Alternativizing markets: the framing of moral commerce

Abstract

How are moral markets organized? While previous research has shown that moral markets combine conventional and alternative elements, it has failed to explain how these hybridizations can ensure the organization of moral markets. To this end, we take an economic-sociological approach using ethnographic materials from a study of Swedish Reko-rings, a direct-to-customer market for local foods, to analyse how actors address the key coordination problems of value, competition and cooperation. The analysis shows how participants of these markets enact an ‘alternative framing’, emphasizing economic certainty as instrumental for moral certainty, which enables them to develop and implement ‘alternativized’ solutions to market coordination problems. Thereby, participants make economic and moral values certain by making the former instrumental for the latter. We advance previous research by showing that moral markets require not just hybridization, but hybridization guided by a specific economic-moral framing that enables these markets to avoid co-option.

Keywords

coordination; economic sociology; ethics; markets

Published in

Socio-Economic Review
2024

SLU Authors

• Bååth, Jonas

  • Department of People and Society, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    
  • Lund University

UKÄ Subject classification

Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
Business Administration
Sociology (excluding Social work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwae068

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/133167