Where are markets?

The goal of this chapter is to prepare the ground for theorizing the diversity and spatiality of markets, (necessarily) dealing with, but seeking to move concertedly beyond, the restrictive optic of the orthodox model. It seeks to do so by way of three steps. The following section opens up some preliminary questions about the place of markets and their actually existing historical geography. Next, the chapter turns to the challenge of decentring the market, of moving beyond the idea that the market properly and eternally belongs at the centre of the economic universe. What is the scope for understanding “real markets”, both conceptually and empirically, without recourse to the idealized model of the “pure” market, and all its downstream distortions? Finally, the chapter addresses the question of alternative “mappings” of markets, taking some cues from the work of Karl Polanyi, but urging a more thoroughgoing reconstruction. The chapter’s conclusion acknowledges that the “where?” of markets remains a demanding theoretical question, such that what follows serves to inform some different points of departure, not the destination itself. New answers to this “where?” question, though properly a matter for what Polanyi characterizes as the “substantivist” investigation of real-world market formation, re-formation and transformation, ought to recognize, inter alia: first, the relational character of markets, which are codependent on non-market modes of coordination and regulation; second, their “instituted” form, necessary in function but variable in practice; and not least, third, their always out-of-equilibrium processual dynamics and contradictions.