, they advocate their use in new market areas. Through this process, markets potentially grow from urban to peri-urban and rural areas. Because endogenous products have an inherent competitive advantage over foreign products, they deserve support in development policies next to the large commodities that typically characterize Africa's production portfolio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many emphasize the supposed frictionlessness and instantaneity of global financial flows, economic geographers have done important work placing globalization in concrete practices and spaces. Yet, cross-border payment transactions, which are constitutive of transnational markets, remain understudied. In this paper, I use creditor litigation against Argentina as a lens through which to explore material geographies of transnational financial payments. This litigation sheds light on the fundamental role of law (especially US common law) in structuring most major payment transactions today. Payment "flows" are not continuous at all, but rather legally divided into discrete spatial segments—and remapping these divisions, via litigation, has become a focal point of struggle between creditors and debtors, as well as among financiers. Fierce debates over contracts and their interpretation have been central in these battles. Furthermore, these financial geographies remain inextricably entangled not only with business actors, but with legal and political actors as well—law anchors economic geographies in state spaces and (often contradictory) state interests at a variety of scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of affect in governmentality and develops the concept of the 'affective milieu' to better understand liberal forms of managerial control in market environments. Taking Foucault's writings on consent, security and technologies of self as a vantage point, we suggest that the regimes of governmentality are both rational and affective milieus and propose that the Spinozan–Deleuzian affect theory provides an entry point for exploring how regimes of governmentality operate as affective milieus. The Spinozan–Deleuzian affect theory helps in understanding affective complexities and attempts to create affective alliances in governmentality. Elucidating this point, we explore how top executives at globally operating paper and metal companies entered a new affective milieu when going through market liberalisation. The affective milieu oscillates between the dangers and promises of the market. Using the notion of priming, we analyse how the top executives use the affective threats and promises of the opening markets and how they attempted to develop managerial techniques to incite and orient employees in the new milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses Fiat's lack of competitiveness in the medium and upper segments of the market. The main empirical finding is that the Italian company unsuccessfully tried to adjust the output mix upmarket as early as the 1970s. This attempt has not emerged from any previous account on Fiat, but it contributes to explain the failure of subsequent attempts to adjust the output mix upmarket in the 1980s and 1990s. The theoretical implication of the Fiat case concerns what in this paper is called 'intangible specialisation'. This concept revolves around the relationship between routines, path dependence and the uneven level of competitiveness of car manufacturers in the different sectors of the market. Intangible specialisation in the design of small cars locked the company in the lower end of the market and reduced the scope for output-mix flexibility in spite of the technical flexibility of Fiat's production technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to identify a framework for analysis of case study research into self-drive tourism and its associated market. The history and significance of drive tourism markets around the world are briefly identified, and statistics are provided to support increased attention being paid to these markets. The lack of existing research is identified, with significant recent exceptions being this special issue of the Journal of Vacation Marketing and a collection of articles edited as a book by Carson et al. In order to gain greater understanding of the diversity of self-drive tourism markets and their behaviour in destinations, the framework for analysis suggests attention be paid to location (destination) description; visitor characteristic; access, including distance aspects; nature of visitor flows; expenditure patterns; attractions; accommodation; promotion; history; investment; physical infrastructure; cooperation between stakeholders; level of public sector involvement; and economic impacts and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies that examine the relationship between stock returns and unexpected earnings may be broadly categorized into two main approaches: the firm-specific approach of Skinner and Sloan (2002) and Lopez and Rees (2001), and the market-wide regime shifting behavior of Conrad, Cornell, and Landsman (2002). Although both approaches provide possible explanations for the asymmetric behavior of earnings shocks, no known study has attempted to establish which approach has stronger empirical support. In this paper, using industry sector results, we generally find stronger empirical support for the firm-specific approach as being more representative of stock price behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If there is a duty of justice to contribute to society, which asks individuals to produce a specific amount of goods and services that can be redistributed, we need a decision-procedure to know when we have done our part. This paper analyses and critically assesses the commonly suggested decision-procedure of relying on market prices to measure the value of one's contribution. It is usually assumed that a high salary indicates that one's talents are put to good use, but this presupposes both that market prices of labour are correct reflections of supply and demand, and that market prices are correct reflections of social value. I criticise both assumptions and argue that the social value of a contribution cannot simply be a function of its market value, but is also influenced by the principles of justice that support the duty to contribute. Further, the market solution is incapable of valuing contributions that lack market prices, like non-marketised care labour. The market solution thus fails as a decision-procedure under other than special circumstances. This does not mean, however, that we need to give up the idea of a duty to contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long history in science and technology studies (STS) of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying "problems" in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. When a data sharing agreement called care.data was announced in 2013, nearly 1.5 million citizens chose to opt out. Yet, in subsequent years, there has been little evidence of a robust public mobilising around data sharing. We will attempt to track this elusive 'non problem' using some digital tools developed in STS for the purpose of mapping issues and problem definitions within science. Although we find these digital tools are unable to capture the "problem," the process of searching helps us map the terrain of the case and forces us to consider wider definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic geographers have recently taken up the study of markets after a long period of inattention. This growing literature has highlighted the diverse spaces, scales, and fields where markets are present, as well as the ways in which markets vary in form. However, the study of markets in economic geography still exists in tension between neoclassical and Marxist conceptions of markets as predictable and approaches like the social studies of economization/marketization which emphasize their contingency. This paper argues that work of Polyani and Gramsci can provide a way forward for the subfield through conceptualizing markets as sites of social struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Registered nurses (RNs) employed in hospitals realize a large wage advantage relative to RNs employed elsewhere. Cross-sectional estimates indicate a hospital RN wage advantage of roughly 20%. This paper examines possible sources of the hospital premium, a topic of some interest given the current shifting of medical care out of hospitals. Longitudinal analysis of Current Population Survey data for 1979-94 suggests that a third to a half of the advantage is due to unmeasured worker ability and the authors conclude that the remainder of the advantage probably reflects compensating differentials for hospital disamenities. Supporting these conclusions is evidence that hospital RNs have higher cognitive ability and higher-quality job experience than non-hospital RNs and indications that shift work accounts for roughly 10% of the hospital premium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the firm size effect with two different approaches. First, the "messy" and "clean" methods of Fama and French are used; the firm size effect is found to remain but only after the regression residuals are analyzed. Then a security market plane and a proxy of it are defined and the proxy security market plane is used for testing. The results indicate that the firm size effect is reliably detected and statistically "explained" by a proxy security market plane for the sample period from July 1963 to June 1986. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]