The Dictionary of Human Geography

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exchange things – in other words, to commod-

ify the world through active participation in

markets (cf.economy). Yet one of the great

paradoxes of contemporary economics is that

most textbooks do little to dispel the notion

that markets are magical or supernatural,

reflecting the extraordinary (and sometimes

utopian) powers of the hidden hand. None

other than Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase

noted that markets had a ‘shadowy role’ in

economic theory at least until they attracted

the attention of other Nobel Laureates such as

George Akerloff and Joseph Stiglitz (see

McMillan, 2002).

How, then, is the term ‘market’ deployed?

One meaning is resolutely empirical and geo-

graphical: it is a ‘public place where a market

is held’, where the latter is ‘a meeting together

of people for the purpose of trade by private

purchase and sale’ (Online Merriam-Webster

Dictionary). In this sense, of course, markets

have a very deep history – commodities

exchanged through some medium (money) –

extending back millennia. Numismatic

research suggests that while there were no for-

mal markets as such, proto-monies facilitating

exchange may date back 10,000 years; gold

coins were certainly in circulation 2,500 years

ago in Turkey, and the Sumerians had made

use of silver bars as a money 2,000 years earl-

ier. Markets are also in the business of com-

modity circulation. Markets facilitate and

promote generalizedcommoditycirculation.

The multiplication of markets – the purchase

and sale of virtually everything – implies com-

modification and the expansion of the com-

modity frontier to every nook and cranny of

the world we inhabit (Willams, 1983 [1976]).

Even if some domain of our social world

remains immune to the deadly conceits of the

market, the extent to which the logic of the

marketplace has insinuated our culture and

social life is historically unprecedented: we

do not as a matter of right or principle buy

and sell children, and yet human organs,

sperm and ova can and are part of brisk market

exchanges. There can even be markets in

abstractionsand fictions – in climatic risk,

in future bundles of currencies, in derivatives.

Yet this dictionary definition is superficial,

because it says little of what actually consti-

tutes – and what are the conditions of possi-

bility of – market transactions. Most

economists – influenced by transaction

cost analysis, by the studies of economic

norms, and by theinstitutionalismof some

forms of neo-classical economics (see

Williamson, 1985) – identifydecision-making

autonomy and participation as key to market

operations: buyers and sellers willing partici-

pate in the exchange and can veto any deal

(McMillan, 2002). The purported ‘freedom’

of the market – buyers and sellers controlling

their own resources and not acting under

(extra-economic) compulsion – turns on

choices and preferences subject to certain con-

straints (on their resources and the ‘rules’ of

the market). Several aspects of this definition

are important. First, where an authority rela-

tionship shapes the transaction, it is not a

market transaction (it is another sort of trans-

action: administered or forced or perhaps

black market). Second, for the poor the

degrees of freedom, participation and choice

are very constrained. Bargaining power

between buyer and seller is unequal, yet

economists would see the right of veto as

‘a kind of freedom’. Third, while competition

is not a defining feature of the market (markets

might be oligopolistic), there is a presumption

that adds to autonomy (by virtue of there

being alternatives). As a consequence of

these attributes, a market transaction is typic-

ally defined as:

An exchange that is voluntary; each party

can veto it, and (subject to the rules of the

market place) each freely agrees to the

terms. A market is a forum for carrying out

such exchanges. (McMillan, 2002, p. 6)

Market transactions defined in this way are,

of course, limited: markets are never wholly

ubiquitous and there are realms in which the

reach of the market is limited even in

advanced capitalist states. Many of the trans-

actions withinhouseholds, within firms and

within governments are not market transac-

tions as defined conventionally. Yet these

non-market transactions take place within a

universe of dominant market transactions

and indeed are directly and indirectly shaped

by the powerful logics of the operations of the

market. It is also clear from the definition of

market transaction that markets are always in

a limited sense ‘free’. They always have rules,

more or less formal. They require patterns of

trustand social convention. And, not least,

they demand the role of government in defin-

ingproperty rights, and typically providing

complex bodies oflawpertaining to contracts.

All of this endorses the idea that there are

many different forms of markets, that market

transactions presuppose quantities and qual-

ities of information (often unevenly unavail-

able – information asymmetries is the neo-

classical argot), and that market transactions

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MARKET