Introduction: The Multiple Pasts, Presents and Futures of Markets and Market Studies

The Market Studies discipline represents an effort to understand and unscramble the entangled knot of practices, agents, devices and infrastructures that constitute markets. Over the past two decades it has become an interdisciplinary field, with scholars from sociology, marketing, management, organization studies, economics, anthropology, geography and design – an epistemic community (Knorr Cetina 1999) studying the emergence, transformation and innovation of markets (Araujo, Finch and Kjellberg 2010; Kjellberg and Helgesson 2006, 2007). The Market Studies field understands markets as socio-material, technical, political and economic forms of organizing collectives of distributed, heterogeneous sets of expertise – not only of exchange but also of society (Çalışkan and Callon 2009; Callon 1998).