Abstract

STEINER, Philippe  and  TRESPEUCH, Marie. Introduction to Contested Markets: When the Market Meet Morality.Translated byMaría de las Nieves Puglia,  Pablo Javier Figueiro. rev.estud.soc. [online]. 2023, n.84, pp.133-147.  Epub Mar 17, 2023. ISSN 0123-885X.  https://doi.org/10.7440/res84.2023.08.

In this article, we translate the introduction by Philippe Steiner and Marie Trespeuch for their book Contested Markets: When the Market Meet Morality (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2014). It presents the perspective of contested markets: those around which intense controversies develop due to the moral status of the goods involved (drugs, gambling, pornography, human organs, among others). To this end, the authors set out to investigate how these markets are formed, transformed and, eventually, become unable to operate, focusing on the mercantile devices that do or do not allow their emergence. Taken from Michel Foucault’s proposal, the notion of dispositif articulates the concrete modalities adopted by singular markets and their moral dimension. The analysis thus focuses on the processual character of these markets, analyzing them as a field of forces in which the actors and arguments involved imply tensions, displacements and alliances, and whose (provisional) result configures diverse forms of the mercantile operation that are approached through a plurality of well-studied empirical cases.

Keywords : market devices; contested markets; contested commodities; morality; economic sociology.

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