Markets, marketization and innovation

Michel Callon

Chapter 36 in The Elgar Companion to Innovation and Knowledge Creation, 2017, pp 589-609 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Marketization, which is gradually expanding the empire of commodities and imposing the financial world’s modes of evaluation on more and more sectors of activity, acutely raises the question of the role of markets in contemporary societies. The debates surrounding marketization have generated a set of contrasting arguments corresponding to different attitudes towards marketization: markets being synonymous with efficiency and democratic standards, markets as machines which destroy the social fabric, or markets perceived as fragile institutions threatened by conservative forces. The objective of this chapter is to contribute to changing the terms of the debate, in particular through reconsidering the way in which market and competition are closely associated. A thorough examination of the notion of market competition leads to a distinction of two ways of describing markets, depending on the role played by product innovations. In interface-markets, innovation strategies aim to reduce competitive pressure, while in market-agencements they are the expression of competition itself. In the former, the definition of market goods is secondary, whereas in the latter it is at the heart of the confrontation between economic agents. Empirical research on the innovation process confirms the greater realism of the market-agencement conception and leads to a new view of marketization and its implications. The competitive dynamics of market-agencements, which makes the establishment of new bilateral transactions and of product innovation the dominant rule, results in the constant expansion of the market sphere. The marketization process is thus at the core of markets’ functioning.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Geography; Innovations and Technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781782548515/9781782548515.00048.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:15485_36

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().