Thinking infrastructure and the organization of markets: the creation of a legal market for cannabis in Colorado

Dane Pflueger, Tommaso Palermo and Daniel Martinez

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This chapter explores the ways in which a large-scale accounting system, known as Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting and Compliance, contributes to the construction and organization of a new market for recreational cannabis in the US state of Colorado. Mobilizing the theoretical lenses provided by the literature on market devices, on the one hand, and infrastructure, on the other hand, the authors identify and unpack a changing relationship between accounting and state control through which accounting and markets unfold. The authors describe this movement in terms of a distinction between knowing devices and thinking infrastructures. In the former, the authors show that regulators and other authorities perform the market by making it legible for the purpose of intervention, taxation and control. In the latter, thinking infrastructures, an ecology of interacting devices is made and remade by a variety of intermediaries, disclosing the boundaries and possibilities of the market, and constituting both opportunities for innovation and domination through “protocol.”.

Keywords: infrastructure; cannabis; markets; market devices; accounting; regulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 M40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2019-08-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 7, August, 2019, 62, pp. 233 - 253. ISSN: 0733-558X

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