MARKETS ARE NOT OUT THERE WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED
Why Markets Are Made, Not Found
Mainstream economics tends to treat markets as pre-existing arenas: rational buyers and sellers meet, prices adjust, and equilibrium emerges from the impersonal logic of supply and demand. Economic sociology rejects this picture. Its central claim is that markets do not simply exist “out there” waiting to be discovered by entrepreneurs — they are actively built, or “shaped,” through the ongoing work of specific actors, institutions, and cultural frameworks. A market is less a natural terrain than a social achievement, one that has to be constructed, stabilized, and defended.
What has to be constructed
For an exchange to happen at all, several things that economics treats as given must first be settled socially. What counts as a legitimate product to be bought and sold? Who is authorized to be a buyer or a seller? How is quality defined and verified, so that strangers can trust an exchange? How is a price calculated and made to seem fair or objective rather than arbitrary? None of these questions has a purely technical answer. Each is resolved through negotiation among actors with different interests, resulting in conventions, standards, certifications, and regulations that make exchange possible — and that could have been settled otherwise.
Who does the shaping
Market shaping is the work of identifiable actors: firms lobbying for favorable regulation, professional associations setting standards, states writing property rights and consumer-protection law, scientists producing the classifications and measurement tools a market needs, and even social movements or media campaigns that redefine what is acceptable to sell. Sociologists such as Neil Fligstein and Michel Callon have shown that firms do not merely compete within markets; they compete to define the rules of the market itself — pricing conventions, industry categories, and standards of legitimacy that favor their own position. Markets, in this view, are as much political and cultural projects as economic ones.
Why it matters
Recognizing markets as shaped rather than discovered changes what we look for empirically. Instead of asking only whether supply meets demand, we ask: which actors defined the categories in play, whose interests were embedded in the resulting standards, and what alternative markets might have existed had different actors won the argument. This is precisely why studying a case like malaria is revealing: the market for anti-malarial drugs, diagnostics, and prevention tools was not waiting to be discovered by industry. It had to be actively assembled — through public funding, philanthropic intervention, global health governance, and scientific classification — precisely because the ordinary commercial incentives were too weak to create it on their own.