DYNAMICS OF DIGITAL MARKETS

The focus of this panel is the material, organizational, and cultural conditions of digital markets. While the notion of economy refers to the more general production, distribution and allocation in society, the idea of markets represents specific contexts of economic exchange typical of capitalist economies (Carruthers & Babb, 2013). A more elaborate understanding of digital markets and their relationships with digital platforms can expand our understanding of the economic implications that specific types of platform architectures have at the level of economic interaction. The discussion takes as a starting point perspectives from economic sociology that emphasize how markets are embedded into broader social and societal structures (Granovetter, 2017) and conditioned upon cultural norms and conventions (Beckert, 2009). In addition, the panel is informed by the way economic sociology and STS have approached the material conditions of markets (Garcia-Parpet, 2007; MacKenzie, 2018) and the way these conditions frame and transform power relations and interaction patterns on specific markets. The panel consists of four papers that approach this issue from a range of perspectives: The relationship between platform architectures, open market strategies and the formation of ‘commodity money’ in the case of Steam, the relationship between platforms, markets, and state regulation in the case of Alibaba, the role of narratives, imagined futures, and collective action that frame patterns of buying and selling in global stock markets in the case of Gamestop shares and, finally, how the online engagement industry is organized in practice in the case of “click farms”.

Talk of Markets

This paper examines “market talk” as a pervasive and flexible cultural tool. We analyze two cases in which the market is invoked as a justification: employers’ pay-setting practices and the exclusion of unpaid housework from calculations of gross domestic product. Employers interpret a candidate’s past salary as “the market price” indicating that individual's value, and thus use salary history as the basis for salary offers. National income statisticians argue that the absence of market prices for housework renders housewives' true economic value uncalculable. We identify three key features of market talk: authority, credibility, and accessibility. These features offer a framework for understanding why actors invoke markets and with what effects. Beyond understanding how culture constitutes or affects markets, economic sociology must also understand the market as a cultural object and, in particular, as a potent and gendered form of justification.

Durkheim and Economic Sociology

Durkheim’s doctoral dissertation on the division of labor had an economic dimension, and his study on suicide rates put a strong emphasis on the professional group for the social reform he had in mind. Durkheim never entered into the technicalities of economic theory proper and limited himself to issues related to economic policy and economic reform, before he moved to study religious issues. Durkheim produced not only a personal work but also a collective one around L’Année sociologique. So, beyond Durkheim’s own achievement, this chapter considers the work of François Simiand and Maurice Halbwachs, who were at the head of the “economic sociology” section of L’Année sociologique, and Marcel Mauss for his work on gift-giving. Finally, the strength of the Durkheimian approach to economic sociology is illustrated through some contemporary inquiries.