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Andrew Jones
School of Geography
Birkbeck College
University of London
Malet Street
LONDON WC1E 7HX
tel. +44 (0)207 631 6471
fax. +44 (0)207 631 6498
email: [log in to unmask]
web: www.bbk.ac.uk/geog
AAG2009 CALL FOR PAPERS
The ‘Market’ Reconsidered
Las Vegas, USA 22nd-29th March 2009
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/2009/index.htm
Organisers:
Christian Berndt, Institut für Humangeographie, Goethe-Universitaet,
Frankfurt, Germany
Andrew Jones, School of Geography, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Peter Lindner, Institut für Humangeographie, Goethe-Universitaet, Frankfurt,
Germany
With the rise of globalized neoliberal capitalism, there has been a progressive
marketization of almost every facet of life. Neoliberal discourse has
increasingly established a hegemonic conception of markets as the most
effective and progressive mechanism for delivering economic growth and
prosperity in the global economy. Yet whilst neoliberal theories have been
widely challenged by radical critiques contesting the effectiveness of the
markets mechanism, little detailed attention has been paid to the underlying
concept of the ‘market’ itself. Grounded in neoclassical and liberal economic
theory, the ‘market’, its ‘invisible hand’ and operation remains a surprisingly
taken-for-granted concept (even amongst its radical critics). However, an
emerging literature in the social sciences – including economic geography –
has begun to engage with the nature, construction and (re)production of
markets. Of key importance is the broad agreement in this interdisciplinary
literature that markets do not simply fall out of thin air, but are continually
produced and constructed socially with the help of actors who are interlinked
in dense and extensive webs of social relations.
This reconsideration of what a market ‘is’ and how it might be best theorised is
the central theme to this session. We suggest it is possible to distinguish at
least three heterodox approaches which conceptualize the market in distinct
ways:
§ Socioeconomics questions the orthodox free market mantra by
pointing out that concrete markets cannot be separated from their social and
institutional context. Dissolving the market in social networks, scholars writing
in this tradition socialize markets.
§ Political economy looks at how powerful players see to it that the
abstract market model is confused for real markets by market participants.
Work in this tradition stresses the damage inflicted on “the social”, the market
being portrayed as a destructive force.
§ Cultural economists do away with the opposition between market
and non-market in a different way, pointing to the practical self-realization of
economic knowledge and arguing that the abstract market model is
performative.
This session aims to attract both conceptual and empirical contributions which
deal with the “the market” from a broadly heterodox position. Such
contributions need not necessarily draw upon the three economic traditions
identified. The following themes illustrate some of the wider questions papers
might address:
• theoretical approaches to markets; neoliberal market theories • markets and
geographical unevenness; spatial approaches to understanding markets •
markets as calculative collective devices and sociotechnical actor-networks •
the formation, emergence and evolution of new markets; • market economy
varieties and market alternatives; • market operation and (re)production; •
the role of knowledge in markets; • the nature of trust, power and practice in
market processes.
These more specific areas are given as a guide only and enquiries from
potential presenters who think that their paper would fit with the overall
themes of the session would be welcome.
The AAG website http://www.aag.org provides more information about the
annual meeting. Accepted papers will need to be registered online (paper title
and short abstract of no more than 250 words and with 3 keywords). If
interested in participating, please send expressions of interests, questions
and/or abstracts (of not more than 250 words) for possible inclusion in this
session to Christian Berndt ([log in to unmask]), Andrew Jones
([log in to unmask]) or Peter Lindner ([log in to unmask]).
Accepted papers will need to be registered online.
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