Cultural, Moral, and Ethical Struggles In Markets

Markets are moral projects as much as economic ones. Rather than ask whether markets corrupt or civilize social life, this session asks how cultural, moral, and ethical orders are built into markets, and how markets remake those orders in turn.

This session seeks papers investigating the ongoing and contested cultural work of market construction. Scholars have traced the making of markets for halal tourism, grass-fed meat, fair trade, carbon offsets, Islamic finance, and green banking, among others.

Much of this research focuses on the important ‘demand side’ of consumers or social movements advocating for cultural or moral constraints on markets. This session affirmatively seeks to expand this analysis to ‘supply side’ actors creating moralized markets: producers, intermediaries, regulators, certifiers, standard setters, and financiers. How do they qualify goods, construct worth, design market devices, and stabilize contested categories? Through what struggles, in arenas of ideas, of economic viability, and of politics and regulation, do some moral orders come to prevail over others?

Two linked processes are of equal interest: the moralization of markets, through which moral meanings become inscribed in goods, rules, and valuation; and the marketization of morals, through which ethical commitments are rendered tradable, with the dilution, capture, or unexpected effects that may follow.

I welcome empirical studies from secular and from religious or ethical traditions alike. I particularly encourage empirically grounded studies from Asia, the global South, and other settings underrepresented in these literatures, alongside comparative and conceptual contributions.