Thinking Socially' about Markets (original) (raw)

For more than a century, the discipline of economics has been dominated by the neoclassical tradition of thought. This has bequeathed an understanding of markets as spheres of free exchange between autonomous, asocial individuals. Moreover, this understanding of markets is often reflected in mainstream public policy discourse. Yet the orthodox approach to understanding markets has proved inadequate for conceptualising the observed nature, practice and evolution of 'actually existing markets' (Chester 2010) in capitalist economies. As a result, it is contested on many fronts.